Patricia Schank

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

Representational Resources for Constructing Shared Understandings in the High School Chemistry Classroom

This chapter reports on the use of representational resources within a computer-based environment, called ChemSense, to support high school chemistry students’ representational practices and their understanding of key chemical concepts. In designing ChemSense, we hypothesized that it would provide students with symbolic resources they could use to jointly construct representations of observable physical phenomena and to explain these phenomena in terms of underlying chemical entities and processes. This study examines the role that these representational resources play in supporting students’ representational practices and their emerging chemical understanding. To elucidate how ChemSense supports the development of representational practice and chemical understanding, we provide an analysis of students’ conversation while they use ChemSense in the laboratory. Our findings indicate that students use ChemSense to construct their shared understanding of chemical phenomena in a common representational space. Their representations serve as key symbolic resources in students’ collaborative efforts to generate coherent explanations of the phenomena they are investigating. On the basis of our analysis we conclude that when using representational resources as part of collaborative investigations, the nature of students’ conversation becomes more “chemical” and students deepen their understanding of the molecular nature of physical phenomena that have, as a result, become chemical.

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.

Exploring differences in online professional development seminars with the community of inquiry framework

Four sessions of two professional development seminars were offered to members of an organization. The seminars were voluntary, free of charge, and participants did not receive credit for their attendance. Participation rates and exit survey ratings for the four sessions varied. After the seminars, an analysis using the community of inquiry framework was conducted to better understand what occurred in the dialogue of the seminars to understand whether patterns of facilitator actions related to the amount of participation and exit survey ratings. The design of the seminars, the activities in the seminars, and the importance of the facilitator to plan and then help foster interaction in voluntary professional development seminars are discussed relative to the community of inquiry model.

Cyberlearning Community Report: Emerging Design Themes in US TEL

The cyberlearning community in the United States parallels EC-TEL in Europe; both research communities bring computer scientists and learning scientists together to design and study innovative learning technologies. We report on six design themes emerging across multiple US-based, NSF-funded cyberlearning projects, based on the analysis of a team of over a dozen researchers who worked together in 2016 and 2017 to create a more extensive “Cyberlearning Community Report”. This work is driving the need for new learning sciences in areas such as embodied cognition, identity, and affect, and requires advances in methods, such as multimodal analytics, and in computer science, such as in context-sensitive computing. By sharing this overview of US-based work with European colleagues at EC-TEL, we aim to foster international connections and stimulate mutual thinking about next steps in research as well as the potential to strengthen positive societal impacts.

Agile learning and collaboration: improvisational uses of group scribbles and other CSCL tools

Teachers in many countries now have access to wirelessly connected devices, but need ways to use that infrastructure to enable rich collaborative learning. Group Scribbles provides a dynamic and flexible medium that is easy to learn and enables transformative participatory learning experiences. A familiar Post-It note metaphor allows most teachers and students to learn Group Scribbles quickly and to use it to enable simple brainstorming activities without much preparation. This workshop brings together users and researchers from around the world to demonstrate Group Scribbles and other collaborative learning tools, discuss challenges of assessment and improvisational instruction, and develop design principles for producing activities that enable agile learning and collaboration in real classrooms. Through engaging brainstorming and design sessions, the workshop itself will operate as an agile classroom as participants use Group Scribbles to receive, generate, edit and transmit their own script to determine the flow and aims of the workshop.