Group items tagged

Cassie- This is a really neat resource in which actual data has been accumulated and presented for teachers and their use of a social networking website. It was interesting to look at the numbers behind the ten educators that they chose and see them present some other general findings. I think the "Benefits" section towards the end of the article hits the goals of any social network precisely: 1) Access to Resources, 2)Supportive Relationships, 3)Increased Leadership Capacity, and 4)Development of a Professional Vision. IF you get into these tools to become a better educator, then I feel those are four visions that you set out to fill by utilizing the networking/technology.

This is a great resource to use to support the research behind using Twitter as an educator. I think the title of the article says it all. As the only social studies on my campus, I have learned to reach out to other teachers using social media. The end of the article brings up some interesting points regarding professional development and Twitter. Research says that teachers need more than just a "one stop shop" when it comes to any professional development, and that they need time to reflect, question, and practice. I would argue that Twitter allows for exactly that. Having a community of teachers to come back to in order to reflect on a teaching experience and/or ask for support provides a safe place to do just that.

Cassie, this was a very interesting research article that presented actual statistics and information on how teachers utilize social media, specifically Twitter. It was very informative and discussed the uses of twitter beyond just being a social outlet.

This was indeed an interesting research project. It was nice to see that there were so many collaborations that were spawned through Twitter connections. Most of the teachers said they were able to exchange information or resources at a professional level, but I was surprised by how many continued the conversation at a social level also.

I feel like this resource has a lot of valuable information. I am very interested in learning to use Twitter as a form of PLN using Twitter and this resource seems to show the value in that. In addition, I liked the research study approach to this article.

This is a fascinating article! I was really inspired by at as I'm finding myself becoming more interested in making sure my social media connections are there to provide professional development (while mixing in some personal). As we become more tech centered, I can see there being value in collaborating online and learning through a variety of avenues, rather than sitting in a common area. I think this article can also be emphasized for student learning as we encourage them to learn and find connections to the content outside of the classroom.

This was an awesome article about professional use of social media. I think that it is really interesting to talk about how fewer teachers are attending face to face conferences and are instead replacing those with the use of the internet and social media!

Interestingly, I've found that in my field, Twitter has become a way to supplement the conference experience. Those who can't afford to attend are encouraged to follow along with what's happening (live) using session-specific hashtags. I can see librarian conferences eventually going by the wayside, and I'm not certain that I would be upset about that!

The article analyses Connectivism by comparing it with past learning theories to evaluate what it has to offer that is new.

This chapter by Hoadley breaks down a community of practice (CoP) and explains the theory behind it as well as well as its history. An interesting piece of the chapter compares a CoP to other groups and how each works a bit differently. It was also interesting to read about how technology is used in successful CoPs.

I learned the feature-based as well as the process based definition of communities of practice. I also learned how we can support a community of practice. It was valuable to learn how technology ties into communities of practices in the form or presentation or communication abilities, integration in content and context, etc. The article mentioned C4P framework, which encouraged me to take a deeper look at the C4P framework.

This is an exhaustive article that covers the definition and history of COPs, thoughts on how to sustain COPs, and ideas on how technology can support and enhance COPs in the 21st century. It is practical, useful, and interesting. While I found it to be perhaps a little too detailed, it was nonetheless a good article.

The concept of communities of practice has been used as both a theory to explain how learning occurs, and a "metaphor for how instruction should take place." From an anthropological view, knowledge is not completely contained within individuals, but is more often found in groups/communities. Knowledge can be "sticky" or "leaky". "Sticky" knowledge is difficult to disseminate, perhaps because it is highly technical, or because the target audience does not absorb it. "Leaky" knowledge is knowledge (like trade secrets) the disseminates despite efforts to keep it secret. Knowledge involves practice in context. One way we learn with situational learning is by peripheral, or tangential, participation. Learners should be allowed to "lurk" before participating, much as beginner social media users do. A knowledge building community and a community are practice are not the same thing. A knowledge-building community seeks to learn and build knowledge, while a community of practice wants to improve some type of work function. The learning may be the same, but the goals are different. Forced knowledge-building communities may never read the stage of community of practice depending on the level of connectedness and peripheral participation. Technology can facilitate communication and collaboration for CoPs.

This explains what a Community of Practice is, it goes into two definitions, features-based and process-based. It also discusses how communities of practice and technology often go hand-in-hand and how this has changed and developed over time.

This chapter provides an overview and history of communities of practice. There is a nice description of the theoretical assumptions underlying its development. The differences of communities of practice and other knowledge communities are explained thoroughly. There is an appreciation for how technology plays a role in today's communities of practice, how it can support it and how it is not less effective than face to face communication. It is explained that the key to a successful community of practice is "connections, conversations, content, and information context."

Christopher Hoadley explains CoPs, focusing on definition and practice. Essentially, Hoadley illustrates that CoPs are informal yet highly connected, constructivist in nature, and supported by technology like social media. He states that technology supports communities of practice by "linking people with similar interests, providing a shared repository of resources, directly supporting communication, and providing awareness of various resources within the information context" (Jonassen & Land, 2012). Additionally, he goes on to express that individual learning fails when it comes to application but that group learning often creates deeper, more meaningful understanding especially when built upon authentic situations.

This article gives two separate definitions for communities of practice, a feature based definition and a process based definition. Between the two it explains how learning through practice can be more beneficial than following a manual or example. It also states how participation is important as well as being viewed as a member of the community of practice. The article then goes into explaining how technology has played a positive role in communities and has helped with communication to allow a community of practice to function even better.

In the opening section it describes the community of practice as being different from the typical teacher development model because it reaches "beyond individuals and toward alignment". This confused me at first, because it seemed to oppose the other information about communities of practice. I had seen a community of practice as a way for individuals to find what they need. However, as I read on, I realized that it was referring to the fact that teachers are now linked to one another and can work together to find coherence and best practices.

As an English teacher I can see the value of the example in this brief. The English department gets together and reflects on similar commenting styles for students to revise papers. They study which commenting helped the best after students turned in their revised copies. My English department just had to do this type of collaboration, but we were analyzing introduction paragraphs written by students and how we could improve teaching this. Unfortunately it was one of those times that were "mandated from the top down" as the brief mentions. Our collaboration was not voluntary and our department is not cohesive. I liked this idea of creating a community of practice with my department, but I am not sure how to get everyone on board Think of the power a CoP would make if it were campus wide, cross-curricular.

A research brief produced by the National Council of Teachers of English, this publication focuses on three aspects of a successful community of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. Although the phrasing is different, the central concepts are similar to other reports on this topic. It does, however, also break down the needs of institutional support as a necessary condition for these communities to thrive.

The national Council of Teachers of English reviewed Communities of Practice as they worked to develop better feedback for student writing. Successful Communities of Practice have been shown to be beneficial provided that specific characteristics are in place, including a common goal. Both face to face CoPs and online CoPs need these specific elements. What sets communities of practice apart from other professional development models is their reach beyond individuals and toward alignment

I found this article or brief by the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) helpful in that it gave context to how teaching organizations view of the communities practice theory. The article paints a picture of how schools try to use the theory as a framework for collaboration. I appreciated how it presented the goals of COPs in schools with some possible pitfalls. The main takeaway being that COPs are less successful when they are implemented "from the top down". It still drives home the reality however that COPs do need an organizational structure and good leadership, but that connections and shared vision are still the cornerstones of COP's. The article was published in 2011 and appears to be preparing it's readers for the wave of new media. It references blogs as emerging COPs and drives home point that online communities, while not face-to-face, still need strong leadership and organizational structure to be successful. It ends by providing questions to consider when trying to form COPs.

Re: The main takeaway is that COPs are less successful when they are implemented "from the top down". I agree with this statement, The most successful CoP that I have been involved in were initiated within the district, but the administration was not overseeing the work being done. This freedom allowed for a more relaxed and teacher supported group. The department was kept in close communication, however, as some time to open our community funds were necessary and therefore it was important to have an advocate.

Thanks for adding this - I really enjoyed it. I like his comment that professional development is now the responsibility of the educator through PLNs than the institution. Also the comment "we really do want to be found by strangers online now." People don't learn just from their face-to-face worlds any more. I am going to download his TED book.

I like what he says about learning being constant in this internet age; with PLN's we are always learning. When we choose the right people to follow we are getting a wealth of knowledge everyday. We see what others are doing and get advice about what we are doing. "Learning is moving away from the institution and more to the individual." Educators and leaders need to support this change by "modeling" and "facilitating." This is exciting, how do we sell our leaders on this?

This article is an outstanding review by Mark K. Smith of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's theories of social learning through communities of practice. It gives a great overview of the theoretical foundations as well as additional explanations of those theories.

This article outlines the theory and practice of communities of practice, and discusses the idea that learning is social and comes from of our experience of participating in daily life. The authors identify a variety of types of CoPs that all humans are engaged in, even if they are not formally identified as such. A CoP is defined along three dimensions: what it is about, how it functions, and what capabilities/resources it has produced. Also emphasized are the importance of the relationships formed between the people within the CoPs - hence, the community in CoP. Stemming from that, they extend the idea of CoPs to apply to the classroom culture and environment and discuss the need for educators to cultivate a similar idea to best facilitate learning among their students.

The point that I learned from this article is that communities of practice go beyond the acquisition of knowledge and skill. They build relationships where people within the community work together to share their skills, knowledge, and interests they have learned in order to complete new or more complex tasks. We learn best through active participation.

Articles like this one make it clear that we are actively involved in communities of practice every day, without even realizing it. This is largely due to the internet; now, if one needs to reach out to another person for advice on baking, for example, one can use online forums or message boards to connect to others in their community of practice. This was not possible before the internet, or at the very least it was difficult to accomplish so easily. I'm interested to learn a little more about what COPs might have looked like before the internet.

Learning is social and takes place by participating in daily life. Learning takes place situationally in communities of practice. These communities of practice exist all around us: home, work, school, etc. As we pursue our goals within our groups, learning occurs. Members off s community of practice (CoP) are united by common activities and by what they learn through participating in those activities. A community of practice is defined by three factors, "what it is about," "how it functions," and "what capability it has produced." For a community of practice to be effective, it needs to "generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories." There also need to be resources like documents, tools, procedures, and a shared vocabulary. The the developers of this theory, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, focused on the kinds of "social engagement" that caused learning to take place. People join groups and initially learn from the periphery. Eventually, they become more proficient through their participation as they move toward the center of the group. The situation in which the learning occurs has a significant effect on the learning.

After reading through this article, I kept coming back to this quote: "Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social relationships - situations of co-participation." These are ideas I try to integrate into my classroom on a day-to-day basis because healthy social relationships can enhance learning experiences due to students becoming vested in goals. Students are more willing to put their feet outside of the box, without fear of sharing and participating in these learning environments---and they become active inside members of these groups, rather than outside onlookers.

This article explains the basic idea of personal learning networks, especially related to e-Learning. The author makes the argument that the education system needs to adapt the ideas behind personal learning networks in order to be successful in the future.

This article discusses the important trends in personal learning environments. It talks of its importance in life long learning, informal learning, the impact of different learning styles and how technology is playing a huge role in our education today,

This is paper written back in 2007 about PLNs. The author argues that PLN are the future of elearning because of the power they have to offer individualized learning and give the learner the opportunity to organize his/her own learning. That educational institutions cannot expect to simply recreate the same forms of learning used in tradition education online. rather that we must learn to adapt to the new and emerging technologies of ubiquitous computing and social software. Considering that this article was written 9 years ago, I found it to be extremely accurate and representative of PLNs today.

The article looks at personal learning environments and discusses the possibility that some form of PLE will be needed as part of the future of learning. It also discusses the need for changes in education to accommodate PLEs as current teaching methodology is out of date with how current students wish to learn.

This article pushes for a change in learning through Personal Learning Environments. This article recognizes that PLEs help to foster lifelong learning though providing multiple tools and resources to support the learning. It is argued that this learning does not have to be a formal, institutional learning, but can be informal which adapts for different styles of learning. A very interesting aspect of the article to me is the addressing of assessment and how the learning that has taken place through the PLE would be assessed. This primarily explains that evidence could be shown through artifacts and possibly an e-Portfolio. It later goes on to explain what a PLE would look like which include a copious amount of tools that one uses daily for learning. These tools primarily would be comprised of what is called social software connecting collaborators. The important take away from this article is that a PLE is not a tool to be implemented, but instead an approach for the use of a web of tools for learning and sharing creating a bridge between the learner and the world outside.

@kcastello Thanks for the article! I particularly like the distinction you made between PLEs as an approach, not a tool.

This site explains in plain terms communities of practice. For example, it explains that a community of practice is not just a club. It is a group of people who are committed to a certain domain of interest.

This was a concise, but well written overview of the definition of communities of practice.

Communities of practice are used across a variety of groups of people. According to Etienne Wenger, there are three characteristics that constitute a community of practice: domain, community, and practice. Communities of practice exist on small local scales, to worldwide networks. This allows people to share and obtain knowledge about common practices with others who are actively engaged in the same domain.

Allows the reader to determine the general guidelines to what a community of practice is. Cites examples ranging from artists seeking transformation to surgeons trying to discover new methods. The article is very simple, yet effective in describing a community of practice.

by Etienne Wenger CoPs are formed by people who are engaged and interested in common domains. These can be done in many domains as long as there is an underlying interest. CoPs provide a new way to learn from one another in a safe environment. All members take responsibility with their members to access knowledge while sharing new ideas.

In this article, Wenger provides a quick overview of what a Community of Practice is. I like how she discusses the three components of a CoP and gives an example of what is not considered a CoP in each component. She addresses that just because something is a community, doesn't make it a Community of Practice. She also discusses where the concept of a CoP is being applied. It is helpful to see that it is being applied in many different fields including: education, government, organizational design, and businesses.

This website, from the National Center for Dissemination of Disabilities Research, identifies 3 characteristics of strong communities of practice: the domain, the community, and the practice. It briefly identifies what makes COPs unique and identifies specific applications. There are additional links in the sidebar that provide more information about COPs and prompts for further research.

This article gives an overview as to what communities of practice CoP are. It describes the characteristics of CoP: domain, community, and practice. The article stresses that CoP are not just like-minded people, but they are where people can interact with others to learn with and from others. CoP rely on active participation. Sharing and learning are at the heart of CoP.

Provides a good, crisp explanation of CoP. This is more of a recap, but sometimes saying something in another way helps to get the point across better. What I particularly liked about this one is that it emphasizes how these communities interact based on a passion that they'd like to learn more about or to improve skills.

This article discusses communities of practice in a very understandable, clear way. It describes communities of practice as individuals working together in collaboration with a common goal, or passion, in mind. I feel that one of the most vital parts of my job as an educator is to collaborate with other teachers about best practices to use in the classroom. It was fun to read this informative article!

This is a great overview of Communities of Practice. I appreciate that it distinguishes between a community and a community of practice because "not every community is a community of practice." I also appreciate that it gives where the concept can be applied.

The article provides a definition of communities of practice and gives examples of these communities. It also gives the three "crucial" characteristics of communities of practice.

Wenger's excerpt focuses on a crucial aspect of CoPs - the difference between a community and a CoP. Wenger outlines the three characteristics of a CoP and the role each plays in executing a CoP. (1) The domain in a CoP is not just a group of people. It is a network of people with similar interests and commitment to the growth of that interest. (2) A community engages, shares, and collaborates in order to learn from one another. (3) The practice of a CoP involves creation. The members act as "practitioners" that develop and share over time and through continuous interaction.

This article discusses how the community of practice is a shared domain between its members or those who engage in the community. It also says not all communities are all communities of practice. To explain that, it lists the three important parts that help show it is a community of practice. It states those parts are the domain, the community, and the practice. With that, it explains that all three should be developed within the community itself.

The author of this article explains that a community of practice is more than just a community. Communities of practice have to have three elements. The three elements are the domain, the community, and the practice. The domain is a shared interest. The community is people engaging in joint activities and discussions while helping each other and sharing information. The practice is the members of practice are practitioners. Communities of practice are being applied in business, organizational design, government, education, etc. Communities of practice have become a learning system throughout the entire world. They help practitioners take responsibility for managing knowledge, create a direct link between learning and performance, and create connections without formal structures.

Kayden, what a great site and explanation of communities of practice. I particularly like the distinct description of what a community of practice is including what it is not!

This site gives an outline of three factors that make a community one of practice vs. a non-specific group of people. The domain, community, and practice all combine to create a community of practice. The site then goes to explain where the concept of a community of practice is applied furthering the idea of "practice," as well as why they are catching on in workplaces and organizations.

An introduction to and application for communities of practice.

This quote from the article: "A Personal Learning Network can be seen as one's gateway to continuous learning" is a true statement. Continuous learning is vital in life. This article has some remarkable points that make PLNs so important and an easier way to gain knowledge.

I think this article illustrated a number of valid points. This day and age only thrives with the means of PLN's. When we look in the past back to the 80's and 90's, it is very evident how we've evolved as a society. Back then, it was almost unheard of to have practical means of communication among those across the nation and across the world. We are so fortunate for the advancements of modern technology and networking.

This article built a strong case for belonging to a Personal Learning Network. It is imperative to keep up with today's resources and knowledge base. The small amount of time I used to build my PLN has proven to be so beneficial. I appreciated the final thoughts of the article to help guide me throughout this process. I am excited to strengthen my PLN and grow professionally this semester and beyond.

This article makes a case as to why Personal Learning Networks are an important part of continuing education. She describes this age as one of constant influx and change and therefore encourages people to use their PLN's to tackle new practices with a sense of creativity and innovation.

This is a great article to pass on to educators who want to know why a PLN is necessary and how connectivist theory makes it possible. Connectivism facilitates continuous learning, exchange of thoughts, and validates insights. Establishing networks allow teachers to tailor a professional development plan, and it doesn't need to take place at the faculty meeting or on teacher work days.

This elaborates on how chaos theory relates to all this, something I didn't really understand until I read this particular article. Additionally, it gives you an idea about the skills required in order to build a proper PLN... Here's a telling quote from the article... "In short, the concept of teams working shoulder to shoulder every day, literally and metaphorically standing by each other, talking over problems and challenges at their desks, is slowly being replaced by virtual teams who interact via social tools and platforms, use Webex for meetings, and update each other via enterprise social networks and WhatsApp. This is why the skill of being able to build one's Personal Learning Network is essential. It's time for everyone to take charge of their own professional development. One of the ways to keep on top of our game, and remain on the cutting edge of relevant skills and knowledge, is to be a part of communities of practices and to focus on building and maintaining our Personal Learning Networks with a deliberate intention to learn, share, and collaborate."

I really like this article. It is always good to read about the "why" behind our practices. The article explains that "A Personal Learning Network can be seen as one's gateway to continuous learning." This reminds me of the thinking behind connectivism, that connecting to a network of resources and people will help us become lifelong learners as we continuously connect to new resources and knowledge.