Community of Practice
A
Community of Practice, as defined by BusinessDictionary.com, is “an informal,
self-organized network of peers with diverse skills and experience in an area
of practice or profession. Such groups are held together by the members’ desire
to help others (by sharing information) and the need to advance their own
knowledge (by learning from others). Also called community of interest” (2013).
This has been the role of Hootcourse, a platform to gather a group of
professionals to develop their PLN (Personal Learning Network) beyond their
universities or social circles.
http://hootcourse.com/
is
an easy-to-use online platform where professionals can become members of a
community of interest, whose sole reason of existence is to help its members to
learn from one another. By having a Twitter account, anyone can become a
member/user of Hootcourse. The platform allows its users to join a course
(community of practice) or to create a course (community of interest). If
applied to online teaching, this virtual space becomes a “virtual classroom”
for students and instructors to share information pertaining to their major or
field of study.
Hootcourse,
as a Community of Practice platform, allows the instructor and learners to have
very well-defined roles. The instructor, by means of hoots also allocated in
Twitter, can send reminders of upcoming due dates for papers and assignments. The
teacher can also share new information either by providing links or comments to
help students focus their learning efforts. It can also be a way to canalize
questions and doubts that learners have, since they can be answered by a peer
or the instructor.
On
the other hand, students can use Hootcourse to send their homework, which can
be easily hosted in other connected platforms such as blogs in http://blogger.com,
http://posterous.com, or http://WordPress.com
or right there in the same Hootcourse site, where it reads essays. By means of the course hash tag (#course), learners –by means
of their Twitter accounts- can follow what is new or what is now happening with
their Community of Interest, -the course they are taking with you at the
university. But what remains important in this case is that students can commit
themselves to be checking either their Hootcourse or Twitter account to have
access to information being disseminated by the Community of Practice members.
What
I like about a Community of Practice such as Hootcourse is the potential it has
for sharing and learning. From the instructor’s point of view, I can easily
keep track of students’ questions, papers, assignments, and sharing of
information with one another or with the group. With no more than 140
characters, I can either provide concrete, timely feedback to students or guide
them towards real and meaningful sources on the Web to continue to develop
their building of knowledge experientially.
To
conclude, I want to ensure that my students understand the importance of what a
Community of Practice is and how they can exploit it for their own benefit. As
soon as this is understood, I will definitely introduce the platform
(Hootcourse) so I can train them on how to join their class online and that
they can have access to information on their mobile devices (smartphones,
iPods, iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, and the like) 24/7.
E To
fully develop and comprehend this teaching issue, it’s advisable to research
and expand these areas:
1
|
Understanding
a community of practice
|
2
|
Uses
of community of practice in education
|
3
|
Hootcourse
as a community of interest platform
|
4
|
Potentializing
the use of Hootcourse in college studies
|
5
|
Community
of Practice as PLNs and VLEs
|
Professor
Jonathan
Acuña-Solano
ELT
Instructor, Course Designer & Teacher Trainer based in Costa Rica
Freelance ELT Consultant four OUP in
Central America
For
further comments or suggestions, reach me at:
@jonacuso –
Twitter
BusinessDictionary.com
(2013): Community of Practice, definition
|
|
Ferriman,
J. (2013, Feb 17) Social Media in the
Classroom
|
Other
blogs and sites I often write for my students at the university are:
Feel
free to download a copy of this article over here.
Sunday, June 09, 2013
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