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ENT Gallery: Developing a Community of Practice
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| Sustained Community |
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Plimoth Plantation wanted to build a collaborative community of museum, classroom and university educators to assist them in developing their Online Learning Center. Taking the online course, Teaching to Standards with New Technologies, would provide them with an online structured learning environment where the community could "meet" with fewer time and coordinating constraints than a face-to-face group. Plimoth hoped these benefits would translate into a vibrant community that could be sustained once the online course was complete.
The group of teachers and Plimoth educators experienced a collegial atmosphere in an initial face-to-face meeting and several others during the course. This helped them to communicate with one another fairly easily when they moved online and into the threaded discussion boards. As online curriculum design began, however, differences in educational perspectives were magnified as the classroom teachers felt they could not presume to know historical information while museum educators felt the teachers were the true experts in curriculum development.
Both the teachers and the museum staff were wary of posting their ideas in the permanent, public forum of the online threaded-discussion board or the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool (CCDT). When participants did post curricular thoughts and ideas online, some became frustrated when other participants did not respond with feedback. If a participant had not posted in some time, some members of the group interpreted this as indicating a lack of commitment to the project. In face-to-face interactions, commitment was apparent, perspectives were easily clarified, half-formed ideas could be offered, clarified, debated, and feedback was immediate. The online course has proven useful for other educators whose geographical distance precludes actual meetings, but it was a less compelling substitute for the personal interaction the Plimoth group preferred.
Though the entire group did not sustain their online community after the course was finished, project facilitator MaryBeth Kinkead and museum educator Kim VanWormer formed a sustained relationship as they continued to work on the design for classroom use. It became clear that the trust and understanding needed among participants to collaboratively design online takes time to develop. While trust and social bonds seem to develop implicitly in face-to-face meetings, they need to be made more explicit online in order for collaborative work to proceed. After VanWormer developed this level of trust and understanding about her collaboration with Kinkead, she began to appreciate the advantages of online communication forums, e.g., widespread access and easy management of jointly created materials.
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