Bill Seitz reacts on communities don’t practice with a suggestion to focus on teams and not communities, because their focus on outcomes “creates a shared ConText which makes learning much stronger”.
This triggered my response, which I’m reposting here.
Agree that distinguishing between team and community is important. Not sure if learning in teams is stronger:
People in teams have a natural drive to learn – they learn in order to get things done. But after “things are done” (e.g. a project is over) the motivation to learn from past experiences is much lower, because “new things” call for “new learning”.
Shared understanding (ConText) is stronger in teams, but it may also lead to “group think”, while a community provides more diversity (and I believe that learning comes from recognising differences).
“Doing” focus of teams creates another problem for learning – lack of time to stop, look back and reflect (more).
Summarising I would say that teams create better conditions for “learning while doing” (implicit learning) and learning directly related to the task, but they don’t provide enough time and motivation for reflection and “learning beyond task focus” (e.g. learning more about a field to prepare for a future job).
Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/29.html#a772; comments are here.
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