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Vance's: Papers | Writing for Webheads | Webheads in Action

For introduction to these issues, click here

Communities online

I started teaching email 'online' courses with EFI in 1996 http://www.study.com

By 1997 English for Webheads, met in Palace, started developing community

1998 Writing for Webheads: LAN hyperlink | Internet hyperlink

Professional communities:

• Teaching for Webheads: LAN Hyperlink | Internet hyperlink
  
• the EVOnline Webheads in Action sessions
  

These are communities of practice. Communities of practice

• are emergent: evolve for the purpose of learning and solving authentic problems - serendipitous outcomes
• encorporate 'playing fields', or what we call a playground
• utilize different areas of expertise within a community; e.g. ZPD
• negotiate meaning between peers as well as expert to novice; experts' roles are facilitative
• handle ill-structured and non-linear problems (chaos navigation --> intuitive chaos navigation)
• engender environments of saftety and trust
• "reflection externalizes proceses that are normally internal"
• "community knownlege surpasses individual knowledge

This is interesting: Virtual communities might eliminate f2f 'norm and group behavior' that tends to 'suppress free expression of ideas and thus effective collaboration and problem solving."

These quotes from "Establishing an Online Community of Practice for Instructors of English for Specific Purposes" by Christopher M. Johnson, 2001, http://sites.inka.de/manzanita/dissertation/Idea_Paper_Johnson1.1.htm

An example of community of practice sharing expertise and 'bootstrapping' individuals is with video.

• In 1999, Felix, a Webhead student from Brazil, sends us a video by email - LAN hyperlink | Internet hyperlink
• This prompts Vance to respond with a similar video mounted on the Webheads pages
• Two years later, Felix again takes the lead, shows us Yahoo Messenger
• We experiment, the meeting with the class from Turkey is a good example
• Teresa is a webhead from Portugal who appreciates what she has learned in Webheads in Action

Some characteristics of chat:

Emoticons

Using graphics to compensate for limitations of text

Maggi can't explain the 'walker' she is using after an accident. The whiteboard was a feature at the Virtual Schoolhouse at the Palace.

Susanne couldn't explain an acrobatic performance she saw at Tivoli. The whiteboard is found at our Groupboard site, http://www.groupboard.com

Students DO occasionally attend to form when engaged in chat:

Here's a chat which the student initiated specifically for the purpose of requesting help with a text:

This was an email followup to a chat:

What do people do online? What's a chat look like?

Chaos navigation in Webheads: here, we're listening to a story Ying Lan made into a Real Media file and emailed us. We've met at the Palace and Ying Lan and I are talking in Hear Me voice chat as well. Ying Lan is getting me to correct her pronunciation. Mysailing has just found us on Yahoo Messenger.

Here's a screen shot of an moment in a synchronous online conference presentation. In the top frame we're paging through the presenter's slides while discussing them in the text chat below. Links at the bottom allow access to further information about the presenter, the abstract for the presentation, etc. The names at right are chat participants.

This video explains the true nature of emoderation, or moderating online events.

It's like herding cats! <<- LAN link only; on Internet: http://www.eds.com/advertising/advertising_tv_catherding.shtml

Implications for teachers:

Deborah Healey gave a Plenary address at the MLI's 2001 Teacher to Teacher conference (Dr. Healey did not attend the conference physically, but sent a video, and took questions after we played it from the audience via a live Netmeeting hookup).

One of the questions was, what could be done about students using online resources such as translators when they were writing conpositons in, say Spanish? How could a teacher assess such work when s/he could not be sure that students had composed it themselves?

What do you think?

Other ramifications of the mindshift required to successfully design and implement CALL in a tool-based constructivist environment: