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Building a Learning Community Palloff and Pratt recommend seven basic steps for building a successful learning community. These include: clearly defining the purpose of the community, creating a distinctive gathering place for the group, promoting effective leadership from within, defining norms and a clear code of conduct, allowing for a range of member roles, allowing for and facilitating of subgroups, and allowing members to resolve their own disputes. The authors caution that it is possible to develop a community that has strong social connections between the students, but where very little learning actually takes place. Thus, it is important that the instructor be actively engaged in the process and encourages students who stray from the learning goals of the course. Specifically, the authors recommend: (1) engaging students with subject matter, (2) accounting for attendance and participation, (3) working with students who do not participate, (4) understanding the signs of when a student is in trouble, and (5) building online communities that accommodate personal interaction. Indicators of a Successful Learning Community You can tell if the learning community is working when you see: active interaction, sharing of resources among students, collaborative learning evidenced by comments directed primarily student to student rather than student to instructor, socially constructed meaning evidenced by agreement or questioning, with the intent to achieve agreement on issues of meaning, and expressions of support and encouragement exchanged between students, as well as willingness to critically evaluate the work of others. Finally, they suggest that the keys to successful learning communities are honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness, and empowerment. Palloff, R.M. & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

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Mindomo: Premium versions of this mind mapping tool come at a cost, but you can get access to the basic version for free. It allows you to add links, pictures and text to mind maps and share them over the net.

Moodle: Post and share podcasts with an interactive online community using Moodle. You can not only post your own podcasts but get access to those of others that could provide educational value to you.

Put your notes or classroom information into an audio format with these handy apps.

Judy has it exactly right--we have to rethink what we do when we move a course online. When radio first moved to television, TV shows were merely radio broadcasts with motion pictures. It took a while for TV to figure out what it did best. It's going to take us some time as well.

Are LMSs helping to improve education or are the current offerings so inflexible that it actually hinders teaching? What are people doing with LMSs that they can't do in an in-person classroom?

By ICT Mindtools I refer to ICT tools that necessarily engage users in higher order thinking.  Students cannot use Mindtools without thinking deeply about the task at hand.  Mindtools require students to be creative and to think and make connections for themselves.