Learning Communities
We might define community as a social organization created by people who share common goals, values, and practices. If you try to apply this description to the city or town in which you live, you might find it excessively idealistic. We likely would agree that most cities and towns fail miserably in meeting this standard. But a functional community can be any collection of people who have identified themselves with a set of goals, values, and practices. Our interests are in understanding how such communities are formed and in using these mechanisms to build learning communities.
Communities come together when some form of search process acquaints people who share goals, values, and practices and this group begins to act on its members’ common interests. School-based learning communities are formed when teachers and students join together to work on long-term projects. The idea is to select authentic and challenging tasks that can be productively approached in a collaborative fashion. The social environment surrounding the project encourages learners of all ages to learn from and teach one another. The task goals of the project shape what knowledge and skills must be acquired, and the nature of authentic tasks usually requires that the learning experiences cross-disciplinary boundaries (Gordin, Gomez, Pea, & Fishman, 1997).
Educators do not have to limit themselves to learning communities formed within school walls. Some have argued, in fact, that schools have become distanced physically, emotionally, and intellectually from the core of our traditional communities (Riel, 1997). Students have few experiences directly connecting what they learn with the world outside the school. Moreover, by focusing on the learning needs of citizens of a narrow age range, schools fail to support lifelong learning. For these reasons, many educators are beginning to create work-based learning communities, which allow students to participate in the practices of a discipline or profession.
Educators need their own learning community and technology has allowed drastic changes in how you can go about doing making such connections. Educators and other professionals often attend regional or national conferences to spend time interacting and making connections with others who share similar interests. Now, we also interact and keep current using online social tools. We follow or share podcasts, blog posts, and Twitter tweets. The social tools and the nature of the interaction are in constant evolution. Some have taken to describing the combination of resources from which we learn and maintain our enthusiasm for what we do as a personal learning network (PLN). We construct our own network by following, joining, and participating. Our approach in developing the resources we offer you is to work backwards from how students in K-12 classrooms might learn from technology tools and resources. However, there is certainly nothing wrong with you appropriating anything you find interesting as a component of your own PLN.
This brings us back to what we described earlier as the culture of practice surrounding authentic activities. For a student, it is the essential difference between learning about what biologists or historians have produced as information and having the opportunity at some meaningful level to function as a biologist or historian to construct personal knowledge (Gordin et al., 1997).