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

Learning architectures and negotiation of meaning in European trade unions

As networked learning becomes familiar at all levels and in all sectors of education, cross-fertilisation of innovative methods can usefully inform the lifelong learning agenda. Development of the pedagogical architectures and social processes, which afford learning, is a major challenge for educators as they strive to address the varied needs of a wide range of learners. One area in which this challenge is taken very seriously is that of trade unions, where recent large-scale projects have aimed to address many of these issues at a European level. This paper describes one such project, which targeted not only online courses, but also the wider political potential of virtual communities of practice. By analysing findings in relation to Wengers learning architecture, the paper investigates further the relationships between communities of practice and communities of learners in the trade union context. The findings suggest that a focus on these relationships rather than on the technologies that support them should inform future developments

Novos paradigmas na educacão online com a aprendizagem aberta

This paper aims to discuss important concepts related to online education which bring a new educational paradigm: open learning through free learning materials and technologies. In this context, we present the OpenLearn Project – virtual environment based on the platform Moodle with educational resources developed by the Open University. The purpose of the OpenLean project is widening participation through digital inclusion and free access to higher education learning. The OpenLearn offers not only course contents, but also new technologies integrated for collective construction of knowledge such as: the software tool Compendium and the web application for video conference Flashmeeting. In the end, we highlight some important actions to facilitate interactivity and co-authorship for learning communities

The Emergence of an Online Learning Community in the EFL Context

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of an application of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) technologies on learning community emergence and students' identity construction in the EFL context. To this end, a web-based course management system called Moodle was used in a general English class at a college. Adopting a sociocultural approach, we had a qualitative examination of the data obtained from students' online discussions. Through the lens of Wenger's (1998) notion of Communities of Practice, we found that learners' online activities facilitated the formation of an online learning community, in which learners constructed their identities. Specifically, with the deepening of the online negotiation, the participants expanded their identities from &#34;we&#34; as students confined in an inconvenient town to &#34;we&#34; as members in the other overlapping communities of the broader context. Thus, they reached a new level of understanding and developed a new sense of self in the community.</p

Fascist Aspirants:Fascist Forge and Ideological Learning in the Extreme Right Online Milieu

Learning in extremist settings is often treated as operational, with little regard to how aspiring participants in extremist settings engage with complex and abstract ideological material. This paper examines learning in the context of the amorphous network of digital channels that compose the extreme-right online milieu. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis, we explore how well the prevailing model of extremist ideological learning (in ‘communities of practice’) accounts for the behaviour of aspiring participants of Fascist Forge, a now-defunct extreme-right web forum. The findings suggest that some of the social aspects of communities of practice have been replicated in the online setting of Fascist Forge. However, for a combination of technical and ideological reasons, the more directed and nurturing aspects of learning have not. Several issues are raised about the role of ideological learning in online communities, notably the open accessibility of extremist material, the lack of ideological control leading to potential mutation and innovation by self-learners, and the role of digital learning in the preparation, shaping and recruitment of individuals for real world organising and activism

Developing Learning Communities in Fully Online Spaces: Positioning the Fully Online Learning Community Model

The Fully Online Learning Community (FOLC), developed at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), is a social-constructivist model, addressing a paradigm shift in employment skills, and supporting key elements of transformational learning. Adopting a Problem-based Learning (PBL) approach to activity design, FOLC has served as basis for both undergraduate and graduate, fully online degree programs for almost a decade. In this time, it has demonstrated its ability to facilitate richly collaborative, socially cohesive, and constructively critical, learning communities supported by a flexible array of synchronous and asynchronous digital affordances. FOLC represents a “divergent fork” of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) design to foreground the synergistic dynamics of social and cognitive presence, the role of professional educators as co- learners, the community-oriented nature of knowledge construction, the mediating role of digital competence and open technologies in fully online learning, and the transformational potential of democratized communication and assessment practices. Having positioned FOLC conceptually, a developing research agenda, aimed at grounding the FOLC on a broader body of empirical data, is presented. The underlying argument is that rich, transformative learning communities can be established in fully online programs, and these communities can have a significant democratizing effect on participants and the broader social context