News

ALLED2 Project is happy and proud to announce that CoP – Community of Practice for ALLED2 EduNET (find more about EduNET on our website: www.alled.eu) is now finalized and operational.

What we learned from COVID-19 is that digital tools are a necessity and digital future is definitely happening now.

Why CoP?

Open method of coordination (OMC) at European Commission is a method used in the area of so-called soft acquis (subsidiarity-based areas of cooperation such as Education, Employment, Social policy, Vocational training, Youth, Culture) and it is composed of 4 basic principles:

•   jointly identifying and defining objectives to be achieved (adopted by the Council);

•   jointly establish measuring instruments (statistics, indicators, guidelines);

• bench-marking, i.e. comparison of EU countries’ performance and

•   exchanging best practices (monitored by the Commission).

Basic principle of OMS is knowledge sharing and/or peer learning. One of areas of knowledge sharing supported and promoted by European Commission is sharing on the level of practitioners in the similar field (known as Community of Practices). The recent elaboration of importance of CoP (in line with EU Digital Agenda) and principles for this tool implementation are elaborated in the so-called ”Knowledge Sharing for Better Implementation of EU regional policy – KNOW SHARE”,

(2016, European Commission DG Joint Research Centre, Publications Office of the European Union; ISBN: 978-92-79-65327-8, ISSN: 1831-9424, DOI: 10.2760/290866, Other Identifiers: EUR 28432 EN, OPOCE KJ-NA-28432-EN-N)

(for referencing: Svanfeldt, C.; Rancati, A.;Cuccillato, E.; Troussard, X; Enabling Communities of Practice, 2016; EUR28432 EN; doi:10.2760/290866)

where knowledge sharing as well as knowledge cumulation is composed of three phases which also can be translated into community objectives:

• Phase 1: Planting the seeds of a community, identifying shared issues and champions willing to take responsibility for action;
• Phase 2: Growing the community and supporting the champions;
• Phase 3: Harvesting the results, making the process self-sustained.

To summarize, Community of Practice is a knowledge management tool, and represents a group of people who share a craft or a profession. The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger 1991). Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998). It isn’t not new phenomena: this type of learning has existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences through storytelling.

Nowadays, with technological development (Industry 4.0) IoT and digitalization is a widely spread knowledge management tool. Lesson learned from COVID-19 is that this method/tool will have even greater importance in the future as a knowledge management tool to support knowledge sharing and peer learning among sector practitioners/professionals.

In this way ALLED2 Project is taking step forward towards EU Digital Agenda for Education and supporting structured cooperation and knowledge sharing between ALLED2 EduNET and all relevant stakeholders.