Assignment 2: Communities of Practice I

http://www.edufeedr.net/pg/edufeedr/view_educourse/1167?filter=course


1. What is the difference between a community and a team?
The community creates the social fabric of learning. A striong community fosters interactions and relationships based on mutual respect and trust. It encourages willingness to share ideas, expose one`s ignorance, ask difficult questions, and listen carefully. The essence of a team is a set of independent tasks that contribute to a predefined, shared object. The team makes a commitment to this goal and ensures that individual commitments are kept. The team leader keeps the team focused on its deliverable and coordinates individual contributions to the overall objectives.
Members of Community are connected by independent knowledge, not by independent subtasks.
Classical structure based organisation (in this contexts could be named as teams) fullfills its positions, some positions may be left even unfilled. Organisation doesn`t use its full competence. Effective organisation uses tasks based structure (there is not any waste of persons) and it is community based and not too restrictly managed, but more flexible. The most of the knowledge comes from community members, not from management. The management only coordinates and makes plans. The community finds its direction by itself. Negotiation of Meaning is actively in use.
2. What is meant with participation and reification?
Participation referes to a process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflect this process. It suggests both action and connection.
Reification is less common than participation, but in conjunction with participation, reification is a very useful concept to describe our engagement with the world as productive of meaning. Reification can take a great vriety of forms, for example an age-old pyramid - This object is only the tip of an iceberg, which indicates larger contexts of significance realized in human practices. Prperly speaking, the products of reification are not simply concrete, material objects. Rather, they are reflections of these practices, tokens of vast expanses of human meanings.
Important is, that partification and reification cannot be considered in isolation: they come as a pair.
Participation is something we do as persons and reification is suggests precisely that, in terms of meaning, people and things cannot be defined independently of each other.
3. How does this relate to the Distributed Cognition wiew of things?
In my opinion Communities of Practice are made possible with help of specific technology usage in early stages of technology development. With help of technology with specific capability in later stages of technology development. You need to know what kind of software to use based on your communities orientation (problems, goals etc.).
In Distributed Cognition we have to think, that we are not using our mind, but it`s tool we are using. We are providing our DC tools with help of technology in the current context.