In this blog, I try to compare three frameworks about online communities I encountered recently.

Affinity Space
Affinity spaces were originated and defined by James Paul Gee (Gee, 2004; Gee, 2005) as a way to understand how spaces, maybe physical, virtual , and blended ones, offer opportunities for indivisuals through ther ommunications within groups to develop affinity for a topic, such as media objects and for practice. (As Duncan & Hayes, 2012, p.7 cited in Hudson et al., 2015).
Affinity spaces can have a number of formal features, although a given space may not
embody all of them (Gee, 2004)

  1. Common endeavor, not race, class, gender, or disability, is primary.
  2. Newbies and masters and everyone else share common space.
  3. Some portals are strong generators, i.e., participants create new content,
    works, projects.
  4. Content organization is transformed by interactional organization.
  5. Both intensive and extensive knowledge are encouraged.
  6. Both individual and distributed knowledge are encouraged.
  7. Dispersed knowledge is encouraged.
  8. Tacit knowledge is encouraged and honored.
  9. There are many different forms and routes to participation.
  10. There are lots of different routes to status.
  11. Leadership is porous and leaders are resources

Community of Inquiry
CoI was developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer in 2001. A CoI is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding (https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/). Three componets of CoI are social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.

Community of Practice
A CoP is a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic and who come together to fulfill both individual and group goals(Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Reference
Hudson, R.C., Duncan S., and Reeve C (2015). Affinity Spaces for Informal Science Learning: Developing a Research Agenda. https://www.informalscience.org/sites/default/files/AffinitySpacesFinalReport.pdf
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge university press.