INNOVATIVE USE OF TELEMATIC TOOLS TO SUPPORT A PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

摘要

Increasing awareness of the knowledge economy, and of the contribution of knowledge to economic and social development, has placed increasing focus on processes of discourse and interchange and the relation between different forms of knowledge and activity. The paper discusses a series of projects developing ICT tools to support professional development and knowledge development in communities of practice. We are attempting to develop a pedagogically deep web-based knowledge environment to support the processes that lead to the development and use of new knowledge in an innovative way. For this to happen, we need a deeper understanding of the ways in which individuals and communities of practice communicate, and the ways in which communication leads to knowledge development. Professional knowledge can be regarded as a personal synthesis of received occupational knowledge and situational understandings derived from experimental learning, capable of being further transformed through a process of critical reflection. As expertise develops, and new contexts are utilised in the performance of practice, so the processes of research, review and reflection can lead to the creation of new forms of knowledge (Engestrom, 1995). Continuing professional development can play a role in making these processes explicit, such that others too can share in the developmental process. In order 'to develop effective ICT tools to support knowledge development, we need to study the community of practice in its socio-cultural setting to uncover the issues and problems that make the use of these technologies successful or unsuccessful. Our approach to this analysis is formative and iterative, as the management of the system will change in reaction to the evaluation. The major focus for the paper is the development of systems to support the development and exchange of knowledge and practice for two European projects. The first is the EVAL system being developed for a EC Leonardo da Vinci funded project. The EVAL project brings together researchers and practitioners in evaluation from ten European countries. The second is a knowledge development system being developed for the CEDEFOP Research Arena (CEDRA). Both systems are being developed by a Welsh based company specialising in knowledge and systems architectures the KnowNet. The systems design and methodology for both systems is firmly based on socio-cultural activity theory (Engestroem and Cole, 1993). Kapetelinen and Nardi (1997) have produced guidance that is being incorporated into the design approach.