Create a since of place
COMMUNITY DRIVEN
Because lifetime learning is more than the students and instructors, we recognize that to continue professional growth people need to interact with their peers. Developing a professional community in your organization can foster communication, and provide valuable opportunities for veterans to share their expertise with new members.
John Brown, Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning (1989)
Tools share several significant features with knowledge:
They can only be fully understood through use, and using them
entails both changing the user's view of the world and adopting the belief system of the culture in which they are used.
COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
On the job, you will find you will learn just as much around the water cooler as you did training. Swapping stories and sharing problems with others in your field is a way to build relationships and gain new knowledge.Â
Participation with others in your field, be it in your office, or online, is a great way to learn from the expertise of others, and share in the knowledge and culture that is unique to your community.
Technology makes creating and finding your community more accessible than ever. Live chat rooms like Slack can provide instantaneous feedback when you need it most. GitHub is a shared code platform for collecting, revising, and updating your coding projects with others. Blogger is an online tool you can use to share your ideas with your community and receive feedback. These and other tools are great ways to participate in your community!
EXPLORE TOOLS TO BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY
SLACK
Slack is a team collaboration tool that offers a persistent chat room for people to talk, ask questions, and share information. Teams and channels can help guide specific topics of conversation. Messages are searchable, and paid options allow for longer history records. This is a great way for people to interact with others in their communities in a dynamic synchronous way.
GITHUB
GitHub offers a repository for sharing code with a group of people. GitHub offers version control, and branching to help maintain stability of your product. It also features task management and a wiki feature for sharing and maintaining information about a project across many people. GitHub can help people collaborate together effectively on a coding project.
BLOGGER
Blogger is a service for publishing and maintaining a blog on the internet. Personal or shared blogs are opportunities to share your ideas with others in your field, and pose questions for others to comment on. Publicly sharing information, and generating dialog can build relationships with others in your community.