Building Community in a Distance Learning Course

References

Cameron, B., Kostelecky, K., Morgan, K., and Williams, K. 2009. Group projects: Student perceptions of the relationship between social tasks and a sense of community in online group work. The American journal of distance education, 23 (1), 20-33.

Palloff, R., and Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: Learning together in community. San Francisco: John Wiley & Son Inc.

Palloff, R., and Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Peck, M. (1987). The different drum: Community making and peace. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Powell, J., and Lines, J. (2010). Making learning personal: Recommendations for classroom practice. About Campus, May-June, 19-25.

Ritter, C., Polnick, B., Fink, R., and Oescher, J. (2010). Classroom learning communities in educational leadership: a comparison study of three options. Internet and higher education, 13, 96-100.

Steelcase WorkSpace Futures. (2010). How the workplace can improve collaboration: Converging spatial, social and informational trends are creating demanding workspaces that support new patterns of collaboration. White Paper, June, 1-7.

Static vs. Dynamic Technologies

I find myself tending to explore more and more dynamic technologies in my courses and with the teachers and students I work with.  The challenge in doing so, as a coach snot assigned to a classroom, is time.  Embedding these dynamic technologies in helping students explore and produce content, communicate with distant learners, and collaborate with peers synchronously and asynchronously is my goal as I hope to return to either a F2F or distance learning teaching position.   Until then I lumber in the midpoint with one foot in dynamic and the other stuck in the static use of technology.  I say this for I coach teachers in the use of technologies, but simply using them does not make them dynamic.  Technologies become dynamic when they are used to promote student production of information, collaboration on products they are creating, and communication among students is self-generated and interactive.  Alone the technologies are all static; we make them dynamic!