Week 6 - communities of practice.

I wasn't in the lecture for this, but after reading the materials and other peoples blogs I thought I'd give it a shot anyway.

I'm at home at the moment and cant access the material again from here because my laptop and home computer are silly! At the moment im writing this based on a few notes i made, so this isnt going to be much of a successful post, but I shall write more when I return to the lincoln land!

I can't really think of a community of practice which I have belonged to, the only one that springs to mind is the Brownies. When I was about 8 I was part of the local Brownie group, and although I was only involved for a year, I guess this was a community of practice!

Being part of the Brownies, we were an all girls club, and were all of similar age. Because we were there as a club, we all socialised and interacted with each other, and had activities designed for us to work together. As Wenger states, members of a CofP are 'informally bound together', and I guess this was the case at the Brownies, although because we all shared the same uniform and had to abide by the dress clothes (brown clogs and a YELLOW JUMPER... what were they thinking!!) we were quite formal. Being part of a club bound us as a group, we worked together and in our groups to acheieve different skills and get the reward badge when we completed certain tasks.

We had a few levels of authority within the brownies, with the "brown owl" being in charge (the responsible adult) and deputy officers. Within the club and members of the club, we were split into different groups, such as the imps and the pixies, and we had a captain and vice captain for each of these. Although the captains didn't take a noticable authoritative or higher role than other members of the group, it was just a known thing that they were in a higher position than you.