Presentation
Growing Internet-mediated Communities of Practice in Education
Bronwyn Stuckey, Wollongong University
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| Growing Internet-mediated Communities of Practice in Education |
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My research in this area began with involvement in a rather spectacular failure to develop a community in an Internet-mediated environment. The design for the project, launched in 2000, had been extensively researched and was based in what was currently known about on-line community design and needs of teachers. We were certain that that we had not let the technology design the community, but were to realize that we had totally underestimated the social components of community building.
Many teachers did come to look at the site and to explore the multimedia tutorials and resources that were offered there, but little or no contribution, sharing or collaboration was elicited from members even after the first year of the site’s operation. Something critical was missing and this realization set me off on a personal learning journey that will culminate in my presentation of my doctoral thesis and a publicly available database of IMCoP case stories (August 2004).
I have over the past three years, researched successful Internet-mediated communities of practice (IMCoPs) to understand how and under what conditions they develop. In this research 10 successful IMCoP cases were studied, half of which were communities in educational domains. Part of the research agenda was to determine whether there were special or unique requirements for IMCoPs in education.
This presentation will review some of the issues that surfaced in relation to education communities of practice and the needs of educators from such collaborative knowledge sharing and building efforts. In this paper you will hear about 5 very different educational communities of practice and what we can learn from the way they established their design, implementation and sustenance.