Short story... lessons learned

From Worklearntogether.org

Short story

We created a Community of Practice (CoP) for education one year ago. This community has the aim to share experiences and knowledge between different people who are all working within the field of education. The Cop has different functions. Members can share documents, links, articles etc. at different ‘tables’. Other people can respond on those tables and after a while discussions arise. After a while most of the members get to an agreements. The form conclusions and then they share them again with the whole group.

Some of lessons learned:

- Organise off-line meetings about on-line discussions. Show the online discussions and after the offline-meeting, continue at the online meeting.

- Ask certain specific people to respond on the discussion. Don’t make everyone responsible for the input: chose some-one and ask this person personally. If everybody is responsibel, no-one is.

- Ask every new member to tell about themselves. Let them compose their own personal page, where they can put a picture of themselves and show the other members who they are. It makes it more personal and informal. It makes it easier to communicate with each other.

- People that aren’t used to work with ICT, are often not able to use a community without some kind of training. Explain to them how it works, show them and be patient.

- If a discussion about a certain issue doesn’t get any respons anymore, be sure to formal close this discussion. At this way you can show people the conclusions and results and publish it at different places.