Communities of Practice
From WikEd
We explore the use by faculty of an online discussion database as a vehicle for transforming knowledge previously and exclusively, privately held by individual members of an organization into a pool of public knowledge owned by the organization and freely accessible to all its members.
Learning Together, Teaching Together - Creating Community Space - explores the creation of a virtual space that enabled faculty to transform knowledge previously and privately held by individual members of an organization into a pool of public knowledge owned by the organization and freely accessible to all its members.
The Center for Distance Learning (CDL) at Empire State College has recently experimented with an online faculty development approach for assessment of student learning. The Center for Distance Learning is a learning institution that focuses on learning and teaching at a distance. Few formal structures exist within the college to provide mechanisms to transform private knowledge into community knowledge. The goal of the online Faculty Development Seminar on Assessment was to encourage course instructors to reflect on their practices when evaluating student work, whilst improving participants’ abilities to assess and document student learning. The medium used was a virtual space, in which an asynchronous online discussion database was formed to enable previously isolated online instructors to come together. The discussion, set up to assist in the professional development of faculty members, may have provided a structure to transform and add private knowledge to the public community. The use of an online discussion database also highlighted the social nature of learning. Tacit knowledge and ideas about practices, problems and possible solutions previously “owned�? exclusively by individual members of the institution were made explicit and then shifted into the public domain mediated by the discussion database.
Ostrov, Kemp and Smith will analyze their experience in the context of Empire State College as a learning organization that strives to cultivate virtual communities of practice to share and create knowledge to enhance an ability to serve students. The presenters will demonstrate the online seminar; discuss how and why it was developed; and draw some conclusions about implications for faculty development and community in the online environment.
The Center for Distance Learning serves over 4000 students each year in xxx of web-based courses that use the SLN template.
--Linzi 14:01, 6 Jan 2005 (CST)
