Communities of Practice: "Communities of practice are known as social entities within which members exchange experience and views, spinning each other’s tacit knowledge into conversations and knowledge objects that allow its transmission.
This paper will briefly argue that such “entities” are not homogenous blocs, but complete ecosystems in which different types of resource serve different roles, and relate to each other either in symbiosis or in competition for the limited resources of practitioner time, work and opinion. Such ecosystem feeds and is fed by the conversations of the community."
Comment: Communities are the future of learning (or more accurately - they have always been the most effective means of learning, we're starting to give them the proper role in our current model of information sharing/learning). This article is worth reading...but I think the author misses two important points:
1. When talking communities, wikis, not blogs, should be the tools of choice. Blogs are personal and can be linked. Wikis are community conversations. Blogs are generally more about individual/personal conversations.Wikipedia is a great example of community content creation.
2. Learning communities are only partially about knowledge sharing. The other (more important) component is knowledge creation. What we know today may well be outdated in a few years. The capacity to continue to know (knowledge creation) is of greater value than sharing what we know now.