Group items tagged

Think of a professor bringing a newspaper to class, carrying a report about the very subject under discussion. How can this be utilized practically? Faculty members can pick a Web service (Google News, Facebook, Twitter) and search themselves, sharing results; or students can run such queries themselves.

A second emergent field concerns social media literacy. An increasing amount of important communication occurs through Web 2.0 services.

Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?

And so we can think of the CMS. What is it best used for? We have said little about its integration with campus information systems, but these are critical for class (not learning) management, from attendance to grading. Web 2.0 has yet to replace this function. So imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.

It is important to note that not one of these elements are about creating predetermined outcomes. Hmmm....Is this what we want in a community for learning? What about our learning objectives? What about our project goals?

Whether we're talking about designing communities for learning or designing communities of practice, the design goal centers on adaptability, on an awareness that things that last (or have value) have the ability to evolve as our aims evolve.

The value members get from a community is what drives a community. People need to see how their participation will translate into something useful.

Drawing from his work with sports teams, jazz combos, and business organizations, Sawyer (2008) identified 10 key conditions that enable dynamic expertise and ultimately group flow (adapted from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990): A shared goal, Close or deep listening to each other, Complete concentration, Being in control of the group's actions and environment, Blending of individual egos, Equal participation, Member's familiarity with each other, Constant communication, Elaboration of each other's ideas, and Frequent failure and learning from frequent failure.

Wenger noted that a learning community cannot be completely engineered by expertise. He said a strong, working learning community is a lot like falling in love. It starts as a budding relationship and it builds with time, engagement, commitment, trust, recognition, respect, emotional availability. When these elements are missing, the community falls out of love and the relationship of its members dissolves. However, he suggested a learning community can be built top-down by management to support the worker bees. He also noted that when a learning community is over-engineered, either by participants or management, it can be absolutely meaningless and soul-crushing to its members.

According to Wenger (1998), learning within a community of practitioners is about helping each other accomplish tasks, share challenges, passions, and interests. In this sense, managing a learning community is a matter of keeping members motivated, interacting regularly, and creating conditions that allow members to learn from and with one another to improve their ability to do what they do.

It's more than about the technology, tools, tactics; it's about a combination of strategies, tools, and the habits of mind associated with shared innovation.

It can be done well and not so well; hence the need for shared goals, clear rules of participation, a solid strategy, and the right tools for the right purpose.

Given the economical, technological, sociological, historical changes taking place all around us, educational institutions have been slow to adapt. These changes have led to ubiquitous access to information and ubiquitous communication. Combined, these two trends lead to new understandings of how people learn and work that, in turn, leads to new ways of thinking about community. Research suggests that real innovation comes when we take the technology for granted. Yet, many of today's educational institutions still see technology as a new innovation, a disruptive innovation (Bowers & Christensen, 1995), thus learning institutions by and large are still a few years off from real innovation. When we examine the idea of communities for learning, instead of focusing on tactics to bring about meaningful growth and change, we need to better define our strategies--we need to know where we want to go, talk openly about them, reflect on them, refine them, and test them out. Creating meaningful communities for practice is an iterative process. Designers can help foster change by designing communities for learning that recognize the key conditions that allow for creativity and innovation to happen. Designers can also help communities for learning by helping community leaders develop rules for engagement that allow for strong, meaningful exchange and reflection.

Researchers warned that “various online learning implementation practices may have differing effectiveness for K–12 learners than they do for older students,” which seems plausible.

The word education, after all, comes from the Latin educare, which means, “to lead out.” I.e., think Socrates. Anyone can absorb information from a book or video, but good teachers will always be necessary to draw out that knowledge and help students develop the skills needed to think critically about the information they consume. In other words, online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied. The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.

It comes down to knowing how to best use the tools at your disposal to maximize the impact of education for students, which has always been what separates good teachers from bad ones. The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.

Teachers will certainly need to adapt in order to use new tools and methods, but that’s nothing new. Online education may never completely replace face-to-face learning, though as the Department of Education study shows, with enough time and under the guidance of a good teacher, online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning. Online learning is likely to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning in the future, however, and in communities where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, online learning is an adequate stand-in.