10.19.07
Comunità di apprendimento/Learning community?
Ostwald (1996) defined a community of practice as
“A group of practitioners involved in a common activity, albeit performing different
roles. Essential characteristics of communities of practice are: 1) they are not defined by
organizational mandate (e.g., the “org chart”), but rather by the ways people actually
work together, 2) they involve many different roles, as opposed to a flat structure, and 3)
they experience an ongoing flux of community members, who enter the community from
the periphery and gain status as knowledgeable members through participation in the
community of practice.”
Koohang & Harman
541
Members of a community of practice have 1) the freedom to participate, 2) the freedom to join or
to leave the group, and 3) they have an interest in the creation or sharing of knowledge (Baily &
Hendrickson, 2004; Davenport & Prusak, 1998)
Karen said,
Ottobre 21, 2007 at 17:37
It is interesting that this section of the reading is under the category of “decentralization improves scalability.” Scalability appears to be one of the problems that we are experiencing in this class. Some possible solutions might be 1) limit the number of participants per class section (which seems to me to be a good idea for all online classes) and 2) distribute the role of mentoring over many people.
This seems to me what wikis and blogs in education are all about — having conversations with many diverse people and benefiting more from those than from direction from a single “teacher.”
Alessandro said,
Ottobre 21, 2007 at 17:54
This is a good consideration. The number of participant in this course is perhaps large (60), but in my actual classes I have 30 students and I can interact with them directly and personally. Otherwise, when I was in the University, the classes had over 100 students, and the teacher(s) didn’t have a personal approach to each student, unless we went to them and talked personally. But when I was in the Uni there wasn’t internet and no social network and nobody used email… or almost nobody…
Thus I believe that this course is a good opportunity to grasp our (mine at least) cognivite gap between what we / I expect from a course and a teacher, and how we / I relate to it (the course, the teacher, the task).
When I studied at Uni I (and my friends) used to read books, discuss together about the topics, then go to the teacher for an oral exam or write down a paper and get it read from the teacher for a later evalutaion.
What is different in this course?
Can I/we make a scheme of how i/we learn and are accostumed to get feedback and find out what is really the problem now?
Do you understand me?
I think this one answer could be also a good answer for the week 8, because there is no learning object or open content that is really usable outside of a context - and a context is always made by people.
“The format itself doesn’t affetc pedagogical aspects” (found in the paper about sustainabilty.
This is my answer to week 8, mr Wiley.