Communities of networked expertise: professional and educational perspectives

K. Hakkarainen, T. Palonen, S. Paavola, & E. Lehtinen, Communities of networked expertise: professional and educational perspectives Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2004, 262 pp

Published online: 19 May 2007

© Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2007

Two different emerging trends in the educational research literature have attempted to provide theories and models for changing how we relate to, and instruct, students of the 21st century. The first trend is towards more community-based learning. Ever since Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's classic book (1991) on how workers learn by gradually adopting the practices of a community, there has been an explosion of research related to the concept of communities of practice, or communities of learning. Wenger himself has fueled these flames in his subsequent books (1998, 2002), arguing that people develop trajectories revolving around communities of practice, with this development centered on their construction of situated knowledge, development of identity, and adoption of practices. However, questions remain related to what it means to say you have a community of practice (Cox, 2005), what the word "community" might even represent (Hillery, 1955), and what instructors can do to leverage the affordances of learning within a community in today's schools.

Alongside this trend, there has been another pattern of discussion about the characteristics of today's learners. In this trend, researchers argue that there is a new age of learning to replace the previous "Industrial Age." This new episode in history, the Information Age, is characterized by an overwhelming access to information, allowing students to become knowledgeable in a particular subject through a few mouse clicks. This transformation of what the students have access to and can learn requires an accompanying pedagogical shift for teachers, who are no longer the experts releasing information to the students, but rather facilitators as students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Accompanying this increased access to information is an unparalleled ability to connect people and resources together through modern technologies, creating a more linked, and networked, learning environment.

Kai Hakkarainen and colleagues tackle both of these issues head on and attempt to merge them together...