This article explores how teachers can use the sentence stems "I notice" and "I wonder" to deepen professional conversations with colleagues, both in person and in online spaces.

Since informal learning occurs outside of formal learning environments, describing informal learning and how it takes place can be a challenge for researchers. Past studies have typically oriented to informal learning as an individual, reflective process that can best be understood through the learners' retrospective accounts about their…

The purpose of this action research was to explore students' perspectives regarding using Web 2.0 technologies to develop a community of learners. The course described in this study was a fully online course in an Educational Learning Technologies master's program at a medium-sized university in the U.S. Southwest. A variety of Web 2.0 tools…

As practices and expectations around doctoral writing continue to change, so too do the demands on academic developers and learning advisors. Social media is increasingly playing a role in doctoral education, just as it is in higher education more generally. This paper explores a blog initiated in 2012 to inform and support doctoral writing; since…

The authors critically analyze how the concept of the drama triangle--part of the game theory associated with transactional analysis--can be used by post secondary instructors teaching online to build a sense of community and decrease students' dependence on instructors in discussion forums. The article begins with an overview of sense of…

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students comprise the most rapidly expanding, and among the most educationally marginalized, group in the United States. CLD students' opportunities to learn are often diminished through service delivery models that are deficit-oriented, viewing linguistic diversity as a challenge to overcome, not a…

So far, the existence of a virtual community forum has become a reality and social necessity in an era cybertech. It was also viewed as the electronic frontier of 21st century society that was undoubtedly for reorganizing and redefining to awareness of human being, that ways of their perceptions and explorations no longer limited by time, space,…

In this article, we explore findings from a semester-long online mentoring project between graduate students enrolled in a doctoral program and university students observing in local high schools early in their teacher education program. The project's goals were to provide supervised mentoring experiences for doctoral students to better prepare…

This article seeks to inspire humanities and social science faculty to explore ways of utilizing existing scholarly online communities to engage students in the process of academic inquiry. The author discusses her own experience using a discipline-specific listserv, shares successful assignments, examples of student postings and a grading rubric.…

In November 2008 the Sloan Consortium published "Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States." This study produced survey statistics relating to enrollments in online courses. The study confirmed what most administrators and faculty members already suspected: the growth of online higher education continues to be astounding;…

In this article we suggest that online environments can function as alternate "organizations" for pre-service and beginning teachers who may find themselves struggling in schools. Building on prior work on framing and reframing in organizations and schools, the authors present a new frame of analysis specifically geared for web-based…

In this paper we examine aspects of the construction of authentic membership, competence, and sense of shared purpose within a professional community of educators accomplished by a class of pre-service teachers during a spontaneous electronic conversation. Implications for teacher education are considered.

The previous report in this series discussed how collaborative tools can be used in the development of formal and non-formal online communities. The current report describes the specific development of an online community advocacy group.

This paper comments on strengths and weaknesses of the papers on communities of practice in this special issue of "Technology, Pedagogy and Education." First it discusses the character of communities of practice and the question of whether schools are environments that are conducive to the development of teacher communities of practice. It then…

One Master's Program, Initiatives in Educational Transformation, has integrated a computer management system (WebCT) into a learner-centered (Weimer, 2002) community of K-12 practicing teachers. Online discussions were an extension of instructional practices that supported dialogue, reflection, and self-assessment for the purpose of continuous…