Tweetchat: Thinking together - What makes Communities of Practice work?



The first #ResNetSLT Tweetchat of 2018 took place on Wednesday, 31st January.

The chat was based around the paper 'Thinking together: What makes Communities of Practice work?' and was hosted by Sally Pratten (@salpratten) and Lucy Benjamin (@lucybenjaminSLT).

The paper discusses the development of 'Communities of Practice' (CoPs) of healthcare practitioners, and how these work effectively. Two case studies of communities of practice were considered - one thriving and high achieving, and the other less successful. The pre-chat questions can be viewed here.

The chat drew 37 participants from Gloucestershire, Bristol, London, Surrey and the North West of England. The hour sped by, with a very lively discussion of the highly topical chosen paper about CoP.

The first and last questions seemed to elicit the most discussions - people seemed to be more engrossed in discussion during questions two and three and actually naturally seemed to move on to these without much prompting.

There was an overall consensus on a number of points:
  • The importance of social media in widening access to CoPs
  • Difficulty in how you define spontaneous CoPs and how you label them
  • General impression that structured/organised CoPs could be the start of more spontaneous interactions and community building
You can find the link to the full transcript here and our Twitter stats here. There were 275 tweets in total during the hour, with a 'reach' to almost 300,000 linked Twitter accounts. A fab start to our year!

During the chat a lot of people confirmed that they related to both ResNetSLT and Clinical Academics in SLT as meaningful personal Communities of Practice.

These groups have both recently started to generate this sense of community through Twitter, but are currently developing other additional platforms and processes for communication and information sharing.

Save the date in your diary now for our next chat on February 28th to hear everyone's comments on the paper about clinical-academic roles.

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