The MOOC online community
A Google + community gave us a visual platform for reflecting and sharing ideas prompted by the course materials and a forum for discussions on the weekly themes. This relates to Wenger, Trayner, & De Laat’s definition of social learning as the collaborative construction of new knowledge through dialogues sharing familiar concepts, problems and insights in a constructive way. (Wenger, Trayner, & De Laat, 2011).
Following on from the course materials, the G+ community is also highly visual, and is a good example of balancing talking and doing. Most posts have an example of the ‘doing’ : variations of the digital artifacts used across different educational contexts, followed by a discussion in the comments. Through this process the participants are developing:
• joint enterprise - a collective understanding of what the community is about, its purpose
• mutual engagement - interacting and establishing norms, expectations, and relationships
• shared repertoire - using communal resources
(Wenger, 1998)
References:
Wenger E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E., Trayner, B., & De Laat, M. (2011). Telling stories about the value of communities and networks: A toolkit. Heerlen: Open University of the Netherlands.
