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The Usefulness of Wenger’s Framework in Understanding a Community of Practice.
Jane Bozarth's dissertation on communities of practice, including a proposed revised framework for analyzing and understanding these communities. The revised version clarifies the difference between engagement and participation and adjusts definitions of other terms.
A review of research on professional learning communities: What do we know?
Like the title says, a research review on PLCs, synthesizing results from 10 articles.
* All research supported the idea that learning communities change teaching practice, although not all articles were specific about what changes took place.
* In one study, teachers in PLCs developed more student-centered classrooms. Some other studies discussed specific teaching strategies used as a result of PLCs.
* All studies showed a change in school culture through "collaboration, focus on student learning, teacher authority, and continuous teacher learning."
* All 6 studies that looked at student achievement found that student learning improved. However, this was only seen when the focus of collaboration was student learning and not just working together.
* Their conclusion: "The focus of a PLC should be developing teachers’ “knowledge of practice” around the issue of student learning"
* "...working collaboratively is the process not the goal of a PLC. The goal is enhanced student achievement."
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Guest Post by Gaurav Mishra: The 4Cs Social Media Framework
A framework for principles of thinking about social media, aiming to look at the underlying purposes and benefits of the tools without getting caught up in the specific tools or buzzwords.
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4Cs of social
media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence -
Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action
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rheingold's brainstorms: The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online
Tips for hosts of online conversations. Applies to online facilitators too.
Communities of practice
Introduction to communities of practice by Etienne Wenger
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Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a
passion for something they do and learn how to
do it better as they interact regularly. -
- Internally: How to organize educational experiences that ground school
learning in practice through participation in communities around subject
matters? - Externally: How to connect the experience of students to actual
practice through peripheral forms of participation in broader communities
beyond the walls of the school? - Over the lifetime of students: How to serve the lifelong learning
needs of students by organizing communities of practice focused on topics of
continuing interest to students beyond the initial schooling period?
The perspective of communities of practice affects educational practices
along three dimensions:From this perspective, the school is not the privileged locus of learning. It
is not a self-contained, closed world in which students acquire knowledge to be
applied outside, but a part of a broader learning system. - Internally: How to organize educational experiences that ground school
CITE Journal - Science: Blogs: Enhancing Links in a Professional Learning Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers
Small study of reflective blogging to build a learning community with teachers. Overall, the results were positive and the teachers felt the experience was beneficial, but there were some technical and other difficulties.
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Small study of reflective blogging to build a learning community with teachers. Overall, the results were positive and the teachers felt the experience was beneficial, but there were some technical and other difficulties.
- christyinsdesign on 2007-10-11
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Anyone who can access the Internet can be part of the knowledge-access, knowledge-building,
information-exchanging culture, regardless of location. -
Learning communities do not have to be built through face-to-face interactions.
They can be realized using nontraditional electronic communication. - 2 more annotations...
Using threaded comments to build a writing community in your classroom | Reflections on Teaching
A 6th grade teacher talks about the advantage of threaded blog comments for building a writing community. This encourages much more of students talking to each other and makes it easier to follow blog conversations.
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One of those is threaded comments. This is rapidly bringing my blogs to the level I had always hoped to acheive–one where the students are talking to each other and not just talking to me.
An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching
Not a whole lot new to me here, but a solid collection of principles to guide online facilitators. If you're looking for an introduction for facilitators or administrators who aren't familiar with online learning or don't really "get" why you can't just shovel face-to-face content into an LMS to have a great course, this would be a good way to help show what's required to go beyond the mediocrity typical of many online courses.
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Principle 1: The online world is a medium unto itself.
The search for excellence begins with this principle: The online world is a medium unto itself (Carr-Chellman & Duchastel, 2000; Ellis & Hafner, 2003). It is not just another learning environment, like a separate classroom down the hall; it is a categorically different learning environment. There are vastly different dynamics in online versus on campus courses. -
Principle 2: In the online world content is a verb.
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The Development Of A Community Of Inquiry Over Time In An Online Course: Understanding The Progression And Integration Of Social | The Sloan Consortium
JALN article on creating a community of inquiry through online discussions, with positive results for students' perceived learning and satisfaction. Specifically, the authors found that, at least in this context, cognitive and teaching presence were correlated with both learning and satisfaction, but social presence only improved satisfaction. Registration required to download the PDF.
Reinventing Project-Based Learning Ning
Ning community set up by the authors of Reinventing Project-Based Learning, used for a course. The group is currently dormant, but the archived discussions still have some interest and will likely provide some inspiration for the project-based learning with multimedia course I'm revising.
YouTube - A Shared Culture
Introduction to Creative Commons explaining how CC licenses benefit content creators who want to share their work with the world. Includes an overview of the differences between licenses.
The Bamboo Project Blog: Deconstructing the Work Literacy Learning Event
Michele Martin debriefs the experience of teaching the Work Literacy online course via Ning. Several things they did were very successful. Ning was a good platform, even though it's intended as a social networking tool rather than a CMS. Explicitly saying that different levels of participation were acceptable meant that lurkers felt comfortable dipping in and out as legitimate perispheral participants. Was the course a success? It sounds like they all learned from the experience; to me, that means it's a success even if some aspects didn't work as they hoped.
What would Dr. Seuss Say about Online Communities?
5 minute presentation on slideshare with tips for guiding online communities
Harold Jarche » Selecting Social Network Platforms
Describes several smaller social network platforms with some pluses and minuses, including Ning, Grou.ps, Buddy Press, and Elgg.
Facilitating online communities - WikiEducator
Course from Wikieducator on communication and community for online facilitators. Offered as a formal course with a facilitator or informal participation at your own pace.
Online Tutoring e-Book 6 - Culture and Ethics - Facilitating Online Learning
Although this is written specifically for online tutors, much of the information and advice applies to online facilitators as well. The authors examine cultural differences in the online learning environment, including how diversity affects language, written text, images, metaphors, communication style, and online presence. Appendix B is a chart comparing different linguistic groups and cultures.
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- Is it easier to work across cultures free from visuals cues, which tap into our prejudices?
- Is it harder without visual cues so that we miss sensitive cultural cues?
- Just how do we maximise the diversity and respect for cultures while tutoring online?
Some of the key questions revolve around how culture is, or is not, experienced online:
- Is it easier to work across cultures free from visuals cues, which tap into our prejudices?
An Inclusive Approach to Online Learning Environments: Models and Resources (PDF)
22-page article on designing for diversity in online learning. Examines how cultural differences can affect learning and shares culturally inclusive instructional design models. Table 1 on page 6 compares high-context and low-context learning (such as how formal student-teacher relationships are).
90-9-1 Theory - Wiki Patterns
Wiki Patterns explanation of participation in a wiki with the 90-9-1 theory. This includes some of the statistics of participation for Wikipedia and other community sites.
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The 90-9-1 theory explains the percentage of a wiki's participation, breaking it down as readers being the highest percent, with minor contributors composing the 9 percent and enthusiastic and active contributors composing 1 percent of the total participants in a wiki.
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While it is impossible to overcome this type of human behaviour, it is possible to change the participation distribution (i.e 80-16-4 where 80% are lurkers, 16% contribute a little and 4% contribute the most).
Sage Advice on Wiki Adoption: Keys to Success
Best practices for wiki adoption in organizations:
* Start with what you already do
* Don't mandate--let it grow naturally
* Invite Senior Leadership
* Find the Champions
* Practice what you preach
A List Apart: Articles: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow
One of the founders of Flickr writes about building online community. One of his big points is that if you create too many hard and fast rules, people are less creative and open to conversation. It's better to build community by providing spaces for people to negotiate the guidelines for themselves as much as possible.
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The sculpture demonstrated a fascinating idea: given fewer rules, people actually behaved in more creative, co-operative, and collaborative (or competitive, as the case may be) ways.
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Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.
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