Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

Supporting Communities of Practice by Advancing Knowledge Management
On the other hand evaluation results showed
one big potential in using the tools as experiences
repository, a hybrid environment where
CoP members can collect and interchange documents
of common interest, a place where they can
share best practices and experiences. Instead of
opening up the use of these technologies to the
all CoP members, the farmers rather envisaged
an asynchronous use of the tool which involves
just the key actors, such as representative of the
groups of interest and representatives of the local
agencies.
However questionnaire results show that involved
users appreciated the possibility to take
trace and reconstruct the path of events, documents
and claims raised within the group. They consider
that this possibility, which is made available by the
combined use of CoPe_it! and Compendium, help
to understand the different positions expressed
by the stakeholders and also the changing positions
and the evolution of relationship inside the
community. Users suggested using the tools to
understand the results of the interaction process
within the CoP and also between the group of
farmer and the enlarged community.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we showed the results of the
project of integration between Compendium and
CoPe_it! with the main aim in mind to enable a
transparent and quasi-automatic integration of
information and knowledge between hybrid collaborative
environments (on-line and off-line).
Results of the implementation show that the
technical integration was successful, but some
cultural boundaries make still difficult to exploit
the use of these groupware technologies to their
full potential. In fact, in the described case study
we tested Compendium and CoPe_it with a community
of farmers that, supported by a planning
team, have engaged directly in the use of the tools.
Results of the evaluation show that, despite some
interaction problems, the users recognized two
main potential uses of the tools:
i. Compendium and CoPe_it! as experiences
repositories of the Community of Practice;
ii. Compendium and CoPe_it! as environments
to monitor and reconstruct CoP members
positions and interaction dynamics when
performing collaborative works.
These advantages are made available by the
integration project for interactions which happen
both within virtual and traditional collaborative
environments. The described integration allows
to represent knowledge with a similar visual language
and to make knowledge easily reusable in
both collaborative environments.
Moreover the case study results show that the
integration between Compendium and CoPe_it!
supports environmental planning practices with
effective tools to collect and manage knowledge
about deliberation and then to communicate
them to the community. The integration between
Compendium and CoPe_it! shows how deliberation
can be enlarged to a wider community on the
web by coupling on-line and off-line consultation
into a unique process of knowledge exchange and
production. This unique process needs to handle
and integrate knowledge coming from different
collaborative environments (virtual and traditional),
thus leveraging CoP to a truly collaborative
environment with no communication boundaries.
This is the environment in which HCoP perform.
HCoP are an emerging kind of CoP where users
are no longer constrained to a particular communication
environment may it be virtual or real.
HCoP is a novel approach to CoP providing users
with diverse environments for collaboration in
knowledge works. In this perspective, we have
proposed the integration of Compendium and
CoPe_it! as an example of an integration platform
to perform virtual and traditional interactions in a
unique hybrid collaboration environment.
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