Building a Learning Community Online

This chapter reviews a pilot e-learning project at Liverpool Hope University Col-lege. It will illustrate an approach to online learning aimed at students working inthe early years education and care sector and attempts to demonstrate the devel-opment of a “community of practice.” This chapter will discuss how the contextinformed the rationale for the approaches taken by the staff team and providescommentary from student evaluations highlighting their experiences.

Narrative

In this chapter we consider the role played by narrative in negotiating and reveal-ing contexts: we explore how narrative can help make more visible the contexts ofindividuals as well as of the evolving community in virtual settings. We use thenarrative genre to “walk the talk” of a research story that highlights three storiesof learning in virtual settings. Our set of cascading stories includes both designedlearning settings and settings that arose through the interactions of members in aself-organizing community. In exploring how narrative potentially fosters mean-ing making and helps uncover contexts we draw mostly on Bruner’s work on nar-rative and on situated theories of learning. In our research quest we aim todeepen our understanding of the intricate relation between narrative, context,and learning. To inform our design practice we summarize the “moral” of ourstory, transferring our insights into some initial guidelines for designing virtualsettings for learning.

Activity Theory and Context

Constructivist instructional design (ID) models have emerged with more frequencywithin e-learning. These models offer guiding principles congruent with construc-tivist approaches to teaching and learning. Although constructivist ID modelsshare common principles, each model also offers a unique approach to e-learningbased on its context of development. Consequently, certain models will also bemore authentic and meaningful for a particular situation depending on their com-patibility to that particular context. If that context can be understood, then direc-tion can be given as to the best application for the model. This chapter introducesactivity theory (AT) as a lens from which to understand the context of constructivistID model development in e-learning. It argues that ATprovides a suitable frame-work for naturalistic inquiry within complex settings and establishes a languagefrom which a better comparison of context can occur.

Context and Learning

This chapter presents a philosophical framework to help understand the essence oflearning contexts. It starts with a brief historical account of the emergence andevolution of the problems of context in learning, and of their increased relevanceas learning activities migrate to the online world. It then presents a simple modelfor a learning event—involving learner, content, and context—from which it ana-lyzes the answers to three key philosophical questions that discriminate betweenthe positivist and the constructivist worldviews. These answers are expressed inthe form of four foundational hypotheses or principles for each worldview, whichhelp analyze the resulting two radically different interpretations of learning con-texts. The implications of these distinctions on the management of learning con-texts, on the perception of the duality between content and context, and on theapproaches to the design of learning contexts are then analyzed.

Quality Assurance During Distributed Collaboration

This case study describes the design and delivery of a collaborative asynchronous-synchronous, graduate-level, cross-university computer science course designedto create a highly interactive learning environment that resulted in the emergenceof multiple unique virtual learning communities. The pedagogical principles of sit-uated and problem-based learning were combined in a distributed collaborativelearning context where students’cognitive and metacognitive capabilities devel-oped through the facilitative guidance of the instructors and through discoursewith and observation of other students. The course was designed to motivate stu-dents to engage in interactive learning with others and to enhance transfer ofknowledge gained through this learning experience to real-life situations. Wedescribe the challenges inherent in creating and managing this type of learningcontext as well as how we deployed ongoing formative assessment to ensure theevolution of a dynamic learning environment. The result of our efforts was aunique learning experience for students and instructors.

Designing for Unique Online Learning Contexts

This chapter argues that more attention needs to be given to problematizing designat the level of purpose, audience, and form of online interactions and to seekingalignment of these components. It derives from experiences of conceptualization,design, and delivery processes. Some online students are more active than others;some groups respond to a series of planned activities and online tasks while othersdo not, and in some cases patterns of interactivity develop that are not planned anddesigned for. We propose that the design of online programs is not a simple, but askilled and complex, phenomenon with a large number of independent and inter-dependent variables. We present our ideas in three sections and use the allusion ofa bespoke tailor customizing a jacket for a client. These sections comprise the“jacket,” “the body,” and the skilled task of tailoring the jacket to fit the body,which represents the process of designing for unique online contexts.

Space as a Learning Context

The concept of “dwelling” is offered as a foundation for learning and for under-standing the role of space in educational settings. This chapter is a first attemptto connect the concept of dwelling, perceived as power over space in the phe-nomenological sense, with the concept of meta-learning as researched in exper-imental psychology, in distributed cognition, and in experiential learning, allfields sharing the idea that for learning to become self-regulated individualexperiences should be acknowledged, some freedom of choice should be offered,and change should be stimulated. Examples of learning environments with adwelling quality are presented together with a list of behavioral patternstrating the role of space. In this way the chapter shows education managers howto take the quality of dwelling into account in evaluating and designing contextsof learning.

Context Engineering for Learning

The authors present a view of the problems related to the role of context in learn-ing and development, individual and organizational, influenced by readings inanthropology, activity theory, and actor-network theory, and of how they relate tothe problems of developing e-learning experiences. Next, they briefly present thecontext engineering approach to information systems development as a frame-work to think and organize the development of virtual contexts for e-learning. Thisapproach proposes to achieve a critical understanding of development as asociotechnical phenomenon within a cultural and historical envelope to provide aframework of development problems focused on the relation between a model ofcontext and its mediators. It also proposes to use contextuality as the key to per-form emancipatory movements while operating on sociotechnical networks. Theauthors then attempt to translate the fundamental ideas and guiding principles ofthis approach to the development of virtual learning contexts, elaborating on someof the learning and development issues that arise.

A Constructivist View of Knowledge Management in Open Source Virtual Communities

This chapter addresses a learning environment that is manifested in the domain offree/open source software development. It provides the base for the emergence,development, interactions, and management of a novel learning environment bytaking a constructivist view of knowledge management. The learning activities ofan online collaborative effort of a loosely and geographically disperse communityof individuals is explored by looking at the interactions between members of thecommunity, the tools used to communicate, and the interactions between the mem-bers of the community and the virtual learning context. The learning context asenvisaged here refers to the free/open source software development environment inwhich learning actually takes place. The main focus is on the resources and pur-poseful activities that promote collaborative learning in this context, as well as thetransfer of learning from the virtual setting to the real-life situation by involving ina collaborative activity.

The Voice of the Online Learner

This chapter examines the role of context in online settings from the perspectiveof the online learner. The chapter attempts to situate the reader within the contextof the online environment studied, using biographical stories of four learners whoparticipated in a cohort graduate program that was held primarily online. Thereader will experience the process that all the learners went through as they grap-pled with their current beliefs, were challenged and stretched technically as wellas intellectually, and learned to rely on the context of their shared experience, aswell as their local communities, for support and encouragement. The reader willalso recognize the transformation these individuals experienced as they let go ofsome of the pieces of their previous identities in a search for a preferred future.The author suggests that the design of the online program studied was critical tothe transformative learning experienced by the individuals studied and hopes toencourage individuals involved in the design of similar programs and environ-ments to think carefully about the powerful potential of socially constructivistdesign.