October 2004 — Features
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Enabling Distributed Learning Communities Via Emerging Technologies - Part Two
Another important dimension cited by Bielaczyc and Collins (1999) is the altered role of knowledge in learning communities: “In learning communities, the development of both diverse individual expertise and collective knowledge is emphasized. In order for students to develop expertise, they must develop an in-depth understanding about the topics that they investigate. Rich subject matter is important. The topics are not randomly chosen, but rather the depth centers on key principles or ideas in a domain that are generative for understanding a broad array of topics. There is also a circular growth of knowledge, wherein discussion within the community about what individuals have learned leads individuals to seek out further knowledge that they then share with the community. Thus, there is an interplay between the growth of collective knowledge and of individual knowledge, with each supporting the other. In most classrooms, the goals tend toward covering all the topics in the curriculum (breadth over depth) and for everyone to learn the same thing.”
This also has implications for teacher education, induction and professional development, as the collective knowledge in a distributed learning community involves contributions from remote participants and includes types of content for which teachers have no formal preparation. The inclusion of multiple sources of expertise is potentially an important aid for teachers in responding to the many kinds of sophisticated exploration that inquiry-based learning for 21st century skills involves. However, professional development must expand a teacher’s capacity to serve as a facilitator, guide and model of learning how to learn, rather than as a sage who is the single source of knowledge.
Overall, successfully implementing new educational approaches in typical classrooms is very challenging. This is particularly true for technology-based innovations in which the wide-ranging capabilities of current computers and telecommunications, their rapid evolution, and the special knowledge and skills required of users pose additional barriers to effective utilization. In addition, shifting to facilitating the learning of 21st century skills via inquiry-based pedagogy centered in learning communities is difficult for many teachers, because this poses a set of instructional challenges and opportunities very different from inculcating rote acquisition of facts and recipes.
Many current approaches to teacher preparation, new teacher induction and continuing professional development are clearly inadequate to achieve the goals expressed in the earlier vignette. Yet, these visions reflect the type of education our next generation of children must have to prepare for work, citizenship and self-fulfilled lives, as well as the types of media literacies and mediated learning styles that they will bring into the classroom. The vignette also illustrates an innovative strategy for schooling that might attract a much broader range of skilled and committed people to the profession of teaching. Such an outcome would, in itself, provide substantial leverage for educational improvement.
The Next Steps
To accomplish major changes in teacher preparation, induction and professional development, such as those outlined above, we must “walk our talk.
