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Themes
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Community Tools
Network Improvement Tools:
Beyond Interest Groups
How can technology better enable individuals to find each other online and
collaborate around mutual interests, skills, and needs? What social processes in
online forums result in successful collaborative learning? Network Improvement Tools
facilitate establishing social places in cyberspace, helping to support activities
for the functioning of communities of interest. Socializing is important for building
trust in teaching and mentoring relationships both face-to-face and online. Virtual
places can provide diverse activities in which teachers, mentors, and learners get to
know one another in deeper ways than text alone effectively supports. For example,
participation in online communities offers a unique opportunity for teachers to expand
their set of peers and to gain a sense of connection with a practicing community of
educators, scientists, and education researchers. The interactions involved in shared
learning are more extensive and subtle than the typical tools for sharing information
among interest groups. Tools are needed to foster long-term, supportive, structured
relationships, not just casual exchange of tidbits or much less passively received
"push" media.
Graphically-oriented multi-user virtual environments that originated in the gaming
world (MUDs, MOOs) have been the basis of many adaptations for learning purposes, such
as SRI's first version of Tapped In, an online
environment for teacher professional development launched in 1995. Virtual-world-building
companies (e.g., http://activeworlds.com/) provide
3D graphical social places in which people around the world represent themselves with
"avatars" and interact at a distance. K-14 learning and education has only recently been
focusing seriously on such 3D environments (e.g., Chris Dede's Harvard work on
Museum-Related Multimedia and Virtual Environments for Teaching and Learning Science
[http://graphics.gmu.edu/muves/], Amy
Bruckman's Georgia Tech work on AquaMOOSE 3D
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/aquamoose/],
Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantis [http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/],
and William Winn's Seattle work on virtual reality for education
[http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/learning_center/pf/]).
On another front, research and commercial developments in community-based or social
filtering technology harness the collective knowledge of all of a website's users to
make predictions about preferences for each individual visiting the site. These social
filtering tools use profiling information explicitly supplied by participants or make
inferences from patterns in their behaviors in order to make recommendations concerning
resources others "like them" have found useful (e.g., the GroupLens technology used in
Amazon.com's recommendation system for books, NetFlix film recommender). Might these
tools prove extensible from interest groups to learning groups? Finally, the development
of metadata systems used to code online learning materials for re-usability in different
contexts by international standards-setting consortia (e.g., IMS, SCORM) and federal
interagency groups is a promising approach for instructional developers to work toward
the use of metadata systems that will help link teachers and learners to the subject matter
content that they need.
The Community Tools theme team sponsored a wide range of Network Improvement Tools seed
projects. The Knowledge Mining project developed a web-based, asynchronous
communication tool to collect and synthesize the best thinking of a community. In a project
on Interoperability among Knowledge-Building Environments (KBEs), researchers
developed an XML markup language designed to enable data sharing between environments,
with the goal of understanding better the design space of KBEs, to share software tools,
and to archive data for analysis. The seed grant Defining the Next Generation of
Online Teacher Learning brought together a diverse group of experts to reflect on
their current practice and set directions for the future of the field. The Learning
Sciences Research Group launched an interactive website that is being used to
coordinate online and face -to-face communication among early career researchers in the
learning sciences, with the goal of better coupling advances in the field of learning
sciences with improved quality of educational practices. The Research Circle
project developed a model for community building and collaborative work among researchers,
based on the well-established model of Learning Circles
(www.iearn.org/circles) for supporting project-based
student learning.
Also related to network improvement technology is the theme team's own investigation
of online teacher professional development. Central to this project was CILT's empirical
study of how the Tapped In environment was used by
a group of educators interested in a particular pedagogical approach to student inquiry on
the Internet. Results of this research were published in several conference presentations,
journal articles, and a book chapter in the edited Cambridge University Press volume,
Designing for Virtual Community in the Service of Learning. The project also
sponsored a face-to-face and online collaborative writing process among the authors of
this volume, with the aim of producing a more conceptually integrated book than might have
otherwise been the case.
Seed grants and related work:
Knowledge Mining
Interoperability among
Knowledge-Building Environments
Defining the Next
Generation of Online Teacher Learning
The Learning Sciences Research Group
http://crlt.indiana.edu/lsrgroup/
Research Circle: Online Learning and Teaching
Designing for Virtual Community in the Service of Learning
[forthcoming from Cambridge University Press]
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