KDI: The Internet Learning Forum: Fostering and Sustaining Knowledge Networking to Support A Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers

拟议的项目将设计和评价一个电子知识网络--因特网学习论坛--的显著特点，以支持一个由职前和在职数学教师和科学教师组成的虚拟社区，使他们能够分享和改进教学实践。ILF的设计围绕着这样一个社区的愿景，在这个社区中，教师可以虚拟地访问彼此的教室，观察和讨论教授数学和科学主题的方法，并分享文物。ILF旨在支持一个分散的教师群体，使他们的教学中涉及的隐性知识显性化，以便与其他人分享，并反过来帮助教师将这些显性知识作为其实践的默示部分。本项目的研究目标是了解培养、维持和扩大实践社区的原则，在这种社区中，参与者分享实践和参与对话的价值大于参与的“成本”(例如，时间、技术获取；让他人观看自己的教学)。虽然有效利用技术(ILF)支持实践社区是本研究的重点，但很明显，技术环境只是整个社区战略的一个组成部分。因此，这项研究着眼于影响社会网络动态的各种变量，教师通过社交网络寻求改进和分享他们的教学实践。这项研究的目的不是产生抽象的衡量标准或分数，而是建立一个关于知识、资源使用、实践和社区历史发展的丰富故事。这些研究问题汇聚在教育学、技术学、社会信息学和学习理论的交叉点上，对每个学科都有重要的影响。反映这种交叉的跨学科方法将是为解决以下每一类问题而开展的研究的特征。(1)如何利用网络和电子技术来代表和促进教学实践的分享和转移？(2)ILF社区中出现的被视为共享的意义是什么，这些意义是如何演变并扩散到课堂实践中的？(3)ILF成员如何将他们自己组织成社区，以及我们如何促进跨界？

The proposed project will design and evaluate the salient features of an electronic knowledgenetwork, the Internet Learning Forum (ILF), to support a virtual community of pre-service and in-servicemathematics and science teachers, allowing them to share and improve pedagogical practices. The ILFdesign centers around the vision of a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classroomsto observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics and to share artifacts. The ILFis meant to support a distributed group of teachers in making the tacit knowledge involved in their teachingexplicit so that it can be shared with others and, in turn, to aid teachers in using that explicit knowledge a tacit part of their practice.The research goal of this project is to understand the principles for fostering, sustaining, and scalingcommunities of practice in which the value to participants of sharing their practice and entering in thedialogue outweighs the "costs" of participation (e.g., time, technology access; the concerns of letting othersview one's teaching). While the effective use of technology (the ILF) in supporting a community of practice isa focus of this research, it is clear that technological environments are only one component of an overallcommunity strategy. Thus, the research looks at the variety of variables that impact the dynamics of thesocial networks through which teachers seek to improve and share their pedagogical practices. The intent ofthis research will not be to produce abstract measures or scores, but to build a rich story of the historicaldevelopment of knowledge, resource use, practices, and community. The research issues converge at theintersection of pedagogy, technology, social informatics, and learning theory and have important implicationsfor each. An interdisciplinary approach, reflecting this intersection, will characterize the research carried out to address each of the following categories of issues.(1) How can networking and electronic technologies be used to represent and facilitate the sharing andevolution of teaching practices?(2) What are the taken-as-shared meanings that emerge in the ILF communities and how do thosemeanings evolve and diffuse into classroom practices?(3) How do the ILF members structure themselves into communities and how do we promote boundarycrossing?