The Role of Web-based Communities in Teacher Professional Development Examples Drawn from Mirandanet: a Learning Community – a Community of Learners

Traditional models of learning have reified into concepts of learning, with the teacher frozen as the embodiment of skills and knowledge that have to be passed on to students. The pace of change in industry and technology has burst through into schools. The syllabus has been expanded to the point of absurdity: the application of knowledge has become a critical issue for those who navigate these shoals as captains of industry. Just-in-Time has become the watchword for Learning, as it has in industry. Whereas Industry has re-engineered itself, however, Education, like Lot's Wife, looks backwards. The pace of change often means that teachers carry a train of conceptual baggage, with expectations as to what should be taught and why it should be taught. These conflict with students as practitioners, who battle with their teachers and academics who act as the gatekeepers over what constitute standards. Knowledge is seen as contained in artefacts – 'knowledge artefacts', whereas for many students knowledge is contained within the artefacts of production: the artefacts produced. The MirandaNet community consists of teachers and academics as practitioners, who embody the problems faced by their students at the bleeding edge of technology. Within this community cognition is manifested as both materiel and social. Information and Communication technology is both the network for communication and also the collective memory of the community. The website acts as the repository of memory: newsletters, case studies, the forum for meetings, workshops and conferences; the source of expert knowledge, with the posting of questions and collaborative learning. This chapter investigates four threads in the development of teacher development. The first thread examines the ways in which the learning community can be seen as a form of distributed cognition. The second deals with factors contributing to teacher participation, the ways in which the online learning community itself requires, and develops, new skills and concepts. The third thread deals with the re-conceptualisation of learning, whilst the final aspect focuses on the co-construction of knowledge in an online environment. The Learning Community as a form of Distributed Cognition MirandaNet, as the social construction for how we learn and why we learn, forms the focus for lifelong learning. The distributed cognition manifested within this grouping of practitioners disseminates into the wider structures of education. A number of small-scale studies are described that focus on the ways in which e-learning can be integrated in a range of settings …