BACKGROUND Global higher education is in a state of change. Its expansion at the end of the twentieth century has led to a burgeoning of new programmes, modules and courses. These include not just the development of interdisciplinary and new subject areas in mainstream academic departments but also those based less on traditional knowledge bases within academic disciplines and more upon vocational and professional bodies of knowledge and their practice-based concerns. At the same time, the concept of lifelong learning means that the learner is no longer regarded as the eighteen-year-old fresh from school, but now includes those entering and re-entering the university – conceived in its broadest terms – at many different points throughout the lifecourse. The university is no longer confined within its own buildings; courses are delivered in outreach colleges, in the workplace and on-line. With these profound changes have come new words associated with learning: ‘distributed’, ‘flexible’ and ‘blended’. In short, the university is no longer the traditional bastion of knowledge, defined by either its disciplinary boundaries or its physical campus, colleges and buildings. It is against this backdrop that researchers in the field of teaching and learning in higher education are drawing upon the concept of communities of practice in order to inform practitioners, both university lecturers and staff developers, about new ways of understanding their students' learning.
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