Learning in Virtual Worlds: A Situated Perspective - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 125

Communities of Practice groups of people that are solving the problems that,

in one way or another, are also of importance to
us. Thus, we become interested in participating
in their activities to learn with and from them and
as a result we engage in all sorts of collaborative
situations and practices. This practice is what
“Gives structure and meaning to what we do.”
(Wenger, 1998, p. 47) and serves as the media-
tor to give coherence to the community. Wenger
(with Snyder, 2000, p. 139) defines communities
of practice as “Groups of people informally bound
together by shared expertise and passion for a joint
enterprise.” For him (1998), practice is the source
of coherence in a community in three dimensions:
1) mutual engagement of participants in collabora-
tive actions, whose meanings are negotiated and
that define the community; 2) a joint enterprise
that gives coherence to actions and keeps the
community together. The enterprise is mutually
negotiated, forms during practice and is used for
mutual accountability; and 3) a shared repertoire
of activities, symbols, tools, ways of doing things,
etc. that the community has created and owns to
pursue their negotiated enterprise. Considering
these dimensions, according to Wenger (et al.,
2002; 2004) a community of practice must have
three characteristics: 1) domain, members share
a common domain of interest, which define their
basic identity as a community, and strive to be-
come more and more competent in it, valuing, as
a group, their achieved level of competence; 2)
community, members engage in mutual activities
and discussions that allow them to share informa-
tion and learn from each other; and 3) practice,
members are active practitioners that, after time
and through sustained joint practice, develop a
shared information base formed with common sto-
ries, the way they solve their problems, what tools
and how they use them, symbols they favor, etc.
This community of practice theoretical frame-
work has been extensively used in research. In
particular, due to the important development and
proliferation that information and communica-
tion technologies (ICT) have had, there has been

For the anthropological approach to the situated
cognition theory, “Knowing is not merely an in-
dividual experience, but one of exchanging and
contributing to the knowledge of a community”
(Wenger, 2004, p. 1). Lave and Wenger (1991),
studying the sociocultural practices of communi-
ties, proposed the process of legitimate peripheral
participation to describe how learners become
members of a community of practitioners. The
process characterized by newcomers: 1) moving
spirally from peripheral to full participation; 2)
developing an identity as a member of the commu-
nity while learning; and 3) interacting with older
community members in an interdependent way, i.e.
newcomers wishing to learn and old-timers look-
ing to sustain the community of practice (Lave,
1991). The concept community of practice is a key
idea in a social theory of learning, as proposed
by Wenger (1998), who regards learning as social
participation and assumes four premises:

1. We are social beings. Far from being trivially
true, this fact is a central aspect of learning.
2. Knowledge is a matter of competence with
respect to valued enterprises [italics added],
such as singing in tune, discovering facts,
fixing machines, writing poetry, being con-
vivial, growing up as a boy or a girl, and so
forth.
3. Knowing is a matter of participating in a
pursuit of such enterprises, that is, of active
engagement in the world [italics added].
4. Meaning- our ability to experience the world
and our engagement with it as meaningful- is
ultimately what learning is to produce. (p.
4)

The posture is that learning is not just what
happens inside the four walls of a classroom, but
something that happens during our involvement
in our day to day living. Throughout this daily
process, we naturally tend to become part of those