Personal Learning Networks, Communities of Practice and Connectivism: A Creative Expression

Communities of practice, personal learning networks and connectivism. from David Yargo

This is my creative expression. I have created and shared a slideshow that demonstrates my ideas about PLN's, Communities of Practice and Connectivism. The first slide is a non-linguistic representation of Personal Learning Networks. It contains images of social media and MOOC's, which are components of effective PLN's. It also has an image of people all over the world sharing information via computers. The second slide is my non-linguistic representation on communities of practice. The image on the left represents people being connected to one another via the same network. The image on the right has people working together, heading in the same direction, to reach a common goal. This illustrates the definition of communities of practice given by Wenger which she states, "Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor." (Smith 2009).The image on the final slide is a word cloud that includes a list of of words related to connectivism. While this is a linguistic representation, I included it because the list of terms ties all three concepts together. Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009) ‘Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice’, the encyclopedia of informal education,http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.