Hi Maha – I’ve read your post very quickly – so apologies if I’ve missed a point or two – but just to say a big YES!! Community in learning is very important – Etienne Wenger=Trayner spoke about this at our Conference last week – I have blogged about that event – and here is my summary of what Etienne said about learning in times of super-complexity:

Communities of Practice?
Like many people in Education I have been aware of Etienne Wenger-Trayner (EWT) and his Communities of Practice arguments in theory and for many years. EWT in practice and in person was a revelation: warm, inspiring and profound in his outlining of the learning trajectory which takes us from peripheral encounters into the centre of various communities of practice – and various learning identities.

EWT locates his theory in studies of apprenticeship practice. Apprentices especially at the beginning rarely interact directly with a ‘master’ but engage more in apprentice-to-apprentice interactions. In this way learning is ineffably located in the group and in our group interactions: learning is social, embodied and whole person.

For EWT, learning experience models this apprenticeship trajectory. He described ‘learning’ as circled by complementary processes involving community (which offers belonging and a meaningful cadre with which to negotiate and define competence); practice (what we do – and how meaningful and valuable it is); meaning (that is rooted with relevance in the now – and not deferred to some indefinable point in the future); and identity (who we are becoming). In this model learning is not the transmission of a corpus of knowledge nor even a process or set of processes with which to engage with a corpus of knowledge; learning is how we negotiate a range of processes of becoming – that oscillate between the individual and the group.

Becoming
The EWT model allows us to see learning as becoming: it involves a realignment of competence and experience; it is socially defined – but personally experienced. Learning involves negotiating identity in a complex dance in complex landscapes of practice that navigate multiple tensions and meaning. It is identity-construction in a time of super-complexity: it is a learning relationship between the social world and the personal.

The community is the curriculum
As one who is still part of the ongoing MOOC: #rhizo14: the community is the curriculum, I could not help but see parallels between the EWT model and the rhizomatic model of learning espoused by Dave Cormier – and as poetically described by Deleuze and Guattari (1997, 2005) in A thousand plateaus. Cormier – who spoke at last year’s ALDinHE in Plymouth – gave birth to our radical un-MOOC. In #rhizo14, learning is/emerges from the connections, contingent or purposeful, between the participants in the different learning spaces we inhabit – Forum, FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, Blogs, Zeega… – and which are fruitfully complicated by the diversity and complexity and internationality of the participants. It is a tricky trickster idea – but actually very helpful when we take back to our classrooms whether F2F or virtual: for to enable learning to happen we must at the very least foster human relationships between the participants.