Community of practice

Definition:
Community of practice (also abbrivated as CoP) is a group of individuals active participating in communal activity with each other in everyday life, in work place or in education, experiencing or continuously sharing their ideas with each other.

It is a process of social learning that shares sociocultural practices among each other in their community that emerge and evolve when people work to achieve their common goals. By doing community of Practicve one can share their knowledge with other in group.

These groups of people have common resorces or languages which they interlinked by any mean. For example in working enviroment employers and employees are interlinked by menns of internet or intranet available. They meet together to do a common practice or work for the benifit of Organisation. Community of practice also involves in organisation in terms of annual meeting day, board meeting, family day etc. In all these occation people in an organisation meet together work on single task. These practices are made for the benifit of complete Organistion or individual benifits also.

For example: When I am persuing my B Tech, It hard for me to meet any students from other Universities or colleges. But few days like paper presentation day , annual meeting day etc we (Me and students from other University) used to meet on that occation to discuss on single subjuct. By doing this so and discussing on single subjucts with different University students I used to gain knowledge on mutual subjucts. That inturn benifited for me to select my IV year projuct work.

By this way one or an complete organisation can be benifited from Community of Practice. My future plan is to become a successful business man, and I expext that by meeting people in some or the other way of same profession, I can gain knowledge on my business.

Reference : 1)http://www.google.co.uk/books?id=zI53WUaFfJIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Communities+of+Practice&ei=agqTSf_KLJb0ygSmzZEM#PPP1,M1
(Beyond Community of practice by David Bartoon and Karin Tusting) Retrived by Feb 11, 09. (ISBN 0-521- 83643-3)

2)http://www.answers.com/Community%20of%20practice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice