Online Learning Communities

1. Online Learning Communities Common ground and critical differences in designing technical environments By Margaret Riel and Linda Polin

2. Underlying assumptions Assumption: Group learning requires 1. intentional activity, 2. collective reflection, and 3. participatory decision making. Learning requires social activity and engaging in involvement in the active manipulation and experimentation with ideas and artifacts in authentic contexts. Intellectual development is a process of negotiation of meaning with others during every day practice.

3. Terms for defining learning communities Proposed three distinct, overlapping forms of learning communities: 1. Task-based, 2. practice based, and 3. knowledge based Overarching construct: Learning Organization – Structure used to create a system of interchange between different communities to support cross-community development.

4. Three forms of learning communities

5. What is community? Multigenerational group of people, at work or play, whose identities are defined in large part by the roles they play and the relationships they share in that group activity. Group cohesion stems from joint construction of a culture based on behavioral norms, routines, rules, and sense of shared purpose.

6. What is a learning community? Must be intentionally designed to support learning and includes four different dimensions: 1. Membership 2. Task features/learning goals 3. Participation structures 4. Reproduction and growth mechanisms

7. Task-based learning communities Groups are organized around a task and members only work for a set period of time. Comparable to corporate working groups. Goal is to use communal diversity to achieve deeper understanding of issues, find solutions, or complete a task that would be beyond an individual’s capabilities. Allows for brief but intense interactions in which an individual identifies strongly with the task, partners, and supporting organization. Product is generally a static, inert report.

8. Practice-based communities These are larger groups with shared goals that provide members richly contextualized and supported arenas for learning. Focus is on the evolution, preservation, and reproduction of the common or shared understandings of the group. Knowledge is shaped as a consequence of modifying practice. Product comes in the form of both reified and participatory knowledge.

9. Knowledge-based communities Shares some features with communities of practice, but focuses on the formal production of external knowledge about practice. Knowledge is to be recorded and shared, but separated from its immediate use or context. Product is dynamic, living documents for the purpose of allowing reuse and revision.

10. Designing technical environments for support of communities of learning Summary: Include tools that serve the goals of each community. Ex. If the goal is to build collective knowledge, then provide a tool that allows for archiving past knowledge for future use. Design of Learning Organizations should include tools to improve communication among the different communities.

11. Questions What do you have to say about all this?

12. Discussion questions Do you agree with the fundamental contention that this is the best way to organize and discuss these concepts? How else might it be structured if not by their end purpose or goal? The authors contend that teachers are isolated. Is this a premise that is defensible?

13. More discussion The authors assume that all the communities are strengthened by the activities and interactions with other communities. Is this a fair assumption? Do there need to be structures in place to correct for dysfunctional systems?