Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked & collaborative learning

My reflection comes from thinking how we should be prepared for each meeting in our PBL group. During the last two topics, we had a lot of discussions, but I could not write any reflection with the pedagogic context. We discussed and socialized in our group, but I don’t know which piece of the new information I could give my students during the next lectures. Being curious about “Learning in communities”, I decided to take a look into the references list, and found a lot of interesting articles which I am excited to read and reflect. The article which I know from other pedagogic courses is “Communities of Practice” from Wenger. This article is of interest because Wenger recalled the engagement as a social context that involves a dual process of meaning making [1]. Our social engagement includes both direct activities, conversation, reflections and also conceptual artifacts such as words, tools, concepts, methods, stories, documents [2]. Our personal participation in social life and our reflection about experiences from socialization establish firstly learning communities which over time create a social history of learning. The digitally learning community that consists of three essential parts is shown in Figure 1.

A digital community consists of three components such as participants’ understanding of the community aims and activities, ability to engage into the community’s activity and use the resources of community to continue the writing process of learning history. Capdeferro and Romero reported that many online learners associate the collaborative learning activities as frustrating experiences [3]. Dirkx and Smith indicated that the online learning activities are the key factors which form the new learning paradigm [4]. In my opinion, the ability to engage into the community’s activity is a key factor. Student is a complicated body which is mainly controlled by his motivation. Some students are able to be engaged in problem-based activities and some students even did not look into the activities, but say that these activities are too complicated or not very interesting. We can argue that maybe the activities are not so exciting to participate, but in my opinion for some students it does not matter what you do, if their intrinsic motivation is low, they will never appreciate your work. Only the combination of three components shown in Figure 1 can help online participants to overcome the “online stress”. The engagement in the online community is based on our learning identity. Learning is not just acquiring skills and information; it is about becoming a certain person [2]. When we enter a new community, we bring a new learner experience in the community, and we also take a community’s competence forming the realignment between community’s competence and personal experience. Human dimensions decide which way of learning we take [1]. The identification of yourself is done using different modes: engagement, imagination and alignment which are essential for our decision which journey we choose through the learning. We must engage in different community’s activities, than we need to construct an image of the world using our experience from the learning activities and make sure that our activities are aligned with the context. The identity includes three characteristics such as identity as a trajectory, combination of multi-membership and identity as a multi-scale. In the trajectory learning, we incorporate our experience by going through the communities and forming relationships to people and places. In other words, we just follow the road and gain our experience. I associate the multi-membership with the life in several different communities, as shown in Figure 2.

There are two villages in South Italy called Celle di San Vito and Faeto which are connected by several roads, and our multi-membership means the co-existence with these two villages. The multi-scale identity is associated by wooden skyscraper in Arkhangelsk (Russia), as shown in Figure 2. Our identities are constructed at multiple levels based on a scale-free process. These many levels of scale go into the constitution of identity [2]. This building is a skyscraper, but in a very remote village in Russia. It sounds very extraordinary, but at the same time this building is in a perfect alignment with its task and its surroundings. Through our identities and various experiences, we participate in social systems. However, I believe that each social system e.g. the door of traditional classroom or the window of digital classroom has its special key for both teachers and students. That is why I am glad that we have in front of us many interesting discussions about learning in communities through the collaborative learning.


References:


[1] Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice; Learning, Meaning and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press)
[2] Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London.
[3] Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are Online Learners Frustrated with Collaborative Learning experiences? The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(2).
[4] Dirkx, J. M., & Smith, R. O. (2004). Thinking out of a bowl of spaghetti: Learning to learn in online collaborative groups. In T. S. Roberts (Ed.), Online collaborative learning: Theory and practice (pp. 132–159). Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.


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