Situated Learning in Online Communities & Discussion Boards

Over the last week or two, as a consequence of participating in the online discussion forum for class, I had much opportunity to reflect over the various e-learning experiences I've had in the last decade of my career.  Lave and Wenger enticed me to really consider what i had defined as "situated learning"  and how we tossed around the terms "community of practice" and "community of learning" in the workplace.  What I had thought it to be in context of work, was that a community of practice was a group of people connecting and networking for the purpose of knowledge-sharing and support as people within a particular profession.  As an example, for online courses we designed for nurses and supportive care staff, there were discussion forums facilitated to discuss practice issues, challenges, and changes, which was set up in each e-learning course.
My thinking of a community of learning was that it was a group of people, not necessarily of the same profession, coming together online to share information related to a common topic of interest.  As it turns out, the term for what i'm describing is actually referred to as a "learning community."  Peter Senge, who defined the learning organization, discusses this concept as a necessary element in a learning organization.

In the workplace, if we look around, there are lots of communities.  Communities of managers, communities of staff of a similar profession, of staff of similar level, but differing profession, of staff of common projects and objectives, but differing profession and level, etc.  How the participants in these communities interact, whether in person or online is important, but the knowledge sharing and building that occurs is the real key.  In coming posts, I will look closer at these shared interests and artifacts and collaborative relationships when our class examines distributed cognition and intelligence.
In the meantime, take moment to reflect on some of the online communities you're a part of, most commonly through places like facebook, linkedin and twitter groups. Why did you join?  What were your looking to learn?  How have you shared your knowledge?  There are some very savvy things happening in many corners of the web, a very interesting site i came across is Social Logical.  Here we can see how many players of different means, backgrounds, geographies come together online for a particular purpose and learn from one another about social business.