How can technology better enable individuals to find each other online and collaborate around mutual interests, skills, and needs? What social processes in online forums result in successful collaborative learning? Network Improvement Tools facilitate establishing social places in cyberspace, helping to support activities for the functioning of communities of interest. Socializing is important for building trust in teaching and mentoring relationships both face-to-face and online. Virtual places can provide diverse activities in which teachers, mentors, and learners get to know one another in deeper ways than text alone effectively supports. For example, participation in online communities offers a unique opportunity for teachers to expand their set of peers and to gain a sense of connection with a practicing community of educators, scientists, and education researchers. The interactions involved in shared learning are more extensive and subtle than the typical tools for sharing information among interest groups. Tools are needed to foster long-term, supportive, structured relationships, not just casual exchange of tidbits or much less passively received "push" media.
Graphically-oriented multi-user virtual environments that originated in the gaming world (MUDs, MOOs) have been the basis of many adaptations for learning purposes, such as SRI's first version of Tapped In, an online environment for teacher professional development launched in 1995. Virtual-world-building companies (e.g., http://activeworlds.com/) provide 3D graphical social places in which people around the world represent themselves with "avatars" and interact at a distance. K-14 learning and education has only recently been focusing seriously on such 3D environments (e.g., Chris Dede's Harvard work on Museum-Related Multimedia and Virtual Environments for Teaching and Learning Science [http://graphics.gmu.edu/muves/], Amy Bruckman's Georgia Tech work on AquaMOOSE 3D [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/aquamoose/], Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantis [http://atlantis.crlt.indiana.edu/], and William Winn's Seattle work on virtual reality for education [http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/learning_center/pf/]).
On another front, research and commercial developments in community-based or social filtering technology harness the collective knowledge of all of a website's users to make predictions about preferences for each individual visiting the site. These social filtering tools use profiling information explicitly supplied by participants or make inferences from patterns in their behaviors in order to make recommendations concerning resources others "like them" have found useful (e.g., the GroupLens technology used in Amazon.com's recommendation system for books, NetFlix film recommender). Might these tools prove extensible from interest groups to learning groups? Finally, the development of metadata systems used to code online learning materials for re-usability in different contexts by international standards-setting consortia (e.g., IMS, SCORM) and federal interagency groups is a promising approach for instructional developers to work toward the use of metadata systems that will help link teachers and learners to the subject matter content that they need.
The Community Tools theme team sponsored a wide range of Network Improvement Tools seed projects. The Knowledge Mining project developed a web-based, asynchronous communication tool to collect and synthesize the best thinking of a community. In a project on Interoperability among Knowledge-Building Environments (KBEs), researchers developed an XML markup language designed to enable data sharing between environments, with the goal of understanding better the design space of KBEs, to share software tools, and to archive data for analysis. The seed grant Defining the Next Generation of Online Teacher Learning brought together a diverse group of experts to reflect on their current practice and set directions for the future of the field. The Learning Sciences Research Group launched an interactive website that is being used to coordinate online and face -to-face communication among early career researchers in the learning sciences, with the goal of better coupling advances in the field of learning sciences with improved quality of educational practices. The Research Circle project developed a model for community building and collaborative work among researchers, based on the well-established model of Learning Circles (www.iearn.org/circles) for supporting project-based student learning.
Also related to network improvement technology is the theme team's own investigation of online teacher professional development. Central to this project was CILT's empirical study of how the Tapped In environment was used by a group of educators interested in a particular pedagogical approach to student inquiry on the Internet. Results of this research were published in several conference presentations, journal articles, and a book chapter in the edited Cambridge University Press volume, Designing for Virtual Community in the Service of Learning. The project also sponsored a face-to-face and online collaborative writing process among the authors of this volume, with the aim of producing a more conceptually integrated book than might have otherwise been the case.
Seed grants and related work:
Interoperability among Knowledge-Building Environments
Defining the Next Generation of Online Teacher Learning
The Learning Sciences Research Group
http://crlt.indiana.edu/lsrgroup/
Research Circle: Online Learning and Teaching
Designing for Virtual Community in the Service of Learning
[forthcoming from Cambridge University Press]