To learn is to know: Teaching, communities, social capital and knowledge management technologies (original) (raw)
Related papers
2004
Our chapter relates to an ongoing and continuously evolving research and development project that has as its goal the design of a socio-technical system (a technical environment and related social structures and activities) that will constitute a good model for distributed teacher professional development programs conceptualized as knowledge-building communities. We focus primarily on a part of our work that is situated within the Secondary Teacher Education Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We begin by describing the original ambitious vision for this program that we set out to implement, including its theoretical basis. Then we discuss how both our initial failures and the theoretical framework itself led us to more carefully consider how the historical and institutional contexts of such community-building efforts might influence the social processes of learning and teaching within the community. To illuminate this idea, we present a contextual analysis of the program as a prelude to an interaction analysis of a representative discourse from a group learning activity within the program. Throughout our chapter, we consider lessons learned from studies such as these and from our immersion in the experience of designing a socio-technical environment for supporting community-based teacher education. Drawing on these lessons, we describe our modified goal and the latest results of our efforts to develop an online system for structuring and supporting group learning, including the online mentoring of such learning, within teacher education programs.
Knowledge Community and Inquiry: A new pedagogical model
This chapter describes the recent evolution of the Internet into a set of socially oriented applications collectively referred to as Web 2.0, and discusses the application of these new functions for educational purposes. We suggest that to take full advantage of social, semantic, and aggregative properties of Web 2.0 the technologies must be integrated deeply into our instructional designs, which is very challenging to do. Theoretical models of pedagogical design will be required. We propose that the theoretical tradition of learning in knowledge communities may be a good source for such models and describe our own recent model, called Knowledge Community and Inquiry. Next, we present two exemplars of instructional design that adhere to the knowledge community approach, including a graduate seminar course that integrates wiki technologies and a high school biology course that integrates a content management system. We close with a discussion of the implications of such designs for learning and instruction in the 21 st century, and address next steps for educators.
Emerging Pedagogies in the Networked Knowledge Communities
Practices Integrating Social Media and Globalization
The chapter discusses networked knowledge societies, networked knowledge communities, digital technologies, and emerging pedagogies. Then, it examines the breadth and depth of Web 2.0 tools, social networking sites, and interactive cloud spaces in relation to a digitally globalized world. It further stresses how networked communities and networked societies tend to blur the traditional concept of social, cultural, linguistic, and political dichotomies. After these discussions, it explores some sites of emerging pedagogies in networked communities, especially in academic institutions, social institutions, and networked global communities. Finally, by showing some problems and concerns of digital technologies and networked knowledge communities in the context of twenty-first century cloud era, it concludes by offering some potential future directions. Overall, this chapter accentuates the process of digital collaboration, content creation, dissemination and consumption of knowledge in the networked communities, and how networked knowledge communities and technologies are impacting global epistemic shifts in the twenty-first century digital village.
From Designed to Spontaneous Technologically Enhanced Learning Communities: An Introduction
With the advent of new media, knowledge has been made accessible on an unprecedented global scale. Given information's ubiquity, questions arise regarding not only how we understand what knowledge is, but also what the responsibilities are for the society that participates in its production. Charting recent educational and social scientific efforts to scaffold learning, the chapter discusses connected learning, an emergent umbrella term that refers to how learners traverse between formal and informal settings. Through this framework, the chapter sets out to address learners' knowledge practices as they navigate between designed and spontaneous or "situated" learning. Accordingly, we identify challenges as educators seek to become agents of positive transformation in the digital age. Online information outlets are, on the one hand, agents for social reproduction and, on the other hand, agents for socioeducational change and individual advancement.
Collective intelligence and online learning communities
2011
Information society brings new forms of communication models where citizens live with multiple digital identities on nomadic online communities. These collectives are capable of interact themselves to create new forms of knowledge sharing experiences and recycling old fashioned model of information management, and thus creating learning communities through informal practices. In this paper we analyze these digital communities representing new forms of learning styles and new approaches for open knowledge as a new trend for the next decade society.
A Reference Model for Online Learning Communities
2002
Online learning communities are introduced as a comprehensive model for technology-enabled learning. We give an analysis of goals in education and the requirements to community platforms. The main contribution of the paper is a reference model for online learning communities that consists of four layers designing the organizational, interaction, channel or service and the technological model of learning communities. This reference model captures didactic goals, learning methods and learning platforms in a structured way and provides guidelines on how to design and implement a medium for learning.
This report is part of the research project on "Pedagogical Innovations in New ICT-facilitated Learning Communities" (LearnCom), 1 under an Administrative Arrangement between IPTS (IS Unit) 2 and DG Education and Culture. The aim of this study is to review and assess the new social and pedagogical approaches to learning that are emerging in new ICT-facilitated collaborative learning settings. In addition to formal education, such communities are increasingly emerging in informal and non-formal lifelong learning environments where learning is happening in a freely organised manner, bringing together learners, experts, and other parties. This study aims to examine these new learning communities in order to find innovative pedagogical and organisational practices that support lifelong learning in different settings and foster innovations in the interaction of teachers, learners and organisations. The methodological framework for the LearnCom project includes desk research on the existing literature about learning communities; 3 the present in-depth case study of 12 different types of learning communities; a validation workshop 4 in which 20 external experts discussed and provided further input to the research; and a final report. 5 This report presents the results of the in-depth study of 12 online learning communities. The case analysis examines features, impacts and outcomes of learning in ICT-facilitated learning communities, as well as factors for failure and success, highlighting what lessons can be learnt from online learning communities that could benefit education and training systems.
Learning In a Networked Society: Spontaneous and Designed Technology Enhanced Learning Communities
2019
One of the most significant developments in contemporary education is the view that knowing and understanding are anchored in cultural practices within communities. This shift coincides with technological advancements that have reoriented end-user computer interaction from individual work to communication, participation and collaboration. However, while daily interactions are increasingly engulfed in mobile and networked Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in-school learning interactions are, in comparison, technologically impoverished, creating the phenomenon known as the school-society digital disconnect. This volume argues that the theoretical and practical tools of scientists in both the social and educational sciences must be brought together in order to examine what types of interaction, knowledge construction, social organization and power structures: (a) occur spontaneously in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) communities or (b) can be created by design of TEL. This volume seeks to equip scholars and researchers within the fields of education, educational psychology, science communication, social welfare, information sciences, and instructional design, as well as practitioners and policy-makers, with empirical and theoretical insights, and evidence-based support for decisions providing learners and citizens with 21st century skills and knowledge, and supporting well-being in today’s information-based networked society.
Bridging socio-technical capital in an online learning environment
2009
This work is based on the premise that online learning environments can potentially help develop communities of scholars by enabling participants to discover persons and resources from contexts other than the original course to which they were assigned. Our software, Prometheus, is being used to support online university level education and teacher professional development under an open community model inspired by this idea. The analysis reported in this paper tests whether people who come to the online environment for instrumental objectives such as taking a course encounter persons or products of others from outside their course workspace, and also seeks to identify how the various digital media available in Prometheus support these encounters. Results show distinct roles for each of discussions, resources, user profiles, and wiki pages, and suggest ways to improve our designs.
Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning
2004
The chapters in this volume explore the theoretical, design, learning, and methodological questions with respect to designing for and researching web-based communities to support learning. The authors, coming from diverse academic backgrounds (computer science, information science, instructional systems technology, educational psychology, sociology, and anthropology), are frank in examining what we do and do not know about the processes and practices of designing communities to support learning.