This week, what I have got to my pocket from Renninger and Shumar's texts are all moving around the concepts of knowledge building communities, scaffolding and social networking. I really liked the articulation of communities of practice: "Not merely peers exchanging ideas around the water cooler, sharing and benefiting from each other's expertise, but colleagues committed to jointly develop better practices (Brown and Gray, 1995)".."Learning is viewed as a social activity that occurs as newcomers and journeymen move through and established communities' professional hierarchy toward expertise (Lave&Wegner, 1991; Brown&Duguid, 1996; Wenger, 1998)". It seems that providing and sharing vast variety of resources is not enough for an effective learning community, instead, there is a need to create something out of the resources, generate ideas, apply knowledge, etc. The learners get resources, think critically on them, reflect upon them and do some type of application, then they can construct knowledge..And learning occurs..In that process collaboration, networking and guidance have important role. Learners should find social and technical support whenever they need. TappedIn uses several ways to scaffold the community members. Help desk, After School Online discussions, MeetMe mailing list are some of the services that has been provided. Similarly, WISE(Web-Based Integrated Science Environment) has many strategies to support the community members in the virtual environment. Those strategies include providing networks of personal relationships to help resource exchange, providing inquiry map as an activity guideline, the NetCourse and evidence pages, etc. (Especially "WISE Learning Communities" chapter provides great tips and guidelines to design effective virtual communities).
Social Networking is another interesting thing to think about. If collaboration is essential, social networking system has be an important design consideration. How to move the knowledge in the community? How to connect people to each other? I'd like to give an example of an excellent online tool which provides a very effective knowledge distribution. Some of you might know the free online bookmarking tool "delicious" which lets the users bookmark their favorite websites and tag them. As the users tag their websites, they not only categorize their resources, but also have chance to view the websites of other people with the same tag. So, a user can reach other people's collection of websites, too. Isn't it great? It is such a big network of people and resources! And it is not random or complicated. Everything is tagged! In virtual learning environments, the needs of the community should be analyzed and the most appropriate tools should be used to transfer the information as well as to stay connected with the other people in the community.
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Ipek,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the bookmarking tool, "Delicious". I haven't used it and didn't know about it. Having an opportunity to view the websites of other people is a good opportunity to enlarge/expand our own websites.
Sometimes I get frustrated in trying to help K-12 teachers see the benefits of student collaboration and interaction. Many are still using a strict dissemination model, and/or believe all student work should be individual and private - not done in collaboration, discussed, or shared. Just a year or two ago, if I used the term "social network" or said "we need something like Facebook" teachers would have gasped and said I was wacko. That attitude seems to be changing (slowly). But the funny thing is that sometimes the older teachers "get it" more than the younger teachers do. Maybe because the younger teachers have only used these media formats for social chit chat?
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