Community of practice

A community of practice is the process where a group of individuals come together and learn from eachother because they have similar, or,the same, goals. They interact together as they aim to reach these goals.

An example of this could be a facebook discussion group of people who are all struggling with the same unit at uni. They could support and interact with each other to help eachother out to reach the shared goal of passing the unit, something they might not have been able to without eachother's help within the CofP.

CofP's are born out of these common goals and the desire of all members to succes at achieving them and are not set up by some greater authority. In this example, the CofP is not a form of support provided by the university of any other support-institution, it has spontaniously come to exist out of the members' desire to succeed.

The forum on this unit COULD be seen as a CofP, however it HAS been set up by the university. The discussion groups on this specific unit that are going on Facebook and similar platforms, however, have spontaniously come to exist due to interaction between students with the same problems and aims.