Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

19 – Building Communities of Practice
nity participation and help individuals avoid potentially
severe negative reactions that can result in social withdrawal.
If the individual adapts to the stressful new conditions
the discomfort is temporary, and increases selfesteem
and perceived competence. 64 To expedite this
process, expectations should be realistic. Faciliated discussions
can create an atmosphere of trust, cooperation,
tolerance and integrity.
Within digital communities of practice, unfamiliar
environmental conditions often challenge new participants
of group oriented activities. These participants can
easily become overwhelmed by new terminology and
technological processes. Facilitating new information
through techniques such as debriefing exercises, frontloading
community activities, and metaphoric examples
framed within a similar context (termed isomorphic
framing) may help participants adopt, and adapt to,
community information.
The use of facilitated debriefing provides the participants
with the opportunity for active reflection and
open communication following group activities. These
debriefing exercises may address specific behaviour or,
more generally, provide direction and help prioritize
future initiatives. Debriefing is commonly used to facilitate
a greater understanding of complex or stressful
events to ensure that individuals comprehend and recognize
a broad community perspective.
Alternatively, activities and events can be addressed
in advance by highlighting common perceptions or actions
and suggesting alternative behaviours. Frontloading
community activities can be advantageous when
attempting to avoid specific recurring and undesirable
behaviours within community interactions. Frontloading
community interactions can also be combined
with isomorphic framing to provide subtle guidance
relating to community expectations.
Sequencing
Developing strong interpersonal communication can
also be supported through carefully designed and sequenced
interactions. Just as facilitation requires specific
and well timed intervention, participant development
can be aided by well structured and implemented opportunities
to engage community participants in the
accomplishment of broad based group goals and objec-
64
This is reinforced by Newes who states, “[appropriate]
sequencing also provides initial successes, or ‘mastery tasks’,
fostering feeling of capability while counteracting internal
negative self-evaluations, learned helplessness, and dependency”
(Newes, n.d., Chapter 2: Sequencing of Activities).
tives. These opportunities can be presented as valued
components that require attention within the digital
community. Using this methodology, participants have
the freedom to specialize in areas of personal interest
defined within the community, while community facilitators
and educators support these contributions by
integrating this information into community practice
and conceptual understanding.
Carefully designing and planning alternative / candidate
activities for community participants can also create
sub-groups based upon experience and expertise.
These sub-groups can provide valuable support as individuals
experience discomfort, stress, and frustration
related to new and unfamiliar practices. In turn, these
unfamiliar practices will become more routine and individuals
will begin to participate more fully in community
practices.
The architect …
“I have come to the conclusion that software architecture
is very difficult to define. It is a range of
artifacts that are used to specify the strategic decisions
about the structure and behavior of the system,
the collaborations among the system
elements, and the physical deployment of the system”
(Quatrani, 2003).
While the previous sections focused on the sociological
and technical foundations for building digital communities,
this section works to address how these ideas can
be integrated into a digital community’s social fabric—
its code. This section is dedicated to exploring tools used
by software developers to communicate the complex
relationships within digital communities. A basic understanding
of these tools can increase the value and functionality
of these emerging collaborative spaces. The
tools can provide powerful working documents that
encourage input from the diverse community members
who populate these digital communities.
The system architect collects and analyzes software
requirements then documents the required functionality
for both the end user and the application. In an effort to
standardize the communication of these complex relationships,
system architects have begun to adopt notation
techniques based on the unified modelling language
(UML).
Education for a Digital World 301