This report is targeted to education leaders and stakeholders who are interested in exploring, starting, or strengthening online communities of practice for educators. It makes the case for broadening educators’ access to and participation in online communities of practice, which show strong potential to support professional learning and collaboration. To make this case, the report articulates the educational potential, offers practical guidance for online community sponsors and potential sponsors, and describes the U.S. Department of Education’s leadership role in supporting online communities.
The report is designed to help education stakeholders and practitioners understand, implement, and participate effectively in online communities in order to:
- Make professional learning a timely, relevant, and ongoing activity that continually improves practice
- Leverage technology to create career-long personal learning networks within and across schools, preservice and in-service educational institutions, and professional organizations
Additional briefs are or will be available on this website to supplement this report with more detailed information on related topics.
This report is a living document, as are the related briefs. Comments are invited. The documents will be updated periodically as additional research and new understandings about online communities of practice emerge.
I am very impressed by the openness of this document and how easy it is to add comments so that an actual conversation can take place. Quite a contrast to the recent process by which comments were “invited” by Natl. Governors Assoc. for the Common Core Standards (and those comments just disappeared into a black hole apparently, while all we got in return were generic emails as if the commenting had never happened and as if we were all in love with Common Core). I look forward to reading more comments here as they accumulate. Thank you for the opportunity to participate.
You will be missing something of true significance if you don’t expand from “educators’ access to and participation” to also allowing for their creation of online COPs.
This is a quibble, but I don’t think you “make” professional learning timely and relevant in this new world of social media, I think you “allow” for it to be as the users themselves help to create and build.
So far, I really like we I have read, althought I have only skimmed the report. I will add it to my favorites and read it more carefully when I have time.
Fran
http://wanttolearn.edublogs.org/