Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

30 – Supporting E-learning through Communities of Practice
the overall set. Expert learners are sometimes invited by
other expert learners to collaborate. In our model, the
instructor works with peer instructors as well as expert
learners in a professional organization. Again, the circles
in the drawing do not denote boundaries, but environments
used for learning community interactions. For
coursework, it might be an LMS like Moodle or WebCT,
but for a professional organization it might be a different
online space with similar tools, such as Learning-
Times.
to record any thoughts about how to solve the problem,
where everyone can see it and respond.
The last steps involve facilitating comprehensive interactions,
making sure that no one is excluded due to
issues of access or the digital divide, engaging external
expert learners and learners alike to participate, pushing
the learning community to learn as a group rather than
as individuals in the same space, and sharing knowledge
and experience with people and groups outside the
learning community.
Figure 30.3. An Online Community of Practice for Instructors
As expert learners working in the online environment,
we must make it our job to structure both the
inquiry and the collaboration around one or more
problems related to our course content. Learners can
present their findings to other learners, so the set of
problems can be distributed among the group. This is
similar to the “jigsaw” cooperative learning strategy in
which students in small groups specialize in a portion of
the total material, collaborate with students in other
small groups who have been assigned the same portion,
and then teach the rest of their own group.
The next step is to select tools within the community
environment (e.g., Moodle, LearningTimes) that would
permit this type of collaborative sharing. It is important
to start with tools that you are comfortable using yourself,
since you are part of the learning community. Remember
that the community can use a variety of tools,
though, that might not need your direct interaction. In
both Figures 30.2 and 30.3, students use email, cell
phones, chat, and other tools to communicate and share
with each other. They can use wikis, blogs, and forums
Case Study: Organizing the Small Cities Online
Research Community
The LearningTimes platform provides a range of options
for public and private designation. One option is
to set the community security so that it allows previewing,
where visitors are allowed to preview (but not post
to) the community before joining. Small Cities community
organizers decided instead to create a public, dynamic
website, which is currently under development as
part of a five-year Community University Research Alliance
Grant, called Mapping Quality of Life and the
Culture of Small Cities, or “Mapping CURA” for short.
This public website will be fed from the databases of
Small Cities. So, instead of “preview” mode, they have
set the community to “restricted” mode, which allows
people who have been invited to join by existing members
to participate immediately. However, those who
have not been invited must first be approved by the
founder or an administrator before gaining access. Their
policy is to allow anyone to join who is interested, but
they are only granted membership to the general member
group.
As well, the LearningTimes platform supports the
creation of both public and private spaces among its
members. An unlimited number of groups can be established,
with each having their own private area for file
sharing, discussion, polling, or whatever other activities
they wish to pursue. Currently, Small Cities has 17 different
groups, each with different privileges.
As of September 2006, the community had 140 members
of whom 55 were members of the Mapping CURA
group. The LearningTimes platform allows them to easily
add groups to the community and to restrict access to
areas of the community through group privileges. For
example, the major tools (Contributions, Calendar, Articles,
Discussions, Databases) each have a folder for
Mapping CURA that only members of Mapping CURA
can see and access. There are other groups that also have
their own areas set aside for their unique group interest.
The creation of these subgroups is an important means
for allowing the community to evolve naturally, rather
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