Mark S. Schlager

Teacher Professional Development, Technology, and Communities of Practice: Are We Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

Over the past decade, education reform and teacher training projects have spent a great deal of effort to create and support sustainable, scalable online communities of education professionals. For the most part, those communities have been created in isolation from the existing local professional communities within which the teachers practice. We argue that focusing on online technology solely as a mechanism to deliver training and/or create online networks places the cart before the horse by ignoring the Internets even greater potential to help support and strengthen local communities of practice within which teachers work. In this article we seek guideposts to help education technologists understand the nature of local K-12 education communities of practice--specifically their reciprocal relationship with teacher professional development and instructional improvement interventions--as a prerequisite to designing online sociotechnical infrastructure that supports the professional growth of education professionals.

Building Virtual Communities: Evolution of an Online Education Community of Practice

[Teachers] have no time to work with or observe other teachers; they experience occasional hit-and-run workshops that are usually unconnected to their work and immediate problems of practice. [Effective professional development cannot] be adequately cultivated without the development of more substantial professional discourse and engagement in communities of practice. — Darling-Hammond & Ball (1997)

Sustaining a Community Computing Infrastructure for Online Teacher Professional Development: A Case Study of Designing Tapped In

Community computing has recently grown to become a major research area in human–computer interaction. One of the objectives of community computing is to support computer supported cooperative work among distributed collaborators working toward shared professional goals in online communities of practice. A core issue in designing and developing community computing infrastructures – the underlying socio-technical layer that supports communitarian activities – is sustainability. Many community computing initiatives fail because the underlying infrastructure does not meet end user requirements; the community is unable to maintain a critical mass of users consistently over time; it generates insufficient social capital to support significant contributions by members of the community; or, as typically happens with funded initiatives, financial and human capital resource become unavailable to further maintain the infrastructure. Based on more than nine years of design experience with Tapped In – an online community of practice for education professionals – we present a case study that discusses four design interventions that have sustained the Tapped In infrastructure and its community to date. These interventions represent broader design strategies for developing online environments for professional communities of practice.

Analyzing Online Teacher Networks: Cyber Networks Require Cyber Research Tools.

The authors argue that conceptual and methodological limitations in existing research approaches severely hamper theory building and empirical exploration of teacher learning and collaboration through cyber-enabled networks. They conclude that new frameworks, tools, and techniques are needed to understand and maximize the benefits of teacher networks. The paper presents preliminary data to illuminate both the power and limitations of current tools and techniques for studying cyber-enabled networks using data from a large, mature online network of K-12 educators. The findings raise fundamental questions that are beyond the capability of most education researchers and evaluators to address rigorously and cost-effectively. The authors propose a research agenda designed to create and validate a new generation of research tools and techniques that enable researchers ask more incisive and convergent research questions and help school leaders and teachers support, learn, and collaborate with one another more effectively in cyber-enabled professional communities.

TAPPED IN: a new on-line teacher community concept for the next generation of internet technology

K-12 education reform research suggests that new models of teacher professional development (TPD) are needed to establish and support communities of teachers engaged in school reform. We are working with several TPD organizations to develop a new on-line TPD community concept called TAPPED IN. Together, we are forging what we believe will be a self-sustaining TPD community in an on-line environment that enables us to employ existing Internet technology to study modes of collaboration embodied by next-generation commercial Internet technologies. In this paper, we present the theoretical foundations of our concept, the rationale behind the design of the TAPPED IN virtual environment, and our community-building approach.

Cornerstones for an On-line Community of Education Professionals

Mark Schlager Judith Fusco Patricia SchankSRI International333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025[schlager, schank, jfusco]@unix.sri.com http://www.tappedin.orgIn a prior issue of Technology and Society [1], McFarland argues that we shouldnot view the Internet as a superhighway, but rather as a gathering place, or

Discovery of Community Structures in a Heterogeneous Professional Online Network

Socio-technical networks that are heterogeneous in composition of actors and the media through which they interact are becoming common, but opportunities to study the emergent community structure of such networks are rare. We report a study of an international online network of educators involved in many forms of professional development and peer support, including sponsored and volunteer-driven activities taking place in both synchronous and asynchronous media, with participants from diverse career stages and occupations in education. A modularity-partitioning algorithm was applied to a directed, weighted, multimodal graph that represents associations between actors and the artifacts (chats, discussions and files) through which they interact. This analysis simultaneously detects cohesive subgroups of actors and artifacts, providing rich information about how communities are technologically embedded. Researchers deeply familiar with the network validated the interpretability of the partitions as corresponding to known activities, while also identifying new findings. The paper describes this interpretative validation, summarizes findings concerning the distribution and nature of communities and groups found within the larger heterogeneous network, and discusses open research questions and implications for practitioners.

An approach for designing virtual environment training systems

We have developed a set of analytic tools to identify and develop virtual environment (VE) simulation training applications. Task selection criteria help identify tasks that might benefit from VE training; VE requirements matrices are used to derive VE training systemrequirements; and cost-effectiveness factors are used to judge the relative merits of VE and other training delivery technologies. The tools have been applied successfully in aircraft and space maintenance domains, and work is in progress to extend them to nuclear power plant maintenance.