UnderstandIT: A Community of Practice of Teachers for VET Education

Maria De Marsico, Carla Limongelli, Filippo Sciarrone, Andrea Sterbini, Marco Temperini

2014

Abstract

Social Networks are among the most popular achievements of Web 2.0. As a matter of fact, the Internet is full of social communities like Facebook or Twitter or others, which are used not only by teenagers but also by older users to share experiences, information and opinions. The expression Social Network allows for a wide interpretation, coming from the research in social and behavioral sciences. It also lends itself to encompass a kind of more thematically vertical communities, namely Communities of Practice, where groups of people interested to learn a particular practice are supported in achieving this goal thanks to the professional relationships with expert peers. The community network evolves with time, as novice users become experts in turn, and new communication protocols arise. We start from the consideration that most high school students nowadays use Web 2.0 instruments and tools for chatting, streaming or posting messages. An interesting challenge is the possibility for teachers the use of the same instruments and tools to enhance their daily work. To this aim, we present a first study of a Community of Practice of teachers, involved in Vocational Education and Training (VET), aiming at learning the use of Web 2.0 tools and applications to support the learning process of their pupils. In practice, we propose to use Web 2.0 to learn to teach through Web 2.0. As a platform we used the web application ELGG, that is an open source social network engine thanks to which we built a social environment where a sample of VET teachers participated to several social activities. A first evaluation of effectiveness of such an approach is encouraging.

References

  1. Blackmore, C. (2010). Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice. The Open University.
  2. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Buysse, V., Sparkman, K., and Wesley, P. (2003). Communities of practice: Connecting what we know with what we do. Exceptional Children, 69(3):263-278.
  4. Calhoun, E. (1994). How to use action research in the selfrenewing school. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
  5. De Marsico, M., Sterbini, A., and Temperini, M. (2011). The definition of a tunneling strategy between adaptive learning and reputation-based group activities. In Proc. 11th IEEE Int. Conf. on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT, pages 498-500.
  6. De Marsico, M., Sterbini, A., and Temperini, M. (2012). A strategy to join adaptive and reputation-based socialcollaborative e-learning, through the zone of proximal development. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 19:2:105-121.
  7. Hummel, H. (1993). Distance education and situated learning: Paradox or partnership? Educational Technology, 33(12):11-22.
  8. Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In Resnick, L., Levine, J., and Teasley, S., editors, Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, chapter 4, pages 63-82. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.
  9. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
  10. Limongelli, C., Lombardi, M., Marani, A., and Sciarrone, F. (2013a). A teacher model to speed up the process of building courses. In Human-Computer Interaction. Applications and Services - 15th International Conference, HCI International 2013, Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 21-26, 2013, Proceedings, Part II, pages 434- 443.
  11. Limongelli, C., Lombardi, M., Marani, A., and Sciarrone, F. (2013b). A teaching-style based social network for didactic building and sharing. In Proceedings of AIED 2013 - 16th International Conference, AIED 2013, Memphis, TN, USA, July 9-13, 2013., pages 774-777.
  12. Limongelli, C., Mosiello, G., Panzieri, S., and Sciarrone, F. (2012). Virtual industrial training: Joining innovative interfaces with plant modeling. In Proc. of ITHET 2012, pages 1-6. IEEE.
  13. Limongelli, C., Sciarrone, F., Starace, P., and Temperini, M. (2010). An ontology-driven olap system to help teachers in the analysis of web learning object repositories. Information System Management, 27(3):198-206.
  14. Limongelli, C., Sciarrone, F., Temperini, M., and Vaste, G. (2008a). Lecomps5: A web-based learning system for course personalization and adaptation. In Proceedings of IADIS 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 22- 25, 2008. Proceedings, pages 325-332.
  15. Limongelli, C., Sciarrone, F., Temperini, M., and Vaste, G. (2011a). The lecomps5 framework for personalized web-based learning: A teacher's satisfaction perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(4):1310- 1320.
  16. Limongelli, C., Sciarrone, F., and Vaste, G. (2008b). Lsplan: An effective combination of dynamic courseware generation and learning styles in web-based education. In Proceedings of AH'08: Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems, volume 5149 LNCS, pages 133-142.
  17. Limongelli, C., Sciarrone, F., and Vaste, G. (2011b). Personalized e-learning in moodle: The moodle-ls system. Journal of E-Learning and Knowledge Society, 7(1):49-58.
  18. Nixon, S. and Brown, S. (2013). A community of practice in action: Seda as a learning community for educational developers in higher education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 50(4):357-365.
  19. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the Horizon, 9(5):1-6.
  20. Quintana, C., Carra, A., Krajcik, J., and Elliot, S. (2001). Learner-centred design: reflections and new directions. In Carroll, editor, Human-computer interaction in the new millennium., pages 605-626. ACM Press.
  21. Radicchi, F., Castellano, C., Cecconi, F., Loreto, V., and Parisi, D. (2004). Defining and identifying communities in networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(9):2658.
  22. Sterbini, A. and Temperini, M. (2009). Collaborative projects and self evaluation within a social reputationbased exercise-sharing system. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - WI-IAT Workshops, volume 3, pages 243-246.
  23. Sterbini, A. and Temperini, M. (2010). Selection and sequencing constraints for personalized courses. In Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE.
  24. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
  25. Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994). Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge Un. Press.
  26. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker, 9(5):2-3.
  27. Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Blackmore, C., editor, Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice, chapter 11, pages 179-198. The Open University.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

De Marsico M., Limongelli C., Sciarrone F., Sterbini A. and Temperini M. (2014). UnderstandIT: A Community of Practice of Teachers for VET Education . In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-023-9, pages 338-345. DOI: 10.5220/0004859703380345


in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist14,
author={Maria De Marsico and Carla Limongelli and Filippo Sciarrone and Andrea Sterbini and Marco Temperini},
title={UnderstandIT: A Community of Practice of Teachers for VET Education},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2014},
pages={338-345},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004859703380345},
isbn={978-989-758-023-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - UnderstandIT: A Community of Practice of Teachers for VET Education
SN - 978-989-758-023-9
AU - De Marsico M.
AU - Limongelli C.
AU - Sciarrone F.
AU - Sterbini A.
AU - Temperini M.
PY - 2014
SP - 338
EP - 345
DO - 10.5220/0004859703380345