NLC2004 /Proceedings / Individual Research Papers
University of Sheffield
Abstract
This article is a theoretical study looking
at a new role for online learning communities. This role is to provide support
from members for others to bring informal learning projects to be
collaboratively developed and explored in a meaningful dialogue. This model
creates a symbiotic relationship that is flexible and authentic within the context
of global education. In this article the author reviews the experience of
taking an informal learning project to an online community for collaborative
support. The particular project under review sought to develop a support
framework within an online community for other members’ projects. An
implemented model is described and considered within the framework of community
capacity. To support learning at all levels, a method is described for
developing exploring community history and identity through the sharing of
narratives and the construction of a Library of Experience.
This
article seeks to explore the potential of online communities to support and
develop new practices around collaborative mentoring and informal learning
projects. This study seeks to address the following research hypotheses:
- Informal learning can be
utilised as a developmental approach in an online open environment
- Online communities can learn
from involvement with informal learning projects and they can support the
development of a community history and identity
- Online communities can be
effective in supporting informal learning projects
In this
article, I describe an initiative arising in part from earlier work (Bowskill
et al, 2001) that seeded the development of a model of support and development
within an online community. This model is my own informal learning project
(Tough, 1971) and forms part of the author’s doctoral research at the
University of Sheffield. This model is innovative in the way it provides an
open member-to-member service that is culturally sensitive and inclusive.
Jobring
(2002) is interesting in describing online learning communities as context
providers and a move away from being content providers. Jobring (2002) also
notes 3 key areas of concern which are community management, community
measurement and skills for working within communities. Community measurement
asks how we might come to know what is being learned within a community. This
is important and in this paper I offer a clear framework to facilitate a view
of what is being learned through the adoption and support of informal learning
projects and the creation of archived case studies from within the community.
This in turn provides a method for management in a voluntary setting. The point
raised about skills is also interesting as Jobring (2002) identifies 7 skills
marking an apprenticeship from initial joining through to a position of greater
autonomy. In the initiative described below, I mark out a similar
apprenticeship structure around involvement in co-mentoring of informal
learning projects. This apprenticeship is a clearer more practical route to
developing autonomy within an engaged and focussed collaborative context.
Keywords
Informal Online Learning, Online Communities,
Global Education & Learning, Voluntary Support, Co-mentoring.
Informal Learning
Tough
(1971) and many others have identified that many people have developed numerous
ideas and interests outside formal educational settings. Although the potential
of the internet has been identified there is little evidence of practice beyond
casual use of the internet for browsing and joining discussion lists or
participating in occasional events. This paper will demonstrate how informal
learning is being developed within a voluntary online community. Table 1, below
(derived from Long, 2001), gives an overview of relationships between formal
and informal learning. This is drawn from different studies in the literature.
Table 1:
Overview of the
relationship between formal and informal learning in different settings (from
Long, 2001)
|
|
Formal |
Informal |
|
Over a
lifetime (Carnevale,
1984) |
17% |
83% |
|
In an
average week |
|
15 hours per week |
|
In first
3 months of starting employment in a company (Bishop,
1991) |
8% |
92% |
Although
formal learning may be very important in providing opportunities and space to
develop learning and to seek accreditation for instance, it plays a
comparatively small part in the totality of our learning. Whether we look at
this based on an average week, the initial stages of new employment or across a
lifetime, the message is the same. Informal learning is the major part of our
learning activities and yet receives much less recognition and much less
support. Part of this lack of support has to do with the obvious difficulty in
pinpointing how to offer support and what kinds of support might be most
useful.
This paper
seeks to respond to that difficulty in concrete terms by describing the design
on an online collaborative initiative within the WAOE to support members
bringing informal learning projects to the community.
Informal Learning in Communities
Informal
learning like all learning is understood as a social activity where meanings
and practices are shared and situated. In non-networked environments community
centres have a long tradition of being supportive meeting places for learning
to take place and often provide access to tutors, resources and mental space.
In this paper I affirm the idea of learning within communities but re-position
that view within a global online community context. My focus here is upon the
idea of online communities as professional development arenas in general and in
this case for development around issues to do with learning and teaching
involving technology.
The
development of a ‘learning community’ model is presenting us with a new and
increasingly popular vehicle for networked professional development. Examples
include course and institutional communities, professional communities and
communities open to anyone interested in general education (see Schlager et al,
2002, for more detail and examples). Within the literature, the learning
community concept relates to an apprenticeship of practice shared or developed
by a given group (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Action Research
This short
study aims to explore online communities as a vehicle for professional
development around topics to do with learning and teaching with technology. I
have chosen action research because of the unique nature of the context (namely
one that is entirely voluntary, draws heavily upon informal learning projects
and online mentoring, is cross-cultural and open to private and public sector
participants in a spirit of mutual collaboration and self-help). This
combination of factors means that the literature is thin on the ground. I also
aim to support the development of our online community and our practices within
that community through the development of this initiative. On this basis we see
action research as entirely appropriate.
There is a
school of thought that adopts a view of action research made up of formal
processes. Whether it is in the definition of how many steps are involved in
the cycles and spirals of reflection (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1982 ) or whether
it is to do with how systematic the overall process should be (Sagor, 1992,
Kemmis & McTaggart, 1982) there is a group of people in the literature that
espouse increasingly formal and scientific approaches to action research. Schon
(1983) and others have argued against this and say that reflection is at the
heart of action research. Keeping a journal and periodically reflecting upon
the contents; writing about emergent thoughts; and reflecting upon the
relationship between emergent views and practice seems to be as formal as some
desire. Certainly, a reflective approach to a problem to which the practitioner
is connected is seen as important by most writers.
The role of
documents in the reflective process is one I hold to be important in
collaborative voluntary online learning. The storying of experience, and the
sharing of documents provides a grounded approach to researching shared ideas
and perceptions. It also greatly informs the development process over time.
Writers such as Sagor (1992) advocate collaborative approaches to action
research in order that research makes a wider contribution to knowledge
development and is more tested within the context of practice. I will argue
that practitioner knowledge should contribute to both personal and professional
knowledge and that this can be facilitated in concrete terms through the
sharing of narratives and documents. This approach means development and
research can be sufficiently flexible to be meaningful and useful to the
situation and purpose of those involved
WAOE as an Online Learning Community
The WAOE is
a non-profit public benefit corporation registered in the state of California,
but its membership spans five continents without being dominated by any
geographical region. The WAOE is a chiefly virtual association serving the
needs of academics and educators concerned with turning online education into a
professional discipline. The WAOE focuses on combining dedication to online
learning with social and cultural exchange. The objectives and purposes of the
WAOE explicitly promote humanistic ethics and global collaboration in online
education, specifically:
- to maintain a global
perspective as a world organisation, supporting multi-lingualism and
multiculturalism in online education, preserving human rights to diversity
and mutual respect despite differences, and encouraging intercultural
sensitivity and world reconciliation through intercultural communication
among global citizens,
- to be as inclusive as possible
in scope, serving the aspirations of all members and working for equitable
access to online education and to membership.
For more
information see: http://www.waoe.org/npo/bylaw.htm
A Self-Help Initiative within WAOE
In the summer of 2003, I designed and developed a new
initiative in collaboration with other members of the WAOE. This initiative was
itself an informal learning project of the author aiming to explore and
understand how it might be possible for online communities to actively support
informal learning projects brought by its members.
The initiative arising from that project involved
other members constructing informal learning projects. Other members of the
community convened around those projects to collaboratively mentor project
holders. The model was introduced to the community discussion list as a
possible vehicle for collaborative professional development. The idea was
warmly welcomed and an invitation to adopt and develop an initiative based on
this idea was made. Through a series of online discussions within the community
the initiative was developed and refined and through reflection a model of the
initiative has been constructed. That resulting model is outlined in Figure 1
below.
Figure 1: Model of Online Mentoring for Informal
Learning Projects
The
infrastructure is almost entirely email list based. This is partly to increase
accessibility and partly because some people were finding it difficult to clear
the time to go over to a web site. Email based approaches may also help reduce
transactional distance (Moore, 1993) at an individual and collective level.
The first
project proposal was submitted in August 2003 and a voluntary team was put
together shortly afterwards. At the time of writing, there were 4 informal
learning projects being supported within the WAOE initiative. These projects
each have a team of volunteers assembled as a temporary co-mentoring learning
set. Typically each team has 5 or 6 people. These people are drawn from a pool
of volunteers invited and recruited from the general community discussion list.
Members signal their interest to become involved by subscribing to a ‘teampool’
discussion list that constitutes the available mentors for an individual
learning project.
The 4
projects currently operating within this model cover a range of topics:
Helping to design a semester-long online course
Supporting the development of a Virtual Think
Tank for Africa
transform a course from face-to-face to online
Constructing a training resource for remote
centres in India
These
projects have each generated between 30-100 messages from participants. They
are each still at an early stage of development within the model but work and
dialogue continues. The membership of the project support teams is highly
distributed and brings together people in Asia, South America, North America,
Africa, India and Europe.
The model
itself is in its infancy and work continues to develop and scaffold the
initiative for future generations. New documentation is being drawn up in
collaboration amongst the pool of mentors and these early projects are regarded
as a cycle of action research. This collaborative self-help model of
professional development has moved from design through to implementation within
the online community. It does currently support dialogue at various levels
within the initiative although there are periods when activity levels dip as
might be expected amongst busy people. Improvements are being considered and a
second cycle is under active consideration. These will be the subject of future
research to be reported elsewhere. In the next section, I want to probe deeper
and explore the model in the context of community capacity and the possible
value of the model to enhance capability within the community.
Developing Online Community Capacity & Capability
The idea
behind this initiative is to facilitate learning conversations (Rowland, 1993)
around issues to do with learning and teaching with technology. Our particular
device for achieving this is co-mentoring around the informal learning projects
that members bring to the organisation. It is anticipated that this will
provide focus within an informal highly distributed and voluntary community.
There is a
concept in the literature of ‘community capacity’ (Goodman et al, 1998) that is
important here. Part of being able to assess capacity involves being able to
audit the resources within a community to understand its potential and
abilities for development. To develop capacity a community needs to be able to
plan, implement and review its activities. The following extract from another
web site is interesting here:
“The term
‘capacity building’ refers to the identification, strengthening and linking of
the community’s tangible resources such as [………..] with intangible resources
such as the community’s get up and go attitude.”
(Strengthening Communities Web Site)
Part of the
method for developing motivation (the get up and go mentioned above) is by
generating expectations that are visible and achievable. This is in tune with
expectancy theory (Brophy, 1987) and ideas around self-efficacy (Zimmerman,
2000). By constructing an initiative within an online community that is clear
in its structure and methods allied to it having benefits for all concerned, it
is possible to develop community capacity and also to develop motivation.
In addition, community identity is both a
side-effect of and a feature of community capacity. This is particularly true
once an audit is done. A number of questions arise here about how to conduct an
audit of a virtual and dynamic community and also how to develop identity and
capacity within such a community. Partly to address these issues we outline the
profile of our community membership within this initiative. This is not a
profile based upon particular individuals but rather it is one based upon a
structural view of participation.
Through the
adoption and implementation of this initiative we have recognised our community
as a potential support system for an apprenticeship around learning technology.
Figure 2 below shows this apprenticeship in concrete steps:
Figure 2: A
Model of Apprenticeship within an online community initiative
1
In the
above model, the different levels of apparent involvement are presented. I say
apparent because involvement is treated as a subjective concept that may be
different in the researcher’s eyes and in the eyes of each person in the
participant community.
The levels
portrayed above are:
- Those making enquiries about
the initiative by applying for the application form online or by
contacting individual members of the community
- Those joining the mentoring
list as volunteers
- Those involved as mentors in
projects
- Those proposing a project
From this
view we can understand our initiative-community as participants working at one
or more of these levels of participation. This could be used as a map of our
community of practice in line with Lave and Wenger’s (1991) conceptual
framework.
Our purpose
here however is to construct a community audit by treating the initiative as a
sub-community or a micro level view of the whole.
This map is
useful for identifying the whereabouts of different areas of activity within
the community. We have audited the key points of activity and identified the
nature of the activities within those areas. Other documents will also cover
the details of the initiative and the expectations and hopes for each stage as
well as outlining the nature of activities that might arise. Goodman et al
(1998) also refer to the value of community history as part of the development
of capacity. When the project-holder is content and there is broad agreement
that the project has gone as far as is realistically possible a case study of
the informal event is constructed for entry into a database (currently being
planned and developed). This case study will contain the proposal, any relevant
documents arising from the support activity and personal narratives reflecting
on the collaborative experience of addressing the project in this highly
distributed context. The narratives are a means of providing participants with
a voice and an opportunity to be represented in their own terms.
This
framework of activity and the resulting archive allows all interested or
involved to understand the collaborative experience over time and to develop a
sense of identity for the community as it changes over time. We refer to the
emergent set of case studies as a Library of Experience from within the
community. To this set of documents others will be added including artefacts
from the project interactions and activities. Research carried out by anyone
involved in a project or with the initiative as a whole will also be included
to create a project-web that witnesses involvement and creates a resource for
others.
The Library
is awaiting the completion of the first 4 projects from this initiative. These
are all still in their early stages of development. A further 3 projects are in
the early stages of negotiation. This overall framework provides an audit
facility in the way it zones activity into different levels of involvement each
of which can be assessed at any particular time. This is furthered by the
development of the Library of Experience that supports the development of
community capacity in the way it displays what has already been achieved and in
the way it signals what is possible for others.
Conclusions
I have
demonstrated the clear potential of online communities to do more than provide
resources and meeting places. I have defined, within this initiative an
apprenticeship scheme using co-mentoring. Members of the community are able to
engage in this professional development framework according to their interests,
available time, and expertise. The model has potential benefits for all
involved.
Informal
learning projects can be developed as intentional self-directed learning within
a networked environment. Furthermore online communities now have a framework
for offering support that includes professional development and opportunities
for all involved. I have mapped out an apprenticeship within our community of practice
for progressing from one zone of activity to another within the online setting.
Of enormous
importance is that this kind of strategy is achievable within a practical
self-help informal framework. It is not always realistic for a group to
construct/maintain a VLE and for this model it is not a good strategy with the
possible increase in transactional distance that may arise with complex systems
used in an informal voluntary setting. Likewise such technologically complex
settings may militate against the goal of accessibility in so called
‘developing’ countries.
Researching
informal learning in networked environments must be similarly achievable if we
are to empower lifelong learners online. For this reason action research
methods have been adopted utilising small scale interventions as cycles of
action research and working in collaboration with others in learning
conversations (Rowland, 1993). Through dialogue and the sharing of narratives I
hope to empower and involve others individually and collectively and to give
ourselves a voice (Winter, 1998). I have also demonstrated how community
capacity and history can be developed at a concrete level within an online
setting. Looking at our overall
model we have also addressed change through identity development and support at
the individual, collective and organisational levels. Finally, this article is
conceptualised as an entry into our Library of Experience.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to gratefully acknowledge the help and support of Mike Warner, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Arizona USA and Maggie McVay-Lynch, University of Portland, Oregon, USA. I would also like to thank all WAOE members involved in this initiative
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