Lessons Learned from Week 1

Communities of Practice
A community as defined by wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn is a group of people living in a particular local area…

Practice: knowledge of how something is usually done; "it is not the local practice to wear shorts to dinner" wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Repetition of an activity to improve skill; the ongoing pursuit of a craft or profession en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Practice

From the above definitions of Community and practice I can say that a community of practice is a gathering of people in a group that meet for a particular purpose or goal and indeed to further understand that goal and expand it.

This idea is shared and further explained by the following definitions from
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/definitions.shtml:

Common practices and language: "Communities of Practice" is a phrase coined by researchers who studied the ways in which people naturally work and play together. In essence, communities of practice are groups of people who share similar goals and interests. In pursuit of these goals and interests, they employ common practices, work with the same tools and express themselves in a common language. Through such common activity, they come to hold similar beliefs and value systems. Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project

Groups that learn: Groups that learn, communities of practice, have special characteristics. They emerge of their own accord: Three, four, 20, maybe 30 people find themselves drawn to one another by a force that's both social and professional. They collaborate directly, use one another as sounding boards, and teach each other.
"The Invisible Key to Success"

If we follow the definitions above then a good example of a community of practice could be group of Christian evangelists that come together from various church organizations, meet on a regular basis to share knowledge about the sole purpose of winning souls for Christ for the furtherance of the gospel.