Communities of Practice with Nancy White. CoP Series.
This is a series of blogs on Communities of Practice written by Nancy White a regular keynote speaker on the conference circuit and expert practitioner. The blogs are fun, but give a really good idea of setting up and managing CoPs. more
UniJos e-Learning Strategy
The University of Jos's eLearning Strategy provides a focus for University-wide five year teaching and learning development through the use of appropriate technology. The aim is to enhance the range of pedagogic uses of eLearning by staff and students and to support the delivery of blended and flexible learning, and to maintain the academic rigor of both undergraduate and postgraduate... more
University of Ibadan ICT Policies
This document describes the position of University of Ibadan regarding how ICT will be used to achieve desired goals and continued relevance in the academic world. The policy seeks to help decision-makers keep long-term strategic issues in perspective and give a clear basis for decision-making thereby reducing ad-hoc decisions and minimising the potential for crisis management. It also seeks... more
F/LOSS is Commercial Software
Many people mistakenly use the term "commercial software" as if it was the opposite of Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/LOSS). This is in spite of: i) the rise in commercial development and support for F/LOSS; ii) the goal of most F/LOSS projects to incorporate improvements, which is actually a form of financial gain; iii) official definitions of "commercial item" that include F/LOSS; and... more
Impact of Communities of Practice (CoP) on Inter-Firm Alliance Research Teams
The need for faster, more flexible and less risky ways for organisations to expand their capabilities and competencies increasingly lead to the formation and proliferation of networking strategies and partners. Understanding the potential contribution that CoP memberhip can provide within these teams is a step towards developing and refining a strategy to support and enhance the speedy... more
Keys to Successful Communities of Practice (Networks)
The guidelines below are drawn from the book "Learning to Fly - Practical knowledge management from leading and learning organisations" by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell), and sets out a number steps to launching, energising and sustaining communities of practice (networks) in an organisation. more
Communities of Practice and Virtual Learning Communities: Benefits, Barriers and Success Factors
A virtual Community of Practice (CoP) is a network of individuals who share a domain of interest about which they communicate online. The practitioners share resources (for example experiences, problems and solutions, tools, methodologies). Such communication results in the improvement of the knowledge of each participant in the community and contributes to the development of the knowledge... more
'Communities of Practice' and the Social Process of Knowledge Creation: Towards a New Vocabularly for Making Sense of Organizational Learning
The idea of knowledge as the source of competitive advantage has been celebrated in the management literature for some time. However, our understanding of how knowledge emerges and develops in the actual work practices is still relatively limited. The argument of this paper is that an approach called ‘communities of practice’ offers a relatively coherent view of the social processes of... more
The Promise of Open Educational Resources
Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge or that have an impact on teaching, learning and research. We (the authors) have been working in the area of OER at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for the past five years and will... more
Motivations for OpenLearn: the Open University's Open Content Initiative
This short paper is a contribution to the OECD's expert workshop to help identify motivations, benefits and barriers for institutions producing open educational resources. The motivations will be examined by looking at the reasons behind the launch by the Open University in the UK of a web based collection of open educational resources, OpenLearn. OpenLearn is launched on October 25th 2006... more
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