Computing at school: an emergent community of practice for a re-emergent subject

The Computing at School (CAS) working group was formed in 2009 as a grassroots organisation with members drawn from schools, higher education and the computing industry. Their concern was the drop in applications for undergraduate computing courses and a dearth of specialists entering related professions. This paper studies the development of the organisation with respect to models of communities of practice. The methodology is a retrospective reflexive study based analysis of e-mail transactions to review the association’s activities and relationships with other stakeholders in computing education. Through this, the formation of a new professional community of practice is tracked and its characteristics established.

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