Year: 2002
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The use of online communities for professional learning is an emerging field, particularly in education in the UK.This paper reports findings from ULTRALAB's experience with online learning communities with the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) in the online elements of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) learning programmes and the Talking Heads informal communities for headteachers (principals).In this work we explore some of the issues arising from our preliminary research and analyse some of the different contexts in building such online learning communities.Such issues that are emerging include developing participation, promoting supportive yet challenging tutoring/facilitation, structuring learning opportunities, connecting formal and informal learning, overcoming isolation, and progressing the boundaries of community knowledge. Models for online learning communitiesOur view is in line with Salmon's (2002) analysis, that it is the community model that seems to us to offer the most potential as a vehicle for professional learning in the immediate future.We are influenced by the social theory of learning put forward by Lave and Wenger (Lave and Wenger 1993, and Wenger 1998) who develop a particular view of situated learning through the lens of an 'apprenticeship' model.For Lave and Wenger, learning is seen as an "inseparable aspect of social practice" (Lave and Wenger 1991) between a community of practitioners sharing a common set of practices developed around a tightly defined domain.A key distinction between this and other theories of learning is that it moves away from the focus on cognitive processes and conceptual structures and instead focuses on developing the "distributed intelligence" (Brown, 1998) of that community.We believe, however, that constituting online learning communities exclusively as a group of practitioners, risks promoting a conservative approach to professional development as there is no explicit mechanism for taking forward the learning of communities beyond that which community members contribute themselves.To address this issue, we have pioneered the 'hotseat' as a mechanism to bring together both practitioners and those involved in enquiry and research.Learners in our communities are professionals -serving teachers and school leaders.Our view is based on that of Eraut (1994) that their learning comes from making the tacit professional experience-based knowledge explicit.We do this through providing opportunity for interaction to allow learners to be scaffolded (Vygotsky, 1978) and through reflection-on-action (Schön, 1983, Eraut 1994).The use of online community also provides a means of addressing Knowles' (1984) model of successful andragogical learning.This model states that adults learn best when learning is:
Authors: Peter Bradshaw, SJ Powell, Ian Terrell
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3082162984