Teacher Professional Development, Technology, and Communities of Practice

Abstract

Practice, then, both shapes and supports learning. We wouldn't need to labor this point so heavily were it not that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction. Brown & Duguid (2000, p. 129) In their book The Social Life of Information , Brown and Duguid (2000) analyze examples of learning in the context of professional practice and the ways in which information technology supports or fails to support professional learning. Failure is related to neglect of ways in which people learn, their resourcefulness in solving problems, and the communities of practice in which they participate. As the opening quotation suggests, training (and technology that supports a training model of learning) tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice. Only by engaging in work and talking about it from inside the practice can one learn to be a competent practitioner. They conclude that “practice is an effective teacher and the community of practice an ideal learning environment” (p. 127). Over the past several years, we have been developing and refining the sociotechnical infrastructure of a virtual environment called Tapped In ® (www.tappedin.org) that is intended to support the online activities of a large and diverse community of education professionals. We have described the design principles that underlie our efforts and documented how educators have used the environment for their own purposes and in the context of formal professional development (Schlager & Schank, 1997; Schank, Fenton, Schlager, & Fusco, 1999).

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