The Community of Practice in Public Access TV

I just found another great resource through Eric Gordon’s del.icio.us feed. He recently bookmarked an online article, entitled “Communities of Practice: a brief introduction” by Etienne Wenger, author of “Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.” The article is particularly useful because it describes communities in a way that’s very descriptive of communities in public access TV. Furthermore, I thought it would provide context for my study of this community and its practice — or praxis — across multiple communications platforms.

Wenger writes

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

But he adds that “not everything called a community is a community of practice.” He says that while a neighborhood is often called a community, it is “usually not a community of practice.” Therefore, he provides three characteristics, which he calls “crucial,” in this definition:

1. The domain
2. The community
3. The practice

The domain is defined by people who share a common identity along with common interests. Wenger writes that “shared competence” is unique to this domain and it contributes to what “distinguishes [its] members from other people.” Furthermore,

They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise.

The community is defined by members who “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other and share information.” Wenger adds, “They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.” And that, relevant to this project, “A website in itself is not a community of practice.”

The practice is defined by members of a community that

develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems–in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

I would assume that people who participate in public access TV, either on their cable channel or the web, would agree that these three characteristics apply to their work in community media. But what I am most interested in learning from my upcoming study is to test the hypothesis that the community media center plays a vital role in facilitating and sustaining this particular community of practice.

Wenger writes that the importance of understanding communities of practice is that it

allows us to see past more obvious format structures such as organizations, classrooms or nations, and perceive the structures defined by engagement in practice and the informal learning that comes with it.

An he adds,

New technologies, such as the Internet, have extended the reach of our interactions beyond the geographical limitations of traditional communities, but the increase in flow of information does not obviate the need for community.

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