Learning Communities and Engaged Learners

Over the past month, we have focused on learning communities, from what learning communities are to using technologies to build communities to looking at communities within social networking. The idea of online learning communities is varied and expansive as our posts have indicated, but a common thread exists. The goal of a learning community is [...]

Read Full Post »

Learning from the Ning learning community

Ning is a ring of social networks run by participants who start and build the social network. I’ve found that Ning can be a great place to learn from others in your own field who have the same interests as yourself. I’m part of a Ning network called NextGen Teachers. The NextGen Ning network [...]

Read Full Post »

Learning Community in BCE

Building Collaborative Online Environments uses a number of techniques to build a learning community. After the field test last summer, instructor Lee Anne Morris had great ideas for really pushing the community-building to the next level.
Wikis
One piece of student feedback we received during the field test was that people wanted to see everyone else’s lesson [...]

Read Full Post »

Instructional Design with Community in Mind

What do you do in your spare time? Quilt? Fish? Read? We all have hobbies that we enjoy. However, to knit, fish, or read, we had to learn how to do it first.
Did your grandmother teach you to quilt? Maybe your father took you to the lake and taught you how to put the worm [...]

Read Full Post »

What does Community have to do with it?

 As educators one of our primary charges is providing an environment that fosters learning. How do we accomplish that foundational step, not only in a face-to-face setting, but how can we hope to establish such a climate online, where we lack many of the visual cues from our students?
I recently had a conversation with a [...]

Read Full Post »