Enabling Distributed Learning Communities via Emerging Technologies--Part One.

EMERGING DEVICES, TOOLS, MEDIA and virtual environments offer opportunities for creating new types of learning communities for students and teachers. Examples of learning communities include a national mix of kids working together to create an online encyclopedia about Harry Potter's fictional world, or groups of mentor and novice teachers in Milwaukee sharing ideas about effective instruction. According to Bielaczyc and Collins (1999):"The defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding. There are four characteristics that such a culture must have: (1) diversity of expertise among its members who are valued for their contributions and given support to develop, (2) a shared objective of continually advancing the collective knowledge and skills, (3) an emphasis on learning how to learn, and (4) mechanisms for sharing what is learned. This is a radical departure from the traditional view of schooling, with its emphasis on individual knowledge and performance, and the expectation that students will acquire the same body of knowledge at the same time. " Both opportunities and challenges arise in applying this model of learning communities to the instruction of students and to the preparation, induction and professional development of teachers. Before discussing these issues, delineating my perspective on educational improvement is necessary for understanding the assumptions underlying this two-part article, which will conclude in the October issue. Six Assumptions About Educational Improvement 1. The most important challenge the U.S. education system faces is not preparing students to do well on high-stakes tests, but rather fostering 21st century skills and knowledge in learners so that they are prepared to participate in our global, knowledge-based civilization. This challenge requires that teachers understand what types of knowledge and skills are required in leading-edge workplaces (e.g., decision-making under uncertainty, just-in-time learning, information filtering). It also requires that teachers themselves are Maria was logging her mother's lung-capacity figure into the national database. Her little brother watched, fascinated by the colored visualizations displaying the ecological, meteorological and pollution factors that predicted today's likely allergic responses in Maria's region. Maria's teacher, Ms. Grosvenor, was also sighing out a deep breath at that moment, but not into a balloon. While eating a Ho Ho for breakfast, she was using her home computer to access a different part of the allergy study Web site--a section with guidance for teachers about how to cover today's classroom lesson on regional flora. Her preservice education from a decade ago had provided some background in ecology; however, with fifth-graders now mastering material she had not learned until the end of high school, Ms. Grosvenor frequently used the site to update her knowledge about allergenic plants. Sometimes the sophisticated multilevel model that scientists and doctors were developing, which was made possible by microregional data supplied by learners nationwide, made her head ache for reasons other than sinuses. On the other hand, at least the students were quite involved in this set of science activities. Discussions in the Web site's "Teachers' Forum" reaffirmed her sense that most teachers would rather have the small hassle of keeping up with new ideas and instructional approaches than the constant struggle of trying to motivate pupils to learn boring lessons. At the same time, in her elementary school's computer lab, Consuela was threading her way through a complex maze. Of course, the maze was not in the lab, but in the "Narnia" MUVE (a text-based multi-user virtual environment developed around the stories by C.S. Lewis). Her classmates and fellow adventurers Joe and Fernando were with her utilizing Internet connections at their homes, as was her mentor--a small bear named Oliver (in reality, a businesswoman interested in mythology who assumed a Winnie the Pooh-like avatar in the virtual world of the MUVE). …