Personal Knowledge Communities

Activity 1: Your Communities

Use the space below to create a map of communities you are a part of. Include at least 5 communities. For each community, include answers to the following questions:

Did you choose to be a part of the community?
What, if anything, have you learned from being a part of the community?

Activity 2: What Do You Know?

Choose one of the communities you identified in Activity 1 above. Now make a list of things you've learned as part of that community and describe the different types of activities that contributed to your learning. The following list describes three types of activities (or knowledges) that can contribute to learning within a community. Please describe two examples of each of the following types of activities.

Social activities – these are types of knowledge gained through understanding values and attitudes of a particular community (e.g., expectations about keeping a shared workspace clean)
Physical activities – these are activities that involve actions of the body and/or interactions with physical materials (e.g., planting herbs in a garden)
Textual activities – these are activities that incorporate texts of some kind (e.g., books, magazines, blogs)

Activity 3: Developing Authority

Return to the information you shared in Activity 2 above and identify the "authors" of each type of knowledge you listed. In other words, who or what taught you this knowledge?

How did you know or come to trust these authors to teach you about your chosen topic?
From your experience in this community, do you now have the authority to teach about this topic? Why or why not?