Hobbies and Communities of Practice

Like Hannah, I found myself asking what a community is after reading Gravyland. Parks seems to conceive of the community (at least, the kind of community people who do “writing beyond the curriculum” are interested in helping) as being primarily local, urban, and poor. What might we lose by focusing exclusively on this type of community? Much of my time spent looking through writing and civic-engagement oriented journals turned up primarily service-learning ideas for local communities, or ideas about how to manage online courses and create learning communities for particular classes. However, for my “hobbies” class, I am interested in self-selected communities with a heavy (or exclusive) online component. Ultimately, I’d like to help my students more effectively engage in the kinds of communities they are already contributing (or interested in contributing) to. The way I think about communities for the purpose of this class would lean away from Parks and toward what Jill Olthouse and Myriah Miller describe in "Teaching Talented Writers with Web 2.0 Tools." They advocate using the benefits of using Web 2.0 technology to become engaged in communities of practice:

Many online networks fit the characteristics of what literacy theorists call communities of practice (Lave, 1996): a physical or virtual space where people who are joined by a common interest come together. In a community of practice, newcomers and experts participate in the same type of tasks, and newcomers learn skills through practicing, collaborating, and modeling rather than only through explicit teaching (Gee, 2000; Haneda, 2006; Johnson, 2001). In an online writing community such as Figment.com, new writers voluntarily participate in activities similar to those of published authors (i.e., writing, critiquing, revising, publishing, promotion); they can interact with published authors by submitting questions and entering contests. Although these young writers may not yet have agents or book contracts, they begin to think of themselves as members of the larger Young Adult (YA) Fiction community.

Communities of practice foster the kinds of epistemological framework Shaffer describes in his discussion of historians and journalists – thinking like a professional within a professional community. However, rather than plugging my students into writing communities as Olthouse and Miller suggest, for this class I’d like my students to have as much agency as possible in choosing the community they want to speak into. Ideally they would bring to class on the first day an area of mastery and enthusiasm to begin writing about.

Within my own hobby’s community (historical fencing), the Wiktenauer is an example of an online civic engagement project worthy of emulation. It is a resource put together by a broad range of participants within the historical fencing community. The wiki is run by a large group of fencing teachers and students, professional and amateur historians, and people inside and outside of the university. Participants can contribute to the wiki ranges in many ways, from simply porting over articles from Wikipedia, to undertaking more complex and collaborative tasks such as identifying collections that house certain fencing manuals, translating texts, and writing articles about an aspect of historical fencing. The page sorts entries by text, fencing master, techniques, and weapon types. There are also links to pages to help fencers find groups to practice with under the “global map,” and a link to a widely-used forum that covers a number of questions of interpretation and practice. Many hobbies have similar sites of exchange for community knowledge. The assignment sequence I’m thinking of would start something like this: 

1. Turn in a 500-700 word essay to me electronically that describes your hobby and raises some of the central questions and issues regarding it (for example, in origami there is some debate over the ethics of copyright, folding from someone else’s diagram and profiting from the sale of the resulting model). 
2. Revise the paper I return to you and then post it on the class blog so everyone can see it.
3. Read all the other posts and pick three to comment on. Ask the poster a question or raise a point that the poster didn’t mention. 
4. Create an “annotated bibliography” of the online presence of your hobby’s community. That is, identify key websites, forums, wikis, message boards, etc. for your hobby and describe what each offers, what faction in your hobby they are biased toward (if any), and what kind of audience seems prevalent. 
5. Identify one of these sources and decide what kind of contribution you’ll make to it. Write a proposal that outlines what work needs to be done (or corrected) and provide a plan for a project to do it.