At the AERA conference in NYC last week, Dr. Roy Pea spoke as the Keynote speaker for the Technology as an Agent for Change in Teaching and Learning (TACTL) Special Interest Group. I was very interested in attending for a few reasons. First, we have already read Roy Pea’s “Distributed Intelligence” in class and I wanted to meet the author. Also, the title of his presentation “Learning Environments Transformed” caught my attention and seemed very interesting. Although it was nice shaking his hand and introducing myself after his presentation, I enjoyed listening to his ideas the most.In the presentation, Pea discussed the properties of emerging learning environments. They are 1. fast growing as part of a participatory culture, 2. created as Software as a Service (SaaS), 3. social networks, 4. search engines, 5. gaming worlds, and 6. pervasive (i.e. ubiquitous) and mobile. He also discussed an initiative that he helped put together for the National Science Foundation. The initiative entitled “Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future: A Vision and Research Agenda” (CELF) was created to find out where we need to be (as educators) in this new web 2.0 rich world. You can find the CELF initiative at http://www.cra.org/reports/cyberinfrastructure.pdf. In the next few paragraphs, I want to discuss a few of the words in the Chapter entitled “Communities of Learning” and relate it to CI 597.”Cyberinfrastructure will make it possible for students in school settings to be more directly engaged with life beyond the classroom, and to observe and interact with communities of professionals and others who develop products and results that matter, both within and outside of their communities.”This is already evident in our class’ use of Twitter outside of the classroom walls. At the TLT Symposium, our class met with a community of professionals. Twitter will enable us to stay in touch with these professionals and learn more from them long after the symposium.”Virtual communities of learning can help address many of the issues raised about the need to retain qualified and talented teachers and support them in their professional practice. They can provide personal support as well as access to professionally interesting conversations and resources; connections to practicing scientists and education researchers; and more opportunities for advancement than the local context often can offer.”Online communities are available that allow teachers to share resources. Along with social networks and blogs, these online communities also provide easy access to conversations with others in their field. Our class blogs and podcasts have created many conversations that would have never happened if we kept those conversations inside the classroom walls.I am providing the end of the Chapter below in the hope that it will help foster future research questions for anyone reading this. I am interested in a few of the challenges and providing some research in the future to address them. Specifically, I am interested in providing research for the challenge of community and member feedback.”CELF research challenges include: Managing the need for large-scale, robust production systems upon which practitioners can rely and researchers can do research, coupled with the ongoing need for innovative experiments. Developing shared standards and specifications to enable the collection and analysis of data about communities of learning. Understanding and planning for educating teacher practitioners to use Cyberinfrastructure for learning collaboratively and across groups. Understanding the affordances of the virtual context for individuals and groups to develop multiple competencies and various senses of belonging that they and others can manage to construct, and adapt the learning environments to their needs. Understanding how social capital influences the participation of different types of learners and, in turn, how various forms of participation impact learning. Identifying and learning to assess criteria for engagement and success within communities of learning. Integrating across different forms of assessment data, such as interviews and observation, discourse and conversation analysis, log analysis, and performance evaluations. Developing effective community feedback mechanisms for “reading” member engagement and perspectives and facilitating various forms of decision making. Understanding how access, availability, and ubiquity affect the development of Communities of Learners enabled by CELF. Understanding how pedagogical content knowledge and related principles should influence the design of infrastructures to support communities of learning. Understanding how to support cross-project collaboration and fertilization. Understanding how Cyberinfrastructure can bridge projects both within and across traditional disciplines. Understanding how projects move from pilots to large-scale efforts and from grant-funded to sustainable. Understanding the global nature of Cyberinfrastructure. Although the Internet and much of industry are already internationally oriented, education in the United States is remarkably parochial. Cyberinfrastructure can help bridge learners across countries (pilots, and small-scale individual efforts) and make it possible (time zones notwithstanding) for class projects to consist of team members worldwide, and to bring in experts from around the world.”
REBECCA WEST BURNS says
The Pligg site was the first step in expanding CI597C’s classroom walls, but I really feel that Twitter has been the true community catalyst. I feel more connected to members in this class than I have felt in other courses. However, I know their identity from their online identities. At the Symposium, I had to ask people what their names were. I knew them online but had yet been able to put a face to their name. This thought really made me think about identity and the importance of a name in it. I feel a blog entry coming on…