Supporting learning in online communities is an important direction for the future of human–computer interaction as people increasingly leverage social technologies to support professional growth and development. However, few have studied how people leverage the socio-technical affordances of online informal workplace communities to develop professional skills in the absence of dedicated expert guidance. We draw from theories of apprenticeship to introduce an emergent theory of distributed apprenticeship, which outlines how community expectations of transparency and mutual support allow for instruction to be directed by a distributed network of nonexperts. We develop distributed apprenticeship through a qualitative study of crowdfunding entrepreneurs, where novices leverage social interactions with community members to develop a wide range of entrepreneurial skills. We then generalize distributed apprenticeship to other workplace contexts and provide design implications for online communities where people develop professional skills with minimal dedicated formal guidance.

随着人们越来越多地利用社交技术来支持专业发展和发展，支持在线社区的学习是人机交互未来的重要方向。但是，很少有人研究在没有专门的专家指导的情况下，人们如何利用在线非正式工作场所社区的社会技术能力来发展专业技能。我们从学徒理论中汲取经验，介绍分布式学徒的新兴理论，概述了社区对透明度和相互支持的期望如何允许由非专家组成的分布式网络指导教学。我们通过对众筹创业者的定性研究来发展分布式学徒制，新手利用这种学习机会利用与社区成员的社交互动来发展各种创业技能。然后，我们将分布式学徒制推广到其他工作场所环境中，并为在线社区提供设计意义，在该社区中人们可以在最少的专门正式指导下发展专业技能。