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ENT Gallery: Developing a Community of Practice
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| Online Tools |
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Plimoth Plantation's Online Learning Center was to be a virtual learning environment where geographically dispersed educators from different institutions could form a networked community to share ideas, challenges, and resources. By participating in the online course, Teaching to Standards with New Technologies, and using the resources in the Education with New Technologies website, the Plimoth group gained first hand experience in technology-mediated collaboration.
During the course, participants communicated in threaded electronic discussion forums (shown to the right) about their readings and other assignments. They also worked together on designing a curriculum unit within an interactive online workspace in the Education with New Technologies website. This Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool (CCDT) is structured around the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework and includes its own message board where members of a design team can communicate.
Although the original proposal called for recruiting teachers who were technologically proficient, all but one of the participating teachers had no experience learning online. Breakdowns in their Internet connections, along with major time pressures from other commitments, contributed to the teachers' discomfort with online learning. Although they began to communicate with each other in the threaded discussion area during the introductory stages of the online course, they were reluctant to use the online CCDT. Most of the museum staff and school teachers preferred meeting face-to-face, or communicating by phone calls or private e-mail for conversations about curriculum design rather than the more public and permanent forums of the online threaded discussion and the CCDT.
The online course offered tools that allowed the Plimoth group to completely design the curriculum online, but members of the group did not feel ready to do so. When undertaking such a project, participants' individual levels of technological proficiency and preferences for communication must be taken into account. Participants must individually wrestle with moving from oral to written, private to public, and expository to reflective forms of communication. To reach the point where a group is ready to design collaboratively in an online environment requires time and persistence: varied means of communication, including face-to-face meetings, phone calls and private e-mails may be necessary to prepare participants to collaborate comfortably online in designing curriculum.
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