In this chapter, we are going to use Moodle to support an informal community of practice within an organization. This is one of the areas where Moodle's social constructivist perspective becomes evident. Moodle was built to support people working together to learn and to teach each other. In the business community, these informal learning groups have become known as "communities of practice".
Communities of practice are "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in the area by interacting on an on-going basis".
Communities of practice (CoPs) have become widespread in a number of organizations. Ford Motor Company, Cisco, IBM, and other large organizations have developed communities of practice to help technical specialists working in different branches of the organization come together to trade best practices and collaboratively solve problems.
Research into communities of practice have identified four principle strategic types of communities of practice:
- Helping communities
- "Best practice" communities
- Knowledge sharing communities
- Innovation communities
Each type of community has different goals and different requirements for support in Moodle. Helping communities may just need a few forums for members to find each other and talk. "Best practice" communities need a way to document best practices and share what they have learned about their application. Knowledge sharing and innovation communities need methods for effectively communicating about problems and their solutions.
Over time, CoP's develop a unique perspective on their topic as well as a body of common knowledge, practices, and approaches. Using the social and collaborative tools in Moodle can help the community both build their perspective and share it with newcomers. Many of the tools, including the wiki and the glossary, can help the community document how it changes over time as well. The main Moodle website, http://www.moodle.org, is an excellent example of a community of practice with many thousands of people working together to understand and use Moodle.
Moodle can effectively support communities of practice through a number of tools. In this chapter, we are going to explore the wiki module, get more in-depth with the database module, modify user roles to make it easier for community members to moderate discussions, and bring in an external news feed to keep community members up to date in their field.
Specifically, in this chapter, we will:
- Set up a wiki for collaborative community editing.
- Create a collaborative glossary for community members to build a shared vocabulary.
- Create a database for the community to build an annotated reference library.
- Create a new role, Community Moderator, and assign users the ability to edit forums.
- Create an RSS feed from a forum.
- Create a block to display an RSS feed from an external source.
So—let's get started!
A wiki is a collaboratively edited document users can create together. The most famous example of a wiki, Wikipedia, is a sprawling collection of community developed encyclopedia entries. Anyone in the world can contribute to the collection of knowledge represented by Wikipedia, either by creating new articles or editing existing entries.
Moodle provides users with a more controlled wiki environment. Only people enrolled in a course can contribute to the wiki, so you don't need to worry about external readers or editors. In addition, you can configure the wiki to be editable only by certain people, or provide a wiki for each group.