As the physical and virtual worlds converge to become the ‘real world’ of teaching and learning, virtual learning communities will play increasingly important roles in educational reform.

Defining Virtual Community-What is it?

My earliest memories of the term “virtual community” came from Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community, about The Well, a social experiment of the 1980’s. Mr. Rheingold explains that virtual communities are “cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspaces.”  Etienne Wenger (1999) describes virtual learning communities as electronic communities of practice where you find groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a topic and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. According to Wikipedia, traditional communities of practice are "based around situated learning in a co-located setting." In the blogosphere however, we see community developed not by common location, but through pockets of common interest.

Capacity Building

Personally, I spend a lot of time participating in, thinking about, and developing community online. I have had the opportunity to see some of the best and some of the worse in action. I am thankful for the new electronic models of professional growth that inspire me daily to think and collaborate differently. The diversity of ideas and thoughts represented in my community push the boundaries of my thinking as I share knowledge and do my part to advocate for educational reform.

The way I see it, social networking tools have the potential to bring enormous leverage to teachers at relatively little cost — intellectual leverage, social leverage, media leverage, and most important, political leverage. And while most of us reading this post can name educators across the globe that are using these tools as windows from their classrooms to share ideas and develop their own personal learning environments, the sad truth is that most aren't. The burning question in most of our minds is how can we accelerate the adoption and full integration of 21st Century teaching and learning strategies in schools today?

What Makes a Community Successful?

A burgeoning body of opinion suggests that virtual learning communities are becoming the venue through which agents for change operate. The potential is enormous, as knowledge capital is collected and the community becomes a sort of an online brain trust, representing a highly varied accumulation of expertise. However, successful virtual learning communities are hard to come by and many seem to fade away almost as soon as they get started. Recently, at the EduBloggerCon at NECC several of us tried to think about components and attributes of successful learning communities. The following are some tips and tricks garnered from my personal "lessons learned" as I have created and led virtual learning communities for various purposes over the last seven years.

Key to success- the community organizer

You may have heard the phrase, “If you build it they will come.” Not so in virtual environments. Planning, building, launching and nurturing virtual learning communities takes a great deal of effort on the part of a community organizer. This person (or persons) holds the key to the success of your online initiative. You will want to select someone who has a well established online voice and an aptitude for community building in an online environment. This person is a visionary for your efforts and must not be afraid of innovation or change.

Typically, the community organizer fosters member interaction, provides stimulating material for conversations, keeps the space organized and helps hold the members accountable to the stated community guidelines, rules or norms. They also build a shared culture by passing on community history and rituals. Perhaps most importantly, community organizers are keenly aware of how to empower participants to do these things for themselves. Community organizers use their group facilitation skills to help all members of the community to become active participants in the process. They work hard behind the scenes to support socializing and relationship- and trust-building.

Other attributes of successful communities include:

    * a shared vision of what constitutes the mission or niche of the community

    * having a core group who is willing to chime in on a variety of topics, keep the conversation rolling, and self-monitor the conversations is critical. This can be a formal group "appointed" to the role or just a group who steps forward organically to assume that role.

    * opportunities for content creation such as book reviews, book chats, PD opportunities, lesson sharing, etc.

    * regular posting of relevant provocative issues, topics which draw in a variety of participants from different angles to give new perspectives.

Questions

Here are some of the questions you will need to answer when designing your learning community:

    * Will communications be asynchronous, synchronous, or both?

    * Will we need file storage and file sharing capabilities?

    * How will we share and store links to web-based resources?

    * How will we support collaboration on projects?

    * Will we need archiving capability for webcasts, chats and threaded discussions?

    * Will we need polling or surveying tools as part of our work?

    * Is voice capability important for our synchronous events?

    * Is a member profiling tool an important feature?

    * What recruitment and roll out strategy will we have?

    * Is the community open or closed?

Measuring Impact

Evaluation needs to be built into this work from the beginning. In addition to any evaluation done in connection with scholarly research, it is critically important for organizers to use "just in time" assessments that allow for continuous improvement of the virtual community experience. Since this is a relatively new field, many research questions remain to be answered.

Your Take?

I welcome you to consider these questions:

    * What role does Web 2.0 play in the development of teacher leadership and implementation of school reform through the communities in which we learn and play?

    * What are the components of successful, thriving virtual communities?

    * Do intentional roles and norms lead to building the trust that is necessary for a community to grow? Or can that disposition not be mediated and nurtured and really works best if allowed to occur organically?

    * Does part of the answer to meaningful change and implementation of 21st Century skills and dispositions in schools lie in the collaboration that occurs in virtual learning environments?

Resources:

Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Revised Edition, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge  University.

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/feltbug/379882377/

By Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach
From TechLearning.com