Case study: nurturing a community of Accounting academics

Overview

This page outlines a project being working on for FET8611: Emerging environments for learning. It was originally a part of a page titled 'Nurturing a CoP of tertiary teachers of Accounting' which has since been separated into two pages. The first page, Communities of practice details general information about how to nurture a CoP using a wiki in any environment. This page looks more specifically at nurturing a CoP amongst a group of Accounting academics.

Ownership

This page was created by Carole Hunter? and will come into community ownership in November 2006. URinvited2 contribute your ideas, feedback and general comments to this page.

1. Why nurture a CoP of tertiary teachers of Accounting?

Two senior academics in the School of Accounting have commented that, during staff performance reviews, many of the academic staff are unable to fully articulate what they are doing in their teaching and why. Also, while many give lipservice to the notion of reflective practice, few are using it effectively to enhance their teaching. This is not to say good teaching isn't going on - it is, and some are quite innovative in their approaches. Yet the inability to articulate what they are doing in relation to learning and teaching theory is affecting their ability to present themselves well in staff performance reviews and their ability to reflect on their teaching in light of the literature on learning and teaching.

2. What can this project achieve?

I'm hoping that this project will provide an environment in which the Accounting academics can start to:

• talk more about teaching and learning,
• share knowledge and experiences,
• learn about various theories, strategies and approaches that may be useful to them,
• become more reflective about their teaching,
• work on collaborative projects related to teaching and learning, and
• generally nurture a community of practice where they will become more articulate in the language of teaching and learning, and more able to express what they are doing and what they would like to do in their teaching.

3. Initiating interest: The workshop

The idea behind this workshop was to initiate discussion about teaching and learning, and to test the idea of nurturing a community of practice around teaching and learning.

One of the senior academics started the workshop with a discussion of why she requested the workshop. She talked about her experiences in staff performance reviews, and how she found many academics were uncomfortable articulating what they were doing in their teaching and explaining why they were doing it. This led onto a roleplay where she and another academic played out a typical example of what they saw in the staff reviews in which they were present.

Of course, this led to a lot of discussion. What are the expectations of staff in these kind of reviews? What was the 'roleplay' academic able to talk about, and what bits did she find more difficult? We talked about their own experiences in staff reviews and what they thought was expected of them. We also related this to what is expected of them if students ask about their teaching methodology. Is developing a teaching portfolio a valuable thing to do - for us as individuals, for the school, for our students? Does being able to articulate what we do make us better teachers???

We moved onto some paired work, where each participant discussed their teaching philosophy with their partner. At the end, we did a rough 'hands up' rating scale and found that others valued how well we expressed ourselves more than we values ourselves. This led to more discussion - many of the younger academics stated that they often felt threatened when discussing learning theories, especially in the Tertiary Teaching Colloquiums (TTCs) run by our Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT). While they took on the ideas of reflective practice and constructivism, they felt like there was another world of jargon out there that they weren't equipped to handle. They knew the language of their discipline, but not of education. Some of the older academics saw learning theory as jargon that was just thrown at them over and over, while others were incredibly keen to learn more about learning theories.

We moved on to discuss some broad areas of thought on learning and knowledge - behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Instead of just talking about this though, we looked at 3 learning environments that reflected the main components of each school of thought, and the academics discussed what each one 'said' about teaching, about learning and about knowledge itself. This was a great exercise - it took away the jargon, got them thinking about key issues and identifying these in real learning environments.

Finally we returned to our discussion on the value of reflective practice, of building on our ability to articulate what we do and relate this to learning theory. We talked about communities of practice and the value of collaboration, and how aware we were of our colleagues' work, expertise and experience. I trialled the idea of a wiki to help support the CoP which already exists in our hallways and in our tea rooms, and there were some very positive responses, and some mediocre ones. None were negative.

Responses after the workshop

Immediately after the workshop I had emails from 3 staff members stating how excited they were about the project and that they wanted to get started immediately. One stated that it was one of the best workshops she'd ever been to! However that's only 3 staff of a total of 12, 8 of whom attended the workshop. I think it's clear that, even from this early stage, we have different levels of participation in our community. We have 3 core members (4 including myself), about 5 relatively active members, but who are still just testing the waters to see what it's all about, and a group of 4 on the periphery who may or may not join in. It will be interesting to see how it develops. At this stage, I think the key is to show the middle group that the wiki will be useful for them, so that they become more active. Though this may not happen for a while.

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4. Exploring potential wikis

The next step was choosing the right tools to work with. I needed to keep the interest in this group of 'leaders' within the community and get it started quickly. As ownership is so important in the beginning (and thoughout) a community, I decided to initiate the involvement of the academics right from the start - even in the selection of which wiki we would use. However, asking them to research wikis in general, when many hadn't even encountered wikis before, was asking too much. Instead, I decided upon another strategy for inclusion and collaborative decision-making.

My strategy for testing the wikis: I decided to first select a few wikis that I thought had potential for our group, but for different reasons. I would then test them with others in my Early Birds group and hopefully others within Knowledgegarden (consider that an invitation!), other educational designers at my institution and, finally, the academics themselves, who would make the final decision. The academics decided on the criteria for selection of these three wikis - that they have restricted access via a password, and that they are relatively intuitive to use. The users (the Accounting academics) were given an opportunity to 'try them out' in a second workshop session and see which had the best 'fit' for them. Interestingly, although the some of the academcs seemed quite ambivalent towards wikis in the first workshop, all turned up at the second workshop to test the wikis. Perhaps they were more interested than we initially thought! I then carried out a small survey asking about their reactions to each wiki. This was used as the basis for the final selection. User rules!!!



I initially considered two wikis - the EdNA groups site which uses Moodle, and Mediawiki. However, discussions with the IT department revealed that a locally hosted wiki would not be supported. Apparently the department are 'very good at institutional-wide initiatives, but very poor when it comes to smaller user-driven initiatives such as this one' (Morton-Allen, 2006). Resources are scarce, and there is concern that once one small initiative is supported, a ‘snowball’ effect will follow that cannot be sustained.
Using an externally hosted wiki proved to be problematic as well. Concern was raised that it was contravening university privacy policies, even Australian government regulations. I was heavily pressured to wait for the implementation of our new LMS (Sakai), but as this would not be available for many months, it was agreed that an external wiki could be used as a temporary solution. These ‘negotiations’ took a couple of weeks to resolve, and slowed the project significantly.

Three wikis were chosen for the group to compare. The first, Moodle, is based in an LMS environment, and so offers a wide range of 'extra' features such as blogs, forums and chat. The second, PBwiki, uses wiki markdown language. The third, Wetpaint, uses only WYSIWYG editing functions.

4.1 The EdNA Groups site

The EdNA groups website uses the Moodle LMS to set up an environment where groups with shared interests can collaborate. While these sites contain the full suite of tools, they also contain a wiki.

An advantage of using the EdNA site is that it is housed within the general EdNA (Education Network Australia) site which contains a wealth of resources on teaching and learning. It is funded by the Australian Government, which helps me in terms of our University policy of generally not using technologies that are hosted on outside servers (yes, it is still outside, but considered more legitimate if it is the government for some reason).

Instructions:The group site is called CSU Accounting Education.. To be able to enter, you'll need to register on the EdNA site (it takes 30 seconds). Go to the EdNA groups page and choose CSU Accounting education. You'll also need to have the login 'key' to assess the site, which for testing purposes is 'cop'.

Here's a screencapture from one of the site's pages.



A summary of this wiki can be found on the Moodle page. It uses a combination of wysiwyg and standard wiki markdown language, but seems a little trickier to work out page navigation and setting up a structure for the wiki. It has the advantages of the other tools in the LMS, but do we really need these? I also had some problems with login when testing with teh educational designers - although we were logged in, and this registered in the general site, when it came to the wiki it kept registering us as guests. Not sure why. It generally has more features though than the other wikis, e.g. inclusion of html.

Selected comments from the workshop:

• Like the flexibility of more WYSIWYG and ability to use HTML.
• More than we need. Some level of user-friendlimess as Wetpaint. Navigation may be an issue. Woudl not object to using this one.
• Best one!
• Mmmmm!!!
• Looks the prettiest. Seems to be fairly user-friendly.

4.2 Pbwiki

I've set up a Knowledgegarden page called Pbwiki to record my explorations using this wiki. I set up two sites, one for the educational designers and one for the Accounting academics.

Here's a screencapture from the homepage of the Accounting test site.



I have allowed open access for this site, which can be seen at http://www.countmein.pbwiki.com

PBwiki uses wiki markdown, but it is slightly different to the one used within tikiwiki, so I found this confusing at first. Also a little tricky working out the right URL for uploading images. But I like the sidebox (useful for navigation). More comments are available on the pbwiki page.

Selected comments from the workshop:

• Not bad, more difficult to change the wiki script
• Not as straightforward as Wetpaint, so I'm not as big a fan.
• Wetpaint much easier to use
• Aaaargh!!!
• Less user-friendly than Wetpaint, not as pleasing to the eye.
• Need to use more markdown language - this is more time-consuming than Wetpaint, but more flexible.

4.3 Wetpaint

Wetpaint is a freely hosted wiki software package - additional features can be gained by paying a fee. I've set up a Knowledgegarden page called Wetpaint to record my explorations using this wiki. Again, I set up two sites, one for the educational designers and one for the Accounting academics

Here's a screencapture from the homepage of the Accounting test site.



Again, I set this up with open access for testing purposes. You can view it at http://www.countmein.wetpaint.com.

This wiki has simple wysiwyg editing, good features and great design. I have included strengths and weaknesses on the Wetpaint page.

Selected comments from the workshop:

• Easy to use and edit. A little limited in terms of editability, but this doesn't worry me. Ads are not a major hassle.
• Relatively simple, but too many advertising links.
• Easy to use and add pages.
• Very easy to use. Does have ads but these are relevant to the pages that are developed.
• Seems simple to use and navigate.
• Extremely user-friendly with very strong parallels to MSWord. Advertising a small pain.

4.4 Testing the wikis with the educational designers - brewing a storm!

The wikis were tested with others in the Knowledgegarden community, educational designers at my institution as well as the academics themselves, who would make the final decision. A test site was set up for each wiki, and a list of advantages and disadvantages for each one was created within Knowledgegarden (further details can be found in Hunter, 2006b). The educational designers and Accounting academics were also given an opportunity to ‘test-drive’ each wiki.
If I thought I’d stirred up trouble previously, asking the educational designers to test them as well caused even more controversy. The educational designers decided, after testing, that wikis had great potential for their own professional development and became very enthusiastic towards starting their own wiki environment, especially using Wetpaint. This was taken very seriously by management, who felt that the educational designers should be ‘modelling’ our new LMS, not using an externally-hosted wiki. They felt it set a bad example for the academics.

As a result, all testing with the educational designers came to a halt, and while they continue to plan for their wiki (I have held demonstrations of other wiki environments and we have two meetings planned for further discussions), we will wait until Sakai is available before proceeding. The Accounting wiki was allowed to proceed as it was related to my Masters project; however, as mentioned earlier, we were required to change over to Sakai once it is made available.

While concern over many different, unsupported applications being used across the university are warranted, the implications of the way management deals with these issues are immense. It’s defeating to be told by management that you are ‘too enthusiastic about teaching’ and that you can’t create the engaging learning environments that you require. I have had many meetings over these issues, and ways that innovative academics (and educational designers) can test new learning environments in a controlled way, with the support of our IT department. New methods are currently being discussed by the Directors of IT and CELT whereby academics can apply to trial applications currently not supported for institution-wide use by IT. In a recent visit to our institution by Chuck Severance, founding director of Sakai, it was acknowledged that an LMS may not be able to provide everything an academic may need to implement different pedagogies. Each step forward is encouraging.

4.5 Comments from other Knowledgegarden members

Paul Penfold and Allan Jones have both added valuable comments on the PBwiki page, and Richard Hawking commented on the Wetpaint page about his concerns of how advertising would play with university policies. This is a valid concern, and has been an issue with another group in our institution - the library - who have started using a Wetpaint wiki for students at http://csulibrary.wetpaint.com. In our case, we weren't as concerned with this issue as the site won't be used by students, just as an internal site. Also, we'll only be using Wetpaint temporarily, until Sakai becomes available. It was also raised in comments following the workshop by the academics, mostly as an 'annoying' issue.

4.6 The second workshop

We first discussed the concept of wikis, the ReadWrite web and collaborative learning. We looked at Wikipedia, changing an entry, tracking the history of a page and the comments functionality. The potential of wikis in our context was a keen source of discussion, with many seeing potential for sharing knowledge on teaching and learning and working collaboratively on projects.

We then looked at both a fully developed example, as well as a skeleton ‘test’ site for each of the wikis. The academics were taken through how to navigate through the site, how to add a page, how to edit a page, track a page’s history add comments, as well as a quick look at the key features of each wiki clone.

At the completion of each site, they were asked to write comments about how comfortable they felt using each one. They were also asked to rank each wiki in order of preference and nominate how important a range of distinguishing features were to their own personal use.

Comments from the workshop have been included in the sections above, related to each wiki.

4.7 The final verdict

Results from the survey indicated that Moodle and Wetpaint were equal favourites, with PBwiki being placed as least desirable by all academics. Thus it came down to a judgment call on my part (as the final vote). I chose Wetpaint, principly on the fact that we'd only be using it for a short time (due to needing to move it to Sakai later on) and so ensuring academics feel comfortable with the application and the wiki environment was, for me, the highest priority. Wetpaint, being so intuitive, seemed to achieve this more effectively than the others, especially for those who are less technically able, who are the ones we'll need to really 'win over'.

There are drawbacks though in this decision, principly that it doesn't have some of the features of Moodle, including file upload, and also that Moodle has restricted access (no reading, if you don't have a password) and is part of a larger educational network. Again, I've justified this by knowing that this is a short-term solution. I'm still not sure that it was the right decision, and wonder about how this will influence the development of the wiki on a daily basis.

5. Naming the site

The final verdict was announced at our School Board meeting, and we decided to hold a competition regarding the name of our wiki. Our Head of School agreed to give two bottles of wine to the winning entrant. The winner was Kay Plummer, with the name Talking Teaching. The site can be viewed at http://talkingteaching.wetpaint.com.

6. Following the key principles

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002) talk about 7 key principles for cultivating CoPs, and we have tried to incorporate these into the design of our wiki, and our plan for its 'evolution'. For more about the 7 principles, please see Communities of practice.

6.1 Designing for evolution

Our first priority was to set up a basic structure for the site. We invited anyone who was interested to a meeting, where we discussed navigational structure, what templates would be required, a site banner, and the necessary help pages. Again, all of the original group turned up for the meeting, a good sign that interest was still high.

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002) state the CoPs are organic, and can change direction as they evolve. We didn't want to direct the wiki too tightly at the start, but at the same time, we wanted to give it some structure to guide its initial development. We brainstormed a few different loose navigation structures, and came up with one that everyone agreed to. However, we acknowledged that flexibility would be required and this structure would undoubtedly change and improve as the community starts to grow.

We decided to develop two basic templates - one for personal pages, and the other for content pages. The academics liked this idea, as it gave them some guides for constructing pages when they were first learning about wikis. I used standard headings, related to much of the work we have been doing in KG. The templates can be seen on the wiki site.

The remaining principles have been discussed, but not carried out at this stage of the project.

6.2 Opening dialogue between inside and outside perspectives

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002) note that gaining an 'outsider' perspective is useful to help the community see the potential of new possibilities and change. I've made contact with two people who are doing similar things with wikis, one from our own institution and one from another university which is nurturing a similar community to our own.

Lisa Griffin works for the CSU library on our Wagga campus, and is behind the introduction of a library wiki at our institution. Michael Sankey works for the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and has been actively involved in the nurturing of a community of practice within the Faculty of Arts. I was given his name by another Knowledgegarden member.

Both Lisa and Michael are valuable contacts for us as our community grows. Our plan is to invite them to talk to us as guest speakers once we gain more involvement in our wiki. In particular, we'd like to talk to them about their experiences using a wiki and nurturing a community of practice, as well as request their feedback about have encountered along the way, and hopefully come up with shared solutions.

6.3 Inviting different levels of participation

In most communities, a core group, an active group and a peripheral group will emerge. 'The key to good community participation, and a healthy degree of movement between levels, is to design community activities that allow participants at all levels to feel like full members. Rather than force participation, they make opportunities for semiprivate interaction, whether through private discussion rooms on the community's website, at a community event or in a one-on-one conversation' (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002).

Our community so far has 4 core members (including myself), another 4 members which I would consider as 'potentially' active (they have been active in the preliminary work on the wiki, but not in the wiki itself) and another 4 which are on the periphery, and have almost no involvement in the wiki so far. My efforts at this stage have been on the core members, hoping that these members would then 'model' appropriate wiki behaviour for others.

It's been important not to expect everyone to participate at the start. At the moment, our academics have a multitude of demands placed upon them. It is the end of semester, which demands many hours in marking assessment items and examinations. On top of this, we have a new strategic plan which is demanding that all academics become more research active (doubling their current research efforts), and a new performance management plan meaning that throughout October and November they are required to meet with the Head of School and make a full plan of their activities for the following year. This is definitely the wrong time to be 'forcing' people to 'do more'.

As the wiki grows, my tactic will be to work with the other 3 core members, and encourage others to lurk by sharing what's going on in the community, and hope that they gradually become more active. It's important that we don't exclude those who are 'lurking' on the periphery.

A tactic that the core group has discussed is to encourage discussion following our weekly seminar sessions in the School. Every Wednesday, one of the academics presents a seminar on their current research or teaching. By encouraging presenters to facilitate a follow-on discussion after the presentation, we may draw more people to the wiki on a regular basis. We have considered setting up a template for presentations, perhaps using a table format for questions and answers, and a section for further comment. We would then send an email to the group, informing them of the page URL and asking for contributions / further discussion on the topic, in a similar way to the monthly discussion papers. This may draw non-participants to the wiki, and encourage them to look further for other resources.

6.4 Developing both public and private community spaces

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002) state that there's a need for public events, but also a need for one-on-one informal conversations where much interaction, relationship-building and learning takes place. In our community, these 'private' conversations take place in the corridors, and lunch times, and via email. They already exist, and we want to encourage these to continue. Our community has an excellent head start!

What we need to work on is bringing these private conversations into the public domain, so that we can all benefit from them. I plan to model this by documenting my own conversations in the wiki, so that the discussion can continue with other community members. This needs to be done carefully though, and with people's consent (this can be a simple question, such as 'This would be great to share with others. Would you mind if we started a wiki page on it?').

6.5 Focusing on value

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002) tell us that value is often not self-evident in the initial stages of community establishment. Thus, activities which help the potential value emerge are important.

This is the focus of my attention at the moment. Having gained interest in the wiki and support for its use, we now have to convince others that this isn't 'all talk', and that the wiki really does offer something valuable to them. Key to this is adding more content to the wiki - something that started well but has been difficult to continue.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be visiting all academics, 'bookmarking' the wiki URL on their computer (with their permission, of course), showing them a more mature wiki, so that they can see where it might develop and help them, as well as showing them some key pages where they can make small contributions without much effort. I'll also show them how to create a page for their seminar presentation, and encourage discussion there. I think this will be important in drawing people to the site, as it is an established event.

6.6 Combining familiarity with excitement

Routine interactions provide stability and assist in building strong relationships within the community. Exciting events, such as workshops or conferences, provide stimulation. In our community, routine interactions will be our corridor conversations, and adding content to the wiki. I hope to add exciting events by asking guest speakers to talk to us (Michael Sankey, some of our education lecturers, others at the university known for teaching excellence) and to start discussions that can continue in our wiki. These will be particularly useful if interest wanes, as a way of drawing the academics back into the wiki environment.

6.7 Creating a rhythm for the community

Vibrant communities have a rhythm, fostered through a healthy mix of community events and quieter times. Our community has a schedule of seminars, as mentioned previously, and I'll encourage the organiser of these seminars to add the schedule to our wiki. We'll also add a schedule of other teaching and learning 'events' within our university, as well as conferences and so on outside the university that people may be interested in. In this way, the wiki becomes a site of current, updatable information about teaching and learning which will hopefully draw people in.

7. The results so far

The results so far have been both positive and disappointing. On the positive side, we've established community ownership to a certain degree, by enabling the choice of wiki, name, structure, and initial decisions all to come from the community itself. Enthusiasm for the wiki has been quite high, particularly from a core group of members, although this has waned in the past few weeks. This was just unfortunate bad timing. The political concerns we had early on in choosing an externally hosted wiki slowed our progress, and the actual launching of the wiki coincided with one of the busiest times of semester for both myself and the academics.

The enthusiasm and commitment to this project is shown in the submission of a funding proposal to our Faculty for further development of the wiki (suggested by one the core team members). This proposal involves funding for a full literature review, as well as travel and accommodation for two staff members to visit our Wagga campus. This visit would involve running a workshop demonstrating the Talkingteaching site to the Accounting academics on that campus (in a separate School), and encouraging their participation. The proposal was supported by the Heads of Schools on both campuses, and is attached as part of this assignment submission.

In addition, as a result of our project one of the academics has compiled a draft map of our community of practice, indicating the projects that people are working on, and how we are working together. We're still developing this map, and will place it on Talkingteaching soon. The ultimate goal of this academic is to pursue a team teaching award for our community of practice from the Carrick Institute. I've encouraged this, as I see it as a way of showing the 'value' of the wiki for our community.

As mentioned, I've felt reluctant to push the wiki at this time, as I thought it would be counterproductive to our long-term goals of creating good community feeling towards the wiki. If academics feel pressured to use it, or feel that it is an added burden at times of great pressure, they may turn away. However, having said that, I need to find ways to make the wiki attractive and useful to the community at all times, not just in our quieter times.

The ebb and flow of the academic year need to be reflected in the community. For example, quieter times may be filled with adding project information and discussion, perusing content pages for new ideas and technologies that we can use, and looking for new contacts for collaborative efforts. In our busy times, we'll more likely come to the wiki for things that will help us with our immediate work. For example, Peter Evans suggested that we start a page related to the new performance management scheme. This is a great suggestion. I've also thought of setting up a page about my role as educational designer. I've recently received a 30 percent increase in my workload, and am struggling to perform what I consider should be essential duties of an educational designer. Finding out from the Accounting academics what their priorities are and what they'd like to see me concentrate on would be a very useful wiki page project for me.

My current cause for concern in the transfer to Sakai, which I haven’t explored as yet. How much work will be involved, and will we lose any material along the way? These are questions I’ll need to investigate over the coming months.

8 Future developments

In the next six months we are planning some substantial development to Talkingteaching. Much of this has been detailed above under ‘7 key principles’. We plan to add more content to Talkingteaching, as well as start regular discussions related to our weekly seminar topics. I'll also be visiting academics and 'bookmarking' the site on their computer, as well as talking to them about how they feel the wiki could be of value to them. If our proposal is approved, we'll start a full literature review on communities of practice, in view of some early journal papers regarding our progress. We'll also invite others to talk to us, and set up a plan for future scheduled events, to ensure we achieve that ebb and flow within our community that is much needed.

With the merger with the School of Information Technology in January, and the possible inclusion of our sister School of Accounting in Wagga if our community starts to thrive here in Bathurst, there’s some exciting – and challenging – times ahead. This project represents the start of something much larger, and hopefully much more long term than one semester could possibly achieve. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.

8. Related Knowledgegarden pages

More on communities

Communities of practice General introduction to CoPs

Building and growing communities Includes stages of membership and different needs at each stage.

Connecting people, Issues and Directions Reveals the results of a survey on social connectivity technologies


More on emerging technologies for developing communities

Introduction to wikis As the name suggests, a general introduction to wikis, particularly concentrating on principles and guidelines related to the establishment of a wiki environment.

Wiki-suggested ways to best introduce

Establishing your own wiki An overview of some of the major wiki clones, including MediaWiki and pbWiki

Building a community of sharing teachers A case study of WordPress used to facilitate online sharing of teaching materials.

Blogging to encourage a Community of Practice Another case study, this time at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

Creating community This page explores issues related to the creation of a sense of community among online learners, particularly at the tertiary level where students may have no face-to-face contact.

9. References

Augar, N, Raitman, R & Zhou, W 2004, ‘Teaching and learning online with wikis’, in R Atkinson, C McBeath, D Jonas-Dwyer & R Phillips (eds), Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILLITE Conference, Perth, 5-8 December, pp.95-104.

Hung, D, Chee, TS, Hedberg, JG & Seng, KT 2005, A framework for Fostering a Community of Practice: Scaffolding Learners through an Evolving Continuum, British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol 36, No 2, pp.159-176.

Leuf, B & Cunningham, W 2001, The Wiki way: Quick collaboration on the Web, Addison Wesley, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA.

Morton-Allen, M 2006, personal communication, October.

Nickols, F 2003, Communities of Practice: An overview. Retrieved October 2 2006 from http://home.att.net/~discon/KM/CoPOverview.pdf

Preece, J & Maloney-Krichmar, D 2005, Online communities: Design, theory, and practice. "Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication", 10(4), article 1. Retrieved October 1 2006 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/preece.html

Wenger, E. n.d. Communities of practice: A brief introduction. Retrieved September 1 2006 from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

Wenger, E 1998, Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge University Press, New York.

White, N 2005, How Some Folks Have Tried to Describe Community. Retrieved October 2 2006 from http://www.fullcirc.com/community/definingcommunity.htm

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