Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

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(Greece) - by focusing on the particularities of online communities of practice (CoPs) and the tools
they use for facilitating or enhancing collaboration among their members - introduces a framework for
mining knowledge that is hidden in such settings. The authors’ motivation stems from the criticism that
contemporary tools receive regarding lack of active participation and limited engagement in their use,
which is partially due to the inability of identifying and exploiting a set of important relationships among
community members and the associated collaboration-related assets. The overall approach described
in this chapter elaborates and integrates issues from data mining and social networking. The proposed
framework enables CoPs members to rank the contributions of their peers towards identifying meaningful
relationships, as well as valuable information about roles and competences. First, the characteristics of
the overall collaboration setting are modeled and a set of associated metrics is proposed. Next, to reveal
unnoticed knowledge residing within CoPs, a data mining technique that groups users into clusters and
applies advanced social networking analysis on them is proposed.
Chapter 8, “Live Virtual Technologies to Support Extended Events in Online Communities of Practice”
by Eleftheria Tomadaki, Peter Scott and Kevin Quick, Open University (UK), presents qualitative
and quantitative data from a naturalistic insight into the use of two online synchronous communication
tools, FM for videoconference and Hexagon for ambient awareness, to support an extended event in
a working online community. As claimed by the authors, a complex mix of planned and opportunistic
interactions requires a new set of working synchronous tools, managing the trade-off between awareness
and disruption. Switching between foreground and background ‘meeting activity’ remains a very
big challenge.
Chapter 9, “Individual Learning and Emotional Characteristics in Web-based Communities of Practice”
by Nikos Tsianos, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), Zacharias Lekkas, National
& Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), Panagiotis Germanakos, University of Cyprus (Cyprus),
and Constantinos Mourlas, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), argues that the
knowledge management paradigm of communities of practice can be efficiently realized in Web-based
environments, especially if one considers the extended social networks that have proliferated within the
Internet. In terms of increasing performance through the exchange of knowledge and shared learning,
individual characteristics, such as learners’ preferences that relate to group working, may be of high
importance. These preferences have been summarized in cognitive and learning styles typologies, as
well as emotional characteristics which define implications that could serve as personalization guidelines
for designing collaborative learning environments. The chapter discusses the theoretical assumptions of
two distinct families of learning style models, cognitive personality and information processing styles,
and the role of affection and emotion, in order to explore the possibilities of personalization at the group
level of communities of practice.
Chapter 10, “From ‘Collecting’ to ‘Deciding’: Facilitating the Emergence of Decisions in Argumentative
Collaboration” by Manolis Tzagarakis, Nikos Karousos, George Gkotsis, Vasilis Kallistros,
Spyros Christodoulou, Christos Mettouris, Panagiotis Kyriakou, and Dora Nousia, Research Academic
Computer Technology Institute (Greece), elaborate argumentative collaboration issues in the context of
communities of practice. As argued by the authors, current tools aiming at supporting argumentative collaboration
provide either means to successfully tame wicked problems or advanced reasoning mechanisms
to facilitate decision making creating a gap in today’s landscape of systems supporting argumentative
collaboration. The consequences of this gap are in particular severe for communities of practice when
they have to employ tools from both sides to support their collaboration needs. The authors claim that
a key factor in bridging this gap is viewing argumentative collaboration as an emergent phenomenon.
Proper support of the emergent aspects of argumentative collaboration would benefit systems supporting
argumentative collaboration as this would enable those systems to support the evolution of the entire