Which principles of groupwork, communities of practice and collaborative learning should a distributed group consider, when planning the design of an e-learning course? week2

Short answer would be: build trust: towards members of the team, towards technology used and towards learning process. Let learners decide how they want to learn (let them set the rules and roles). Support interaction between learners and give them feedback.
What is important: to give learners time to build trust. It does not happen overnight. Trusting each other means that learners must have time to develop common "language" and common understanding. They must learn to know each others' strengths and weaknesses.
Technical apprehension - this is definitely a problematic question when planning an e-learning course.
How can learners see what they have learned: reflection period and assignments must be thought through? How will they communicate and collaborate.
Networking, knowledge how to communicate, collaborate, how to communicate effectively, how to create opportunities for learning and growth, collect and provide feedback.
And of course: you can not forget the "fun" - this celebration idea in article was great!

But I want to share my thought about the article in the way which does not match perhaps the title of the blog.
First I did not like this article very much (readings last week were much better from my point of view). This one was not very well structured, cases described were not well bounded with literature analysis and differences/similarities of described cases were not deeply analysed. I did get too little new information and they raised more questions than I found answers.
Still there were some moments when I realised that this is something we are trying to do or what is still ahead of us in this class. Like we are trying to "learn about" and "learn how to" at the same time.

As team members know each other before then of course it was easier for them to build trust and to be more successful with online learning/working (this is similar in classroom as well).

What really disturbed me in this article was the approach of authors to the knowledge and more specifically to tacit knowledge. It might be because tacit knowledge is quite obscure term and authors did not explain what they meant with it or how tacit knowledge develops. From my point of view in successful e-learning groups learning process begins with explicit knowledge except for the teams who have worked together before or who previously have had e-learning courses (and have some technological skills), but this is not very common now. Otherwise e-learning is explicit and bounded with "aha"-effect or conflict situation (in both cases learning is explicit). Every team member has his own understanding about the process, has his own learning experience …. So to create a successful e-learning group, the first stage learning must be explicit.

There is one sentence in this article with what it is hard for me to agree: "once team members trust, they are more likely to make their tacit knowledge explicit, transform explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge …" First: if a learner makes (!) tacit knowledge explicit then it must be explicit already. Otherwise tacit knowledge becomes (!) explicit to others. And knowledge becomes more explicit more learners communicate/interact with each other. I'm not sure in the second part of this claim: if trust is the reason why explicit knowledge comes tacit. It has more to do with learners' competence development then team members trust.

Other question for me is: whether learners can learn something "tacitly" or tacit knowledge is something what expands from explicit knowledge?

Now about "Teachable Moments". Of course conflict situations and failures are teachable moments and the best way to learn is from one's own experience. Authors bound teachable moments with failure. It gives an impression like all valuable learning would happen through failure or conflict.
To create secured environment for failures, it means that the feedback to failure (learner does not always recognise this) must take place practically online. As e-learning tends to be more time consuming then it is not easy to do (it is a huge pressure to facilitator).
Other thing is that "teachable moment" can happen through positive success!

About "inciting conflict". I would be very careful to encourage inciting conflict. I have seen (so this is not based on academic knowledge ) some training where facilitator knowing that conflict in the group would take place trying to encourage conflict. The results of that were not great. If one wants to do something like this then one must have perfect knowledge in psychology and perfect sense of individuals so that the group could be put back work together again. Conflict appears in group processes usually anyway - so let it be normal and real conflict what is usable to all group members as well.
It is hard to agree with authors that learning "does not become "real" until conflict occur". Unfortunately authors do not offer definition to "real learning".