21st Century Learning - Community of Practice for Students in Higher Education

The sustainability of a new economy depends, among other factors, on the sharing of tacit knowledge in addition to creating new knowledge. This implies the existence of special relationships among people. Such relationships exist in communities of practice (CoPs) which as knowledge centers have started gaining ground over the last two decades. Since CoPs were conceived by Wenger (1998) they have evolved into essentially what could be termed, 'special schools', where voluntary participation aims at sharing and creating knowledge. This paper proposes a community of practice (CoP) as an alternative learning model to create tacit knowledge in addition to explicit knowledge. It focuses on how student learning in CoPs can be stimulated. It differs partially from existing praxis of CoPs in that its awareness is created, and students are educated on how to form CoPs, how they operate, and how to use them to their advantage. They, in actual fact, are not created by the students, but guided, in a voluntary manner, towards the creation of, and participation in, communities of practice. Student learning takes place through 'Edulink'; a web-based portal. This is the first phase of a project where it is accepted that if the 'ingredients', as suggested by Wenger (1998) and McDermott (1999), are absent, CoPs cannot exist, or cannot be classified as CoPs. The results were very encouraging, as it was established that most of the students were in favour of forming their own CoPs. The second phase of the research will investigate the effectiveness of student communities of practice in an online environment.