Communities of practice and the 'smart tools'

I've been reading Etienne Wenger's 1997 book on communities of practice on the train in the past few weeks. The book that I've borrowed from the library - the book is out of print - is totally dog-eared and has obviously seen lots of use.

Wenger talks about reification 'the process of giving form to our experience by producung objects that congeal this experience into "thingness"'. These include abstractions, tools, symbols, stories, terms, and concepts that reify something of that practice in congealed form. The term reification covers a wide range of practices that include 'making, designing, representing, encoding, and describing, as well as preceiving, interpreting, interpreting, using, reusing, decoding and recasting'. Reification and participation (or mutual engagement) form a duality that is fundamental to the negotiation of meaning and thus the nature of practice. The duality of participation and reification suggests that, in terms of meaning, people and things can not be definied independently of each other.

I found this all relevant to the 'smart tools' - evaluation tools for information practitioners being made by the LEAP IMPACT community of practice with its dgroup at www.dgroups.org/groups/leap/impact/ - beacuse the tools themselves represent reified experience but, this emphasis on duality, demonstrates the continued importance of mutal engagement if the tools are to be understood.