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Research Unit Goals

The main goal of the research unit is to understand the role played by Information Technology (IT) in the interaction between people participating in the birth of a community of practices. We want to verify how, in a weakly bounded organisation, the use of a relatively poor technology (mostly centred on written text) produced a community sharing knowledge. In most cases, IT tools not designed for sharing, interacting and learning produced such phenomena. Such evidences are found both in communities characterised by a strong IT competence (free software and Linux developers, or small groups of hackers), and in communities where such a competence is not granted (for instance, net-based self-help groups).
The phenomenology does not give raise to a unique interpretation: there are both cases where the birth of a community of practices was fostered by technology and cases with the opposite phenomena.
We want to analyse which set of technological competencies was used in different situations and how technology was adapted to the needs. This process is similar to the so called "drift", that is forcing an information system toward usual practices. A system without the needed flexibility is forced by the user to adapt itself to the preferred work practices (usually the one in use before the introduction of IT).
In creating a community of practices, communication (with the meaning of explicit exchange of meaning) plays a less relevant role than the shared work context or the unintentional construction of common values and representations. IT for people interaction is usually related to mediation of communication, but this is not enough for accounting all the processes of a community of practices in its starting phase.
While new tools, enriching the interaction media between people (e.g. virtual worlds), are increasingly important, it is relevant to analyse how, without such new tools, a set of people was able to take advantage of technologies (possibly unconsciously) in order to build a community of practices.
A possible follow-up of the project is in the field of distance learning, with emphasis on Teaching/Consulting methods. In these cases situated learning plays a central role, we would investigate how the participation in a community can help the learning process and which tools could be useful in this case.