October 2004 — Features
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Enabling Distributed Learning Communities Via Emerging Technologies - Part Two
- The MPS Curriculum Design Assistant (CDA)
is a tool that emerged from the district’s work with Replicable Schools as initial test beds. Teachers are asked to blend many agendas into meaningful student work as various directives reach teachers from the state, the district, professional organizations, their principal, the community, colleagues, their union, etc. Conventional district curriculum support operations were having little impact in helping teachers with these many agendas. To aid with this situation, the CDA creates a collaborative environment where teachers are able to post and find lessons that support their daily classroom work. This Web-based tool is accessible all the time, every day of the year, at www.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/pages/MPS/Teachers_Staff/Tech_Tools/CDA. When used in the creation mode, the CDA guides its users through lesson-design options that are research proven, searchable and standards-based. State and district standards also are readily available in the lesson-design process, wherever and whenever the work is taking place. - Teachscape, a commercial professional development process based on video case studies, provides examples of standards-based lessons being taught in urban classrooms at the elementary level (http://ts2.teachscape.com/html/ts/public). These video artifacts of good teaching in typical settings showcase quality instruction, highlight the components of sophisticated pedagogies, and provide opportunities for individual and collective reflections.
- Tapped In, a nonprofit multi-user virtual environment for professional development, provides an online social context where educators can build and sustain communities of practice (http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin). Teams of teachers can interact in a shared work space without driving to a common meeting site. Also, at anytime, when face-to-face support is not available, teachers can go online for intellectual and emotional support via virtual interactions with peers and mentors.
An emerging version of the MPS Portal is under development at http://mpsportal.milwaukee.k12.wi.us. Formative design feedback from new teachers is encouraging, and large-scale evaluation studies are in progress (Dede and Nelson, in press).
These examples, and similar initiatives, provide guidance for designing a distributed learning communities process. Specifically, the emphasis on community identity in both the Inquiry Learning Forum and in Milwaukee’s PSP is consistent with what Bielaczyc and Collins (1999) note about classroom learning communities: “In a learning communities approach, there is also the notion of a community identity. By working toward common goals and developing a collective awareness of the expertise available among the members of the community, a sense of ‘who we are’ develops. In the absence of a learning culture that builds a collective understanding and views its members as learning resources, most classrooms fail to develop a strong sense of community identity.”
