Communities of practice online: Reflection through experience and experiment with the Webheads community of language learners and practitioners

 Week 2

How many people are in a CoP? How many are too many?
How many are too few?

Dr. Cat wrote: "I wonder if there is also a size at which a community begins to break up."
______

In building and maintaining CoPs, how little is little and how many is many? In cat herding, is it possible that herds fall apart? And, what could be the reasons for it? And, is it possible to ever happen to webheads? among webheads?

Aiden Yeh
Hi all,
This morning after reading an article by R. Heingold, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.html, I thought that the size a community has depends on the members' interests. A bigger group could split in smaller ones to accomplish different tasks and then gather to share the information, as is done in f2f classroom situations with the cooperative learning.

Regards,
María Irene
Valencia, Venezuela
Aiden,

In answer to your questions, I would like to put in my 0.03 cents worth. (Inflation has hit in, so it's no longer 0.02 cents). You might say that I am thinking out loud (considering a possible article related to
development of virtual communities).

IMHO, size is relative. It really doesn't matter how big the community becomes until such time that it begins to interfere with the free communication among members. Once a community becomes so big that the moderators feel they MUST control what messages do/do not get through to the rest of the list, then it has reached such a size that it will begin to break up as a community. After all, once the cats are no longer free to wander, they become sheep - and it is then no longer cat herding.

Until that time is reached, however, the community may (and probably will) continue to grow and develop.

As for Webheads, whether a community stays together or begins to fall apart also depends on how the community is structured. In Webheads, for example, this list is only part of the community building process. We also have the Saturday and Sunday chat sessions and the web pages. There are members who never post on this list, but I often see at the chat sessions, and people who I never see at the sessions who post to the list. Personally, I believe that this is what makes WIA such a special CoP. People know they can freely communicate with other members of the community. Members know that they can either send a private e-mail or chat privately with other members, or post to the list, and they will
not be turned away. Try doing that with a large (28,000+) member community that only relies on a mailing list. That is where size matters.

Well, that's my 0.03 cents (inflation is killing me) worth. I would appreciate comments about this from other members of the community.

Dr. Cat
Dr. John H. Steele
Thank you, Aiden, for reminding me of a post I was going to write yesterday but didn't get around to--an example of a CoP that broke up (or almost did). A number of years ago I subscribed to TESP-L, the branch of TESL-L for English for Special Purposes (ESP). Due to the lack of member contributions (postings), the list owner was going to close it. There were some initial outcries over this possibility, but then I didn't receive any more messages and don't know what happened. The list seems to have been revived since it is operational now--I resubscribed to it when I was teaching a Business support class for international undergraduate students.

My take on this? I think a moderator's involvement may make a lot of difference in such a group--coming up with interesting topics to discuss, new findings (research, web sites, techniques, etc.), and encouragement of the members. Aren't those also some of the principles that we apply in teaching?

Christine Bauer-Ramazani
 
  Week 2