The research team sees the development of network-enabled classrooms and schools as telecollaborative organizations. At each site, networked communities, based in a university, a school or group of schools engage in learning or knowledge building. Learning or knowledge building goals is the organizing principle.

The community being open to a larger and more and more differentiated group of learners (another school staff, parents, students from a number of schools, etc.), effective organizational mechanisms must be found. Each community of learners, practitioners or knowledge builders is capable, to the largest extent possible, to handle its own learning needs and to build its capacity to adapt and grow. Knowledge building is one exemplary way these communities are learning to surpass themselves.

Learning Communities

1. Vision of learners in the 21st century (SchoolNet Canada, 1996)
2. Learning Community : What is it all about?
3. Learning Community : A definition
4. Learning Community : Essential Components
5. Learning Community: 1998 Bibliography
6. Networked learning communities in teacher education (1998)
7. In-service education through face-to-face & on-line interaction in learning communities (2000)
8. IsCoL

Communities of practice

Communities of practice are informal places where people learn. Online communities of practice are a new model, one that TL-NCE help foster in Canada by funding the Telecatalyst project, and that the Office of Learning Technologies also helped foster by funding the TeleLearning Communities of Practice project. In the worlkplace, TL-NCE researchers are working with CEFRIO (Centre francophone d'informatisation des organisations) on a study on virtual communities of practice (Modes de travail et de collaboration à l'ère d'Internet).

9. Case study: CSST
10. Tappedin
11. Modes de travail et de collaboration à l'ère d'Internet

 

Knowledge building Communities

This concept is being primarily developed at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, and the TACT Community, based in Quebec City, is a close collaborator in the design of and research on knowledge building communities.

12. IKIT

 

June 2003