Communications of the ACM
Designing for improved social responsibility, user participation and content in on-line communities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge
Making web sites be places for social interaction
CSCW '02 Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Technology-supported systemic reform: an initial evaluation and reassessment
ICLS '04 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Learning sciences
Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge (Acting with Technology)
Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge (Acting with Technology)
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Applications of information technology to support systemic reform in public school systems have taken several forms. Instructional applications include attempts to more effectively convey information to students, to empower students' own agency in accessing information and constructing knowledge, and to aid teachers' classroom management, lesson preparation, and assessment. Technology has been proffered as a change agent in itself: teachers will need to change their practices in order to use technologies designed for doing authentic inquiry and communicating or collaborating with others [10]. Information technology can also support professional development through access to online courses, and enable participation in distributed communities of practice. The work reported in this paper has taken this latter strategy. Because today's school systems operate in an environment of constant change, professional development requires a paradigm shift from a scripted training approach to a more fluid approach that encourages the incorporation of networks, coalitions, and partnerships. The capacity to network with other professionals is essential to the notion of communities of practice. McLaughlin and Mitra argue that sustaining large-scale theory-based reform efforts "requires a community of practice to provide support, deflect challenges from the broader environment, and furnish the feedback and encouragement essential to going deeper" [7]. Barab defines a community that advances ongoing and open-ended professional development as a "persistent, sustained network of individuals who share and develop an overlapping knowledge base, set of beliefs, values, history and experiences focused on a common practice and/or mutual enterprise" [1]. These communities change the relationships among teachers, breaking the isolation that most teachers have found so confining.