Facebook or fail-book: Exploring “community” in a virtual community of practice (original) (raw)
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Communities of Practice and Virtual Learning Communities – An Exploratory Study
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The use of new information and communication tools such as; Web 2.0, social networks, wikis, blogs continues to grow for learning in higher education. More and more instructors worldwide have already started incorporating these tools for their course delivery and pedagogy. The growing literature suggests that virtual communities of practice (CoPs) and virtual learning communities (VLCs) are becoming common for collaboration and sharing resources due to the emergence of Web 2.0 tools and other social networks within higher education institutions. This exploratory study examines the existence of such communities of practice or learning communities in higher education particularly among business school instructors. The data is collected through phone and e-mail interviews with academic staff. The preliminary findings suggest that business schools professors have still not become part of CoPs and VLCs
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An intimate community of learners: Strange as it may sound, one instructor after another notes the surprisingly close relationships that they have developed with their online students. They say that it is common for participants in online courses to develop a strong sense of community that enhances the learning process.”
Journal of e-learning and knowledge society, 2018
The pervasiveness of technology is affecting also the education field, so it is possible to evaluate whether technology can foster collaboration among students or improve the learning outcomes. A community of practice online is the subject of the present study, it represents a kind of blended learning which is defined as the integration of classroom face-to-face learning with online learning experiences with the objective to increase students’ engagement and motivation. A recent experience of blended learning education has been carried out by four Italian Universities and in the present research study we have implemented social network analysis technique in order to observe online interactions of students, thus describing the nodes that exert the most influence in the group and to evaluate if the online interactions can positively affect the learning process. As result we can state that the outcomes of social network analysis are
Virtual Social Networks for Cooperative Learning: an EduCamp Experience.pdf
Virtual Social Networks have increasingly become integrated into the lives of college students, as means of communication and recreation. Because of this, their mastery of these technologies has the potential to be used as a tool for the acquisition of other skills, as demonstrated by the EduCamp workshop designed by the University of Buenos Aires: a knowledge sharing activity in which participants learned from each other. This research project had the objective of replicating this workshop with the Faculty of Education students of the Autonomous University of Yucatán, to determine if their knowledge of the use of virtual social networks could be used for the digital learning of other web 2.0 technologies. Results were positive, with participants acquiring skills related to the use of cloud-based services and web based reference and citation tools.
Analysis of a Learning Community as a Social Network
Online knowledge-sharing communities are usually small. In this paper, we present the challenge of analyzing a large online community in order to determine if it is feasible for knowledge-sharing. We deploy social network techniques to analyze patterns of interactions critical to information-and knowledge-sharing among learners in a virtual community. Based on this, we determine the characteristics of the network and the roles of the actors. The research was carried out at the Faculty of Information Technologies in Mostar (FIT), after the end of the 2007/8 academic year, during which 293 freshmen were enrolled. We collected data from the FIT Community Server (FITCS), for the period from 1.10.2007 until 30.9.2008, and modeled them into three networks (N, N1 and N2). Network N (overall communication) has 273 vertices, N1 has 143 (fall semester course in Programming), and N2 has 99 (summer semester course in Programming). With regard to the number of enrolled freshmen, we estimate that 85 to 90% communicated via FITCS. The characteristics of the analyzed networks are as follows: density varied from 0.17 to 0.25, average distance from 1.80 to 1.93, cohesion from 0.53 to 0.63, betweenness varied from 7.83 for N to 56.23 for N1, and closeness varied from 52.66 to 56.78. The results for the characteristics of selected actors are degree (ranging from 10 to 119), betweenness (ranging from 0 to 88.17), and closeness (ranging from 16.93 to 60.62). The results of this research show that some educators do not have a proper roles in the online knowledge-sharing community, but that can be due to the fact that the actors are freshmen. On the other hand, some of the most successful students, with extrovert personalities, were the stars of the three analyzed networks. Therefore, we can conclude that the analyzed part of FITCS is a knowledge-sharing community. Recommendations are that we should motivate educators to support online knowledge-sharing, that we should educate educators about their proper role in such a community, and that we should motivate successful students with introvert personalities to be more active in knowledge-sharing.
Virtual Learning Communities in Higher Education
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This chapter will examine the virtual classroom as a social constructivist educational space and identify whether and how a virtual ‘learning community’ emerges in different telecollaborative environments. A qualitative analysis of e-mails, field notes of in-class discussions, as well as a subsequent survey with open-ended questions have shown that virtual learning communities do materialize when certain preconditions are met, such as embedding virtual elements into face-to-face learning environments, sufficient monitoring by staff and the design of suitable learning environments that bring about multiple perspectives with the help of stimulating prompts and adequate tasks. For intercultural virtual learning communities, an important feature of foreign language instruction at higher education level, several success factors were identified, including a genuine interest in and commitment to the task and collaborators at hand, the willingness to engage in a discourse structure that res...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
Networked Learning Communities (NLCs) are complex systems made up of course users with a shared purpose: achieving learning goals. When these communities and the online courses they take part in are supported by Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), studying interactional patterns and the communication structure of the community is a real challenge for researchers as VLEs do not usually provide relational data. Researchers thus have to (1) produce this type of data while building the corpora they wish to analyse, and (2) resort to specific methodologies to analyse the corpora built. One such methodology is Social Network Analysis (SNA), an emerging methodology in the study of NLCs as it offers various measures and modelling tools for the analysis of relational patterns within a group. In this chapter, we show how powerful this method is through a case study on interactional competence development in English as a second language through an online course. Indeed, the sociometric analysis of the corpus built highlighted the influence of the communication tool used on the interactional load and configuration of interactions, and demonstrated the extent to which telecollaboration was successful depending on the tool used. More general conclusions are also drawn on the invaluable contribution of SNA in the study of NLCs.
Facebook as a learning space: An analysis from a community of practice perspective
This study investigates the potential of Facebook as a medium and process for teachers' learning about mathematical and pedagogical knowledge. Participants (n=117) responses towards four inter-related posts regarding division-of-fractions were captured and systematically analysed to gain insight about the participants' engagement. The results suggest the potential of Facebook to support informal teachers' learning. This was evidenced by the existence of the three main elements of a community of practice (CoP): mutual engagement; negotiated joint enterprise; and development of a shared repertoire.
Virtual Communities in an Online English Language Learning Forum
This study aims to shed light on the prospect of MyLinE (Malaysia Online Resources for Learning in English) as a platform for development of virtual communities of practice. Students discussion threads (DTs) in Lounge were explored to answer the following questions: (1) Are the discussion threads task-oriented? What are the tasks?; (2) What social structure patterns can be found from the discussion threads?; and (3) What are the shared resources that emerge from the interaction between participants? This study adopted a descriptive approach of document analysis whereby its main goal is to provide a detailed description of the patterns that emerged from the data. Specifically, interactional analysis was conducted to provide answers on the emergence of community. In addition, depth thread measure of 6-levels was also adopted to determine the quality of interaction. The findings of this study accentuated three features: (1) task-orientedness, (2) social structure patterns and (3) shared resources. Based on the interactional analysis done on DTs, six speech acts were also identified which indicated conversational exchanges between the participants. From the data, two types of discussion patterns were identified. The first was an intensive discussion that took place in a short period, and the second pattern identified was a discussion that stretched over a long period with long gaps between posts. From the data, participants were found to share three resources, which are (1) a shared idea of politeness, (2) a shared manner of expressing opinion and (3) shared manner of supporting opinion by using personal experience. Keywords: virtual community, community of practice, online interactions
Learning communities: theory and practice of leveraging social media for learning
Managing and Designing Online Courses in Ubiquitous Learning Environments, 2020
The purpose of this chapter is to present the similarities and differences of three learning communities: communities of practice (CoPs), professional learning communities (PLCs), and professional learning networks (PLNs). For this purpose, researchers adopted a qualitative phenomenological approach and interviews with three connected educators and content area experts were conducted regarding their views, perceptions, and experiences of the various learning communities and how technology (specifically Twitter) is used as part of their learning in an open community. Additionally, the interviews helped explain the current practices in community development and support, the evolution from a lurker to a contributor to a community leader, and the evolution from a community to a network.