Learning and Boundary in communities of practice

A community of learning according to Wenger (1998) takes a while to come into being and can linger long after an official group is disbanded. This idea creates a problem for the design of online education learning communities. When developing a curriculum and granting membership to teachers and students it is essential to get all members of the community involved and engaged from the start and maintain engagement till the end of the curriculum. Any communication after the curriculum is a bonus. What we can not afford in education in this case is any lead time with membership. We need all students and teachers to quickly form a community of practice. The FLEXE curriculum that I have alluded to a few times in class is a good example of a number of communities of practice interacting with each other. To be specific there are communities of students, teachers, classes, countries, and scientists. All of these communities involve a range boundary encounters. What we, as curriculum developers and evaluators, are careful about considering are facilitating the boundary encounters that we believe to be beneficial to first students then teachers and scientists. These encounters are types of periphery and overlaps of communities. Practically speaking, how do we design function to facilitate these encounters? Blogs? Wikis? Email? School profiles? What types of encounters are meaningful and facilitate communication toward shared goals instead of just plain communication?