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

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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?