Week 4 Blog Virtual Teaching and Learning
What lessons might we
take from successful (and unsuccessful) OCL Institution Innovations and from
the concept of Community of Practice (CoP)?
A community
of practice is a group of people who have the same common goal. There are many
online communities that have a focus on obtaining knowledge by having
communication with each other and digesting the information individually.
Knowledge is a special thing to obtain because it can’t be obtained by just
reading information or being told information. Harasim found that “Knowledge lives
in the human act of knowing. Knowledge is tacit as well as explicit. Knowledge
is social as well as individual. Knowledge is dynamic.” (2012) Communities of
practice sharing and growing knowledge between each other so it is important
that the group has a way to address each part of knowledge to be successful. An
online community of practice that has been very successful is Wikipedia. Data
is collected regularly to improve the effectiveness of the OCoP so this means
that reflection on the community helps the community learn more and grow.
Online
Communities of Practice are found/created for situations where physically
meeting is impractical or impossible. This is true for the OCoP called telemedicine
which “enable the diagnosis and treatment of patients at a distance, but may
also be used as a long-distance training tool for health care professionals.” (Sims,
2016) In the study done by Sims, there were 500 health care professionals who
are members of the OCoP. The community was centered around blog and email lists
of which members would comment on each other’s blogs or send emails to each
other. Sims had a questionnaire and one of his questions was “Does membership
facilitate enhanced quality of care?” and all responses except one responded
affirmative and that it reflects reflection and questions of each other (2016).
Another successful CoP was done by ergonomics in France and Barcellini et al
discovered what made the group successful was that there were novice and expert
members of the community to help share and learn the knowledge.
My last
thought on this week’s topic is about how can I be more a part of our class’ OCoP.
Sometimes when I respond to other’s blogs, I really have to dig deep on what to
respond with. With this said and you are reading this, I will gift you a
question that you can respond to that might help guide or bring up ideas about
this week’s essential question. What CoP’s or OCoP’s that you have been a
member of have been successful for you? List two exact (small or big things)
that contributed to this success. Can you apply this to this class or in your
classroom?
Barcellini, F.,
Delgoulet, C., & Nelson, J. (2016). Are online discussions enough to
constitute communities of practice in professional domain? A case study of
ergonomics' practice in France. Cognition, Technology & Work, 18(2),
249-266. doi:10.1007/s10111-015-0361-z
Harasim, L. M. (2012). Learning theory
and online technologies. New York, NY: Routledge.
Sims, J. M.
(2016). Communities of practice: Telemedicine and online medical communities. Technological
Forecasting & Social Change, doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.030
Mariah- So our class would be an OCoP because we comment on each others blogs and also email each other. Well CoP’s that I have been a part of is meeting with another teacher to plan lessons. This was successful because we both want the same things to have ideas to use in our classroom. Yes we have applied this to our classroom. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteMariah, I loved the quote you shared about knowledge by Harasim. It spoke to me when I read it because I think humans have a need to learn, especially when they are interested (engaged) in a subject. I think about what we read on our own and how we then share our learning with others in this course. We then visit each other blogs and take their learning and add it to our own, which allows us to each expand our learning. I think of it like this....I don't know everything and you don't know everything, but now thanks to you, I know more than I did on my own. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with me!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi Mariah,
ReplyDeleteHere are two example that my friend who teaches AP Chinese used and I really liked. She uses google phone to leave a question as the recorded message, and students have to call her, listen to the recorded question, and then right away record their answer in the voice mail to answer the question. In this way students can get used to answering the questions with a time limitation. The other example is that she makes a student group with any social media, and then the teacher can post a picture or a question, and the students will reply to the posts. In this way they can talk about something in real time. For example, when they study the weather, they can talk about the real time weather and reply to each other’s responses.