Towards the development of activities-oriented platforms serving communities of practice

摘要

Providing communities of practice (CoPs) with IT tools is increasingly becoming a challenge for researchers. The first step towards this goal is extracting CoPs needs and proposing accordingly relevant tools. We present in this research the user-centred and application-centred platforms as options to embed such relevant tools for CoPs. We raised their main limitations as they are used either for socialising or simply centralising tools which is significantly different from platforms serving CoPs. Consequently, we present the need to have dedicated platforms for CoPs based on the widget technology and we enumerate some key features such as Single sign-on and awareness. Then, we present a higher level of integration for providing activity-oriented platforms which is the interoperability of embedded widgets and its implications such as resources reuse and functionalities reuse. Finally, we propose a structure for such platforms.