Interconnection of Communities of Practice: A Web Platform for Knowledge Management

TL;DR

This paper presents a web platform that interconnects Communities of Practice to enhance knowledge sharing, specifically applied to educational tutoring, using a novel model based on Wenger's Constellation of Practice.

Contribution

It introduces a new model of Interconnection of Communities of Practice and implements it in the TE-Cap 2 platform for educational tutoring activities.

Findings

Successful deployment of TE-Cap 2 in real educational settings

Effective indexation and search within the knowledge base

Positive validation results from descriptive investigation

Abstract

Our works aim at developing a Web platform to connect various Communities of Practice (CoPs) and to capitalise on all their knowledge. This platform addresses CoPs interested in a same general activity, for example tutoring. For that purpose, we propose a general model of Interconnection of Communities of Practice (ICP), based on the concept of Constellation of Practice (CCP) developed by Wenger (1998). The model of ICP was implemented and has been used to develop the TE-Cap 2 platform which has, as its field of application, educational tutoring activities. In particular, we propose an indexation and search tool for the ICP knowledge base. The TE-Cap 2 platform has been used in real conditions. We present the main results of this descriptive investigation to validate this work.