New roles for librarians are emerging in a changing information environment, and a burning question for LIS educators is how to help LIS students prepare to take on and shape these roles. One proposal is the blended librarian who helps restructure the library experience by integrating learning, technology, and information literacy (Bell & Shank, 2007). Blended librarianship is the collaborative effort of librarians, educators, and technologists who design, manage, and evaluate programs that are engaging, relevant, user- and learner-focused, and use technology effectively and innovatively for information access, learning, knowledge building, and community building. This effort calls for librarians with a broad vision, a wide range of skills, and full institutional support.

Bell and Shank discuss online community building as it relates to the global The Blended Librarian Online Learning Community. Other important communities that may have a strong online presence include the project team for a local implementation of blended librarianship, as well as the librarians, educators, and students who are involved in the learning facilitated by the new structures, tools, and techniques. Studies that colleagues and I have conducted on educational project development lead to the conclusion that the use of the communities of practice framework offers a number of advantages for these (online) communities. For project teams:

• The CoP delineation of social learning processes provides coherence for projects operating in environments of uncertainty and structural impediments. In interdisciplinary or cross-organizational collaborations where it is challenging to shape an enterprise and remain accountable to it, the dualities and modes of belonging provide a framework for visualizing and tracing the community learning processes that lead to a clearly defined enterprise and effective action.
• The dualities provide a means to clarify the choices faced by developers. The need to integrate the elements of the dualities (rather than choosing between them) helps designers frame priorities by understanding the implications of their decisions.
• The CoP framework foregrounds the fact that each individual has expertise through membership in multiple CoPs; it provides mechanisms for sharing that expertise and building collective knowledge on an ongoing basis.
• The framework points to the types of facilities needed for supporting team members' identification with and productive shaping of an enterprise through negotiating meaning, models of practice, expertise, and identity and leadership.
• For educational projects with a community focus, creating a CoP among the developers serves as a model for CoP formation among the project's target group. The use of the CoP framework encourages participation in and reifications about community building among the developers that can provide valuable insights into critical design and development issues for face-to-face and online community building.

I am currently conducting an ongoing study of the design, implementation, and evaluation of LIS courses based on the CoP framework. Interim results indicate that there are advantages to using a CoP framework in LIS curricula as well (Yukawa, 2009):

• The CoP approach of situating learning within a community, a domain, and a practice provides coherence for social constructivist learning approaches that build on the interdisciplinary expertise of students. As noted above, the model also provides mechanisms for sharing expertise and building collective knowledge.
• The CoP dualities are a guide for prioritizing blended learning design choices and have the potential to guide curriculum planning, implementation, and assessment in practitioner education programs.
• The use of the CoP approach with social software can serve as a model for blended learning and librarianship for future librarians.

The main disadvantages to implementing faculty of this CoP-based approach to blended learning are: (1) its complexity, (2) the time needed to implement the model, (3) a lack of institutional support for course redesign, (4) the difficulty of acquiring new teaching and technology skills, and (5) the risks associated with innovation (cf. Vaughan, 2007).

Online communities of educators and students are receiving considerable attention, and while librarians do not seem to figure prominently in these groups, interest in collaboration among faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and instructional technologists appears to be increasing. Blended librarianship offers a vision and rationale for inclusion in these communities. The CoP framework provides a guide for social learning and community building.

References

Bell, S.J. & Shank, J.D. (2007). Academic librarianship by design: A blended librarian's guide to the tools and techniques. Chicago: ALA.

Vaughan, N. (2007). Perspectives on blended learning in higher education. International Journal on ELearning, 6(1), 81-94.

Yukawa, J. (2009). "We create": Blended learning in LIS courses using the communities of practice framework. Paper accepted for the Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference, January 20-23, 2009, Denver, Colorado.