Group items tagged

This resource ties social media and communities of practice together, discussing how social media can create a "more dynamic" type of community. We need to focus on the context of the community to find the best tools for the community to use to develop knowledge and skills together. Social media can create a better flow of discussion and engages more of the members with the ease of access and ability to share resources quickly and easily.

This article explains the positive impact and value that social media adds to communities of practice. And it explained the many factors to consider when using social media as part of a community of practice.

This is one of my favorite sites, www.edutopia.org, and I thought this was a nice intro article to social networking in education.

While short and simple, this gives a powerful punch! By using strong language like "scary" and "criminal" it says teachers (and parents, I might add) need to show kids how to tell their own story wisely. If we block social media tools out, students will not learn!

Jaime, I like the term coined here, academic networking. It fits very nicely with the Connectivism Learning Theory.

In a different twist, this article discusses personal learning environments as a part of activity theory. This theory encompasses connectivism, but also adds in other elements such as rules and division of labor. The paper goes on to analyze the parts of a personal learning enviornment which include the person and the tool being used.

Summary: This article examines the distinguishing features of PLEs. The authors assert that PLEs are complex activity systems; therefore, they want to prove that key elements of PLEs can be described using Activity Theory. Section 2.3 provides a nice overview on Activity Theory, while section 4 reflects their findings. To read the article click the MSWord link. I appreciate the fact that they include diagrams and charts -- these make the article user-friendly.

The article examines two frameworks for understanding and building communities of practice.

In particular, I liked the graphic, C4P Framework, as it illustrates how the community works.

Summary: This paper/study is about using technology to transform communities of practice into knowledge- building communities. The paper goes in depth on how they believe knowledge is created. The paper then goes into the ways that technology provides a value add for learning. I thought that this paper was an interesting take on communities of practice.

I stumbled across the video that a former student created that shows the differences of CoPs, Connectivism, and PLEs. What is cool is that the author uses only pictures, music, and written text to define them - no dialogue.

I watched this because it was made by a former student. It was nice because it was different - the no words was a nice touch. I wasn't really a fan of all the images and I think they only made sense because I am watching this last. If I watched this first, I am not sure I would be much wiser. Not a criticism of the video per se, just didn't do a lot to further my rather limited knowledge. Sorry Matt! ;-)

I watched the video and now need to go improve my presentation. The student did a great job of finding images that exemplified the topic. Even knowing this was for module 2, I kept waiting for words, not because I didn't get the message but I think people (teachers and students alike) are just so used to having words to rely on.

This shows how communities of practice is defined, explains the process of how they've created and what they look like. Further explanation into how they can be applied in a wide variety of environments. The application part discusses how specifically it can exist within education both internally and externally. For EDTECH students, web communities of practice enable us to " extend the reach of our interactions beyond the geographical limitations of traditional communities."

I forgot to add my summary! This is an excellent source that fully explains what a Community of Practice is and how it can be applied. "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." I particularly liked the section about what CoPs actually look like. This is a must have resource for every EdTech student.

The author lists three "must-haves" to be considered a community of practice: the domain - shared interest, the community - learn from each other, the practice - share a repertoire of resources. Communities of practice fall back to learning theories. The term community of practice refers to a living curriculum. The concept is being applied in organizations, government, education, associations, social sector, international development, and the web.

This video was really helpful. The only thing that has changed is Desmos is not available as an add-on to Google Drive. I had to go to the Desmos webpage but everything else worked well. This will come in handy as I create more project-based lessons.

This browser based polling system can be embedded inside a Google Slide with the PollEv.com Chrome Add-on. Students can use almost any device with access to the internet to answer questions during a presentation. The data is projected immediately on the Google Slide as students answer.

In this article, Ravenscroft adds to the conversation surrounding connectivism by focusing on dialogue. Ravesncroft argues that connectivism can benefit from social constructivist perspectives.

This blog post by Tom Whitby explains what a connected educator is and is not. Whitby discusses that way that educators can connect through social media and who they connect with is very crucial. He continues by discussing that being a connected educator is not an add-on, it is a necessity. We need to have digitally-literate educators to be able to teach digitally-literate student.

I really enjoyed reading this post, and it helped validate the reason I sought my Master's degree in Educational Technology. It is so important for educators to stay connected for their own professional development, and to enrich the instruction given to their students. When teachers connect with other teachers and use PLN's it benefits everyone involved, including the students.

It so true. Educators are finally arriving a pedagogy that reinforces the digital tools already available and provides a theoretical framework for all those teachers who resist technology or say that it isn't for them.

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This is an excellent overview of what communities of practice are, the characteristics that define them and some examples of what they "look" like. Gives great information to those new to the idea.

I really enjoyed the author's writing style which included metaphors and lots of examples and non-examples of COP. I noticed this blog post was 2006, and so I was curious what the author had been involved with since this post, especially since he points out the importance of sustained interaction. He now has a consulting business to help problem solve education solutions found at http://wenger-trayner.com/

Excellent resource to begin to understand CoP's. Etienne Wenger was cited in many of the articles I researched.

This article explains why communities of practice are so important for the business realm. In one statement it explained that companies have now figured out that "knowledge = power, so share and it multiplies". This idea is synonymous with connectivism and the idea that in order to gain more knowledge more connections must be made through sharing, collaborating, creating, etc. This article also made the distinction between tacit knowledge that is rooted in people's life experiences with explicit knowledge that is deliberately shared outside of people. This distinction also helped me to really see the reason why connectivism, PLNs and CoPs work so well together. You have a group of people, connected by common interests and goals, that are expanding upon their knowledge by sharing their own collective experiences and goals in effort to connect with others that can share insight, collaborate with and add to their ideas, solutions and questions.

Allee uses the term organizational intelligence to describe how CoPs are becoming more prevalent in the modern workforce. He talks about how he has consulted with various multinational companies to help them create CoPs and to get employees at various levels to share their expertise.

David Warlick discusses the advantages and uses of new social media technologies as key components of growing PLNs. He focuses on synchronous, semi-synchronous, and asynchronous platforms. Asynchronous platforms allow us to domesticate the information landscape as opposed to hunting and gathering pieces of information. "Learners become amplifiers as they engage in reflective and knowledge building activities, connect and reconnect what they learn, add value to existing knowledge and ideas, and then re-issue them back into the network to be captured by others through their PLN."

Read and Write for google is a free app that you can add on to your chrome. It will read web pages for you. It works great for my students with learning disabilities.

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work-in the web browser itself. It has an awesome add-on for Firefox that helps stay organized and cite references.

This website was a fantastic resource for me this week when learning how to create interactive slides. This is a great element to add to any PowerPoint presentation to get the students involved. Creating links on the slides to travel through the questions in the correct order takes some time to organize in your head but once it is created, it is awesome!