Virtual communities and professional learning across a distributed remote membership

Headteachers, or Principals, of schools work in isolation from each other yet share common practice and domain of leadership and management. They exhibit the characteristics of a community of practice yet are remote from other members of their community. Similar communities of practice can be identified for other types of school leaders, subject co-ordinators for example, and for professionals in other disciplines – consultant registrars in health, optometrists working in dispensing opticians, museum curators, and so on. This paper explores ways of using virtual communities to develop professional learning in these communities of practice. We discuss our work in the context of education and formal and informal learning communities of school leaders and explore how the lessons learnt have general application. We present a model for professional learning through online collaboration and communication, and look, in particular, at the concept of time and its effects in the virtual community

Ubiquitous computing and knowledge management

MOBIlearn is a large European research project to develop a mobile learning system to facilitate formal, non formal and informal learning. The project has two primary objectives: • Develop a methodology for creating mobile learning scenarios and producing learning objects to implement them. • Develop the technology to deliver the learning objects to users via mobile computing devices. This paper will concentrate the MOBIlearn health care domain. One of this applications main objectives is managing and sharing of tacit knowledge. Using the system participants discuss case studies and alternative approaches to specific problems are evaluated and documented. This is then used and extended in future case studies. In a mobile learning environment, individual health workers can use the system to either advanced their skills, or in a ‘live’ incident, use it for reference and indeed call for backup.</p

Learning to assess in higher education: a collaborative exploration of the interplay of 'formal' and 'informal' learning in the academic workplace

During 2005 to 2010 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) were funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). As the name suggests, the aim of the CETL initiative was to reward and develop expertise in teaching and learning linked to particular areas of excellence. The CETL where the authors of this paper worked focused on developing Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices (McDowell et al., 2008). The paper discusses the findings from three research projects undertaken at the CETL which can be grouped under the broad theme of the exploration of assessment practices and academic development.However, while we are all interested in the ways academics learn to assess, the disciplinary/research backgrounds and theoretical assumptions we bring to our respective projects are quite different. Hodkinson and Macleod (2010) discuss conceptualisations of learning by referring to metaphors which are commonly used ‘when learning is thought about’ (p.174): learning as acquisition, as participation, as construction, as formation and as becoming. They argue that each metaphor assumes particular approaches to understanding and researching learning, and this also applies to the projects drawn on for this paper. The projects which have generated the data considered in this paper are, on the one hand, underpinned and informed by different conceptualisations of learning, bodies of literature and methodologies. On the other hand, the institutional context within which the data were collected and the data collection methods, i.e. semi-structured interviews, are the same. This paper also explores the benefits and challenges of working collaboratively on HE research questions from different theoretical perspectives. We would like to argue that that using data generated by all three projects is a legitimate, albeit unusual, way of advancing our understanding of learning in the academic workplace since it allows us to focus on the interface between informal and formal learning rather than discussing one type of learning at the expense of the other

Real‐time interactive social environments: A review of BT's generic learning platform

Online learning in particular and lifelong learning in general require a learning platform that makes sense both pedagogically and commercially. This paper sets out to describe what we mean by generic, learning and platform. The technical requirements are described, and various trials that test the technical, educational and commercial nature of the platform are described Finally, the future developments planned for the Real‐time Interactive Social Environments (RISE) are discusse

A Microservice Infrastructure for Distributed Communities of Practice

Non-formal learning in Communities of Practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today’s knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically towards CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or even develop a software ecosystem to support their activities. In this paper, we describe a distributed, microservice-based Web infrastructure for non-formal learning in CoPs. It mitigates the need for central infrastructures, coordination or facilitation and takes into account the constant change of these communities. As a real use case, we implement an inquiry-based learning application on-top of our infrastructure. Our evaluation results indicate the usefulness of this learning application, which shows promise for future work in the domain of community-hosted, microservice-based Web infrastructures for learning outside of formal settings

Identifying communities of practice: analysing ontologies as networks to support community recognition

Communities of practice are seen as increasingly important for creating, sharing and applying organisational knowledge. Yet their informal nature makes them difficult to identify and manage. In this paper we set out ONTOCOPI, a system that applies ontology-based network analysis techniques to target the problem of identifying such communities