UnderstandIT: A Community of Practice of Teachers for VET Education

Maria De Marsico

, Carla Limongelli

, Filippo Sciarrone

, Andrea Sterbini

and Marco Temperini

Roma Tre University, Faculty of Engineering, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146, Rome, Italy

Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Computer Science, Via Salaria 146, 00134, Rome, Italy

Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Engineering Systems and Management, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Rome, Italy

Keywords:

Communities of Practice, Social Networks.

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.

1 INTRODUCTION

The expression Social Network was born in the ﬁeld

of social and behavioral sciences and soon acquired a

weight of its own. A lot of research has been spent

to analyze these social structures made up by a set

of individuals or organizations and their (dyadic) ties

(Wasserman and Faust, 1994). Thanks to technologi-

cal progress and, most of all, t o the spread of the In-

ternet and to the rise of Web 2.0 protocols and frame-

works, the same expression is nowadays mostly re-

ferred to virtual places for sharing information, opin-

ions, data and whatever among connected peers of

a community. In practice a Social Network (SN)

is a set of people or groups of people with similar

pattern of contacts or interactions such as a friend-

ship, co-working, or information exchange (Radicchi

et al., 2004). In this scenario, individuals register into

virtual communities for different purposes: to know

other people, to share daily experience with friends

in a sort of shared virtual diary, but also to exchange

professional knowledge, to learn about particular top-

ics and so on. Among the most populated SNs, we

can mention facebook

for contacts, texts or messages

sharing, YouTube

for video sharing, linkedIn

for job

posting and sharing and their number is continuously

growing. Communities of Practice (CoPs) can be con-

sidered as an especially vertical kind of SNs where

members enroll to reach some goals related to very

speciﬁc topics in particular domains, typically con-

cerning their work or even a kind of hobby (Wenger,

2010). CoPs are groups of people who share an in-

terest or a passion for something they do, and aim

at learning how to do it better by interacting regu-

larly. They are not merely clubs of friends or net-

works of connections between people, but rather own

an identity deﬁned by a shared domain of interest

(from the Wenger web site

). Here we present a par-

www.facebook.com

www.youtube.com

www.linkedin.com

http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/

338

De Marsico M., Limongelli C., Sciarrone F., Sterbini A. and Temperini M..

UnderstandIT: A Community of Practice of Teachers for VET Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0004859703380345

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2014), pages 338-345

ISBN: 978-989-758-023-9

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

ticular CoP, called UnderstandIT

from the European

project inspiring it, having Italian Vocational Educa-

tion and Training (VET) teachers as members. Their

common goal is the learning of the best practices to

use some Web 2.0 instruments and tools, such as fo-

rum, chat and wiki, in their daily teaching activities.

This project arose from the need to bridge the gap be-

tween the use of Web 2.0 by teachers, compared to

that by pupils, and to make digital immigrants (the

former) and digital natives (the latter) encounter in

a common ground (Prensky, 2001). In fact, the un-

derlying hypothesis is that the use of these tools has

great potentialities to make teaching more effective.

In the original European Project, teachers of different

European countries (Lithuanian, Italians, Portuguese,

German, Danish, and English) used a CoP to reach

the same professional goals. The UnderstandIT CoP

was designed following the Wenger’s schema, based

on the concepts of domain, community and practice

(Wenger, 1998). The domain of shared competence

addressed here is the teaching activity for VET ed-

ucation; the community members are VET teachers

while the practice is the use of the Web 2.0 instru-

ments and tools in the teaching activities. In addition,

peer-mentoring as well as peer-coaching are adopted,

since they are widely recognized as winning strate-

gies, most of all when learners are teachers in their ev-

eryday life. However, coaching is an art, that implies

carefully tuned presence/absence of the coach, to spur

coachee’s abilities regarding critical planning, and an

accurate evaluation of obstacles and related overcom-

ing activities. We used the open source ELGG so-

cial network engine

as a platform, since it is one the

most used frameworks delivering the building blocks

that enable companies, schools, universities and asso-

ciations to create their own fully-featured social net-

works and applications. This engine runs as a web ap-

plication, providing a social environment with a wide

range of Web 2.0 services such as forum, chat, wiki

and so on: members are free to create wiki activities

and to participate to all the social activities put on line

by the platform. The research question of our work

is to test if such a reﬂexive approach to the learning

of Web 2.0 really helps the teachers of the Understan-

dIT community to learn and to teach. The powerful

message carried by the learner centric model can be

enhanced by enriching the role of the teacher to in-

clude greater individual support and guidance for the

learners (Quintana et al., 2001). The remainder of the

article is structured as follows. Section 2 draws some

important related work; Section 3 shows the system,

i.e., the social network engine which the CoP is based

http://understandit.di.uniroma1.it/

http://elgg.org

on. In Section 4 the social network along with its

evolution is shown while Section 5 presents the ex-

perimental evaluation of the overall system. Finally

in Section 6 some conclusions are drawn.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND

RELATED WORK

Even if it is not possible to determine the exact birth

of the modern interpretation of CoPs (see for exam-

ple (Bourdieu, 1977) and (Vygotsky, 1978)), it is in-

dubitable that its success has been signiﬁcantly sup-

ported by the works by Lave and Wenger (Lave and

Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1991). The main stream of in-

novation has been related to riding out the idea that

work practice must be conservative and stable in time

and learning must be taken separate from it and be fo-

cused on the most static aspects. One of the factors

supporting this has been the concrete understanding

that the ways people actually work are usually dif-

ferent from what described in manuals, training con-

tents, and job theoretical descriptions. Differences

are related to both complementary as well as com-

pletely alternative strategies and rules. Nevertheless,

it has been noticed that organizations tend to rely on

the static form of training in their attempts to un-

derstand, improve, and transmit work practice. On

one hand, this kind of behavior was generated by a

society structure recognizing a special value to ab-

stract knowledge: the practice details are considered

as contingent, and therefore less essential, or at least

easily derived after the relevant abstractions. It is

to say that the above conventional theory of learn-

ing and most of all of training is far from the an-

cient institution of the artisan workshop, with their

primary role in transmitting and preserving arts and

crafts. However, the industrial era took this preva-

lence of abstract knowledge over actual practice and

to separate learning from working, as well as learners

from workers. By contrast, the new theories returned

to the ancient wisdom, suggesting that appropriate

practice is central to work understanding, and that

abstractions detached from practice might even dis-

tort or obscure less trivial details of practice. Further,

they assigned a special role to social exchange of ex-

perience and information. Transferring these consid-

erations to learning was quite immediate, also due to

the theories of Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1978) and of the

other researchers in the line of socio-constructivism.

Lave and Wenger built on a practice-based theory of

learning, which has its core concept in the Legitimate

Peripheral Participation in CoPs (Lave and Wenger,

1991). The novices enter the community from the pe-

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339

riphery, yet over time move towards full participation

by acquiring experience and reputation. However, the

community itself also moves through stages of devel-

opment which are characterized by different levels of

interaction among the members, and also by differ-

ent kinds of activities. This concept provided one of

the most versatile accounts of the constructive view

of learning, even if it is not actually a method of edu-

cation. Its focus is on learning, rather than on teach-

ing (Wenger, 2010). It is interesting to consider that

a topic formerly focused on organizational learning,

at present deserves an increasingly signiﬁcant role in

any learning ﬁeld. Moreover, ﬁrstly the spreading

of the Internet, with early forms of forums, and sec-

ondly of modern SNs, supported by Web 2.0 tech-

nologies, have further supported the possibility and

spurred the inclination to exchange on virtual com-

munities not only personal data but also working ex-

perience and learning difﬁculties. With the creation

of dedicated software frameworks, CoPs have become

one of the most appreciated forms of social learning

(Blackmore, 2010). In recent projects CoPs have also

been used to implement career education networks,

aiming at supporting an aware transition from school

to work and/or further education, requiring a lot of in-

formation from a wide range of sources. In this new

perspective, learning is both the main activity and the

core topic which is supported by the CoP strategies.

Buysse, Sparkman and Wesley (Buysse et al., 2003)

underline the growing need to integrate educational

research and practice to connect what we know with

what we do. However, they underline that shared lists

of recommended practices often fail to promote the

personal responsibility and exploration ability of all

involved stakeholders, including not only educational

researchers and teachers but also parents and students.

Every member of the educational community should

be encouraged and motivated to analyze and possi-

bly criticize, in a constructive way, each other expe-

riences and teachers should be engaged in research

activities as well. We consider CoPs a very promis-

ing environment to reach this goal, to joining-research

and practice, among which they mention action re-

search (Calhoun, 1994), or professional development

schools. The trick is breaking the linear relation-

ship through which information is handed down from

those who discover professional knowledge to those

who provide and receive educational services (Buysse

et al., 2003). The two central elements of the CoP

approach are: i) situated learning (Hummel, 1993)

and ii) community reﬂection on practice. Knowl-

edge is acquired from and applied to everyday set-

tings, and is discussed with peers and experts that

made up a social system (Wenger, 1998). Other ap-

proaches concern: i) the personalized learning where

the added value is given by a didactic capable to tai-

lor its patterns to the learners’ speciﬁc needs, such

as in a formal education (see for example (Limon-

gelli et al., 2011a; Limongelli et al., 2008a; Limon-

gelli et al., 2011b; Sterbini and Temperini, 2010) for

an insight into this area) ;ii) the ontological approach

where teachers are helped by ontology-base systems

in order to search for suitable didactic material in

the Internet (see (Limongelli et al., 2010; Limon-

gelli et al., 2012; Limongelli et al., 2013b; Limongelli

et al., 2013a)). Moreover, in a perspective of technol-

ogy enhanced learning, there is some research work

(De Marsico et al., 2011; De Marsico et al., 2012)

aiming to integrate more traditional individualized e-

learning and social-collaborative e-learning (Sterbini

and Temperini, 2009; Limongelli et al., 2008b). The

project closest to our work is the SEDA project, that is

a network of people engaged in staff and educational

development. In (Nixon and Brown, 2013) a CoP for

educational developers has been proposed, highlight-

ing the needs for teachers of sharing their experiences.

In our work we focus our attention on a speciﬁc ob-

jective that is the involvement of teachers in the use

of Web 2.0 tools as vehicles for captivating learners.

3 THE SYSTEM

The design of the system started from the requirement

analysis, based on an input coming from a sample of

VET teachers to identify a list of useful features to

deploy:

• Groups common goals sharing and shared editing

tools;

• Friends, groups, stream of interactions and event

calendar and RSS feed import;

• Antispam protection;

• FAQ managing;

• Activities sharing among friends;

• Embedding external contents;

• Tracking changes/hot topics;

• Synchronous (chat) and asynchronous (blog,

page, comment, tweet, forum) communications.

Subsequently we analyzed several open source envi-

ronments and selected the ELGG framework. ELGG

is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MYSQL, Php) web ap-

plication that provides a basic set of services for a so-

cial network system, allowing for a complete interface

conﬁguration and extension of the functionalities (by

adding plug-ins that are either newly implemented or

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selected among the many already available from the

ELGG development community). Finally, the sys-

tem has been deployed and customized to satisfy the

above requests. In SNs members share and exchange

knowledge by adding a new bookmark, posting a link

to a particular video, publishing new pages and so on

and people might feel the need to know those mem-

bers of the community that are interested in sharing

that knowledge. So, among the several features of-

fered by a social networking platform, of special rele-

vance is the setting of access rights associated to each

contributed resource. In particular, the author of a

contributed resource can specify a group (a class of

users) to whom release either read access or read and

write access rights on the resource. The group is a

subset of the CoP members; there are several possi-

ble group speciﬁcations available (listed from a more

public to a more private nature): Everybody, All reg-

istered users, A Group, All your friends, A subset of

your friends and Private. Depending on the write ac-

cess rights of a post, the contributed contents can be

edited asynchronously by different users. Each post

in the system can be tagged by the author, i.e., it can

be associated with one or more keywords. This al-

lows for searching through the system resources by

both full text and tag-based selection. Another char-

acteristic of the system is that the UnderstandIT CoP

has been conﬁgured in such a way to allow for dis-

cussions in several language-speciﬁc communities, as

mentioned in Section 1, with a common discussion

space in English. This feature has been implemented

through the concept of Group managed in ELGG,

where a Group is a subset of all the CoP members that

is owned by a member and can be moderated. Each

group represents a (sub-)community whose members

interact through:

• Group Blog posts, Group Bookmarks and ﬁles

and Group pages (in particular the editing of sub-

page trees was made easier through an appropriate

plugin);

• Possibility to embed videos/podcasts and RSS

feeds and to upload resources through the File

Tool feature (with the organization of ﬁles sup-

ported by the File trees plugin);

• Possibility to embed external content by reference

through the Media Tool;

• Possibility to add (asynchronously) comments on

posted resources (ﬁles, media, bookmarks and

blogs);

• Possibility to share interesting resources through

the Bookmarks Tool;

• Possibility to monitor (import) RSS feeds through

the Feed Tool;

• Management of Forums and Chats.

Moreover, in order to increase the support to col-

laboration, a synchronous shared editing plug-in has

been installed. It is based on the Etherpad open

source project

. Through this plug-in the Group

members can share the editing process on the same

document, i.e., members can cooperate (also by using

a small chat) through:

1. Normal (wiki-like) pages, with the support to

comments and revisions;

2. Shared (etherpad) pages, which allow for: i)

synchronous editing as Google docs, where

each editor’s input is differently highlighted;

ii) replay to all changes/revisions; iii) ex-

port/import to/from documents in various formats

(rtf/doc/odt/html/pdf).

Users of the CoP are kept updated about the CoP

activities either through automatic e-mail notiﬁca-

tions or by means of the CoP web interface. Both the

former and the latter collect information from many

relevant areas of the network, and offer appropriate

notiﬁcations, such as in the following:

• E-mail, RSS feeds, status tweets;

• Last changes in page history;

• Group activities;

• Last changes in the user’s dashboard;

• Last changes in the main CoP’s page and in each

Group main page;

• Contextual tag cloud providing information about

the terms used in the CoP and their location.

To make spammers’ life harder an ELGG plug-

in has been selected and installed and members can

report occurrences of spamming to the administrator,

who in turn can remove the spammer and add user-

name and e-mail to the global

stopforumspam.com

database. To externally disseminate the CoP discus-

sions towards Twitter, a plug-in has been installed to

broadcast twits generated by the CoP users.

Since the original UnderstandIT CoP was born in

the context of the European project with the same

name, its interface was to the languages of the Un-

derstandIT project partners (Lithuanian, Italian, Por-

tuguese, German, Danish, and English). To allow for

cooperation among different language groups, an au-

tomatic Google Translation-based tool has been in-

stalled in all pages. Partners have found the Google-

translator tool sufﬁcient to understand the knowledge

posted by other language people. This was an inter-

esting experiment for international courses, and for

inclusion of contents in foreign languages.

http://etherpad.org/

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4 THE CoP ACTIVITY

In this section we show some main activities of the

CoP members. We describe participants’ interactions

about their collaborative activities by means of the so-

cial Web 2.0 communication tools described in the

previous section, i.e., forum, blogs, faqs, and so on. In

particular, the UnderstandIT CoP was used as a con-

tainer for an online course deployed adopting peer-

to-peer coaching and mentoring strategies. For the

reader’s sake, from now on we will use UnderstandIT

as a name for the course too. This course was attended

by a sample of 64 teachers, coming from different di-

dactic experiences, as shown in Fig. 1. Intentionally

we randomly selected the sample of teachers from dif-

ferent educational institutions in order to obtain a sig-

niﬁcant set of teachers.

Figure 1: The sample distribution of the didactic work ex-

periences of the CoP members.

The overall learning outcome was: I can choose

relevant resources using the CoP approach for any

planned learning activity including ICT-tools where

these are the most appropriate and I am able to

change my teaching style in order to use a more

coaching oriented approach. In the following we

show the detail of learning outcomes of the course

that have been proposed in English and Italian.

Detailed Learning Outcomes

1. Information sources: I can help my students to ﬁnd and

evaluate relevant information including pictures, maps,

sound and video from ICT sources as well as traditional

sources. (e.g. RSS-Feeds, Wikipedia);

2. Information storage: I can help my students to store in-

formation in digital form such as blogs, wikis, podcasts

or portfolios (so it is accessible at home, on the move

and to external experts/advisors);

3. Communication: I can help my students to communi-

cate synchronously and asynchronously through text,

voice and video;

4. Documentation: I can author online spaces to document

learning events and facilitate student use of this material

afterwards (e-portfolio, screen casts, class blog/wiki);

5. Safe use: I can help my students to use online applica-

tions safely (e.g. online identity, privacy, trustworthi-

ness);

6. Group work: I can facilitate online group working, us-

ing methods such as complex instruction;

7. Learning: I can identify the learning outcomes by using

speciﬁc ICT tools in a speciﬁc learning activity;

8. Assessment: I can identify how the learning outcomes

of ICT related activities will contribute to student as-

sessment and use appropriate rubric tools to record this;

9. Planning: I have made a plan for my continuing profes-

sional development in the use of ICT in my teaching;

10. Documentation: I have documented the use of an inter-

active internet tool so that others can beneﬁt of this;

11. Sharing: I have tried at least one way of sharing my ICT

experience with either internal or external colleagues;

12. Local context: I have identiﬁed possibilities/limits of

the use of interactive Internet tools in my institution;

13. Portfolio: I have started or added to an existing e-

portfolio;

14. Evaluation: I have evaluated the outcomes of my

amended teaching session and documented this in my

e-portfolio;

15. Coaching: I have embarked on peer coaching with one

of my colleagues;

16. Coaching: I have the skills of listening and questioning

to be able to coach other people.

The main achievements of such a course were ba-

sically in the deeper appreciation of the amount of

work required from teachers in order to timely deal

with the assigned tasks, and in the knowledge about

which parts of the course need localization and/or

translation, given that this is feasible (e.g., external

material in pdf is heavy to completely translate). The

course included several tasks such as:

• Practice with Web 2.0 tools for doing and analyz-

ing one’s own teaching;

• Analysis of existing CoPs;

• SNs and blogs to coach sessions with the course

tutor and with peers;

• Final composition of a plan to experiment one’s

learning outcomes in her present teaching activity.

The visits of the CoP members at the web site,

over the entire duration of the course, were about

2, 000, distributed as shown in Fig. 3, i.e., in aver-

age 31.25 visits for member. In Fig. 4 the tag clouds

concerning the Blog and the Bookmark activities are

shown. Finally, in Fig. 5 we show the overall CoP ac-

tivity in terms of a standard metrics like the total num-

ber of posts in the forums, the total number of faqs and

so on. All the above activities show that the members

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have been engaged enough in the CoP life. In partic-

ular for the blog activity we see that there have been

posted 90 discussions and 700 posts as shown in Fig.

5. Fig. 2 shows a view of the system interface and an

example of a group interacting through group blog.

Figure 2: At the bottom an example of interaction among

peers, at the top the home page of the course.

5 A FIRST EVALUATION OF THE

CoP

In this Section we present a ﬁrst descriptive evalua-

tion of the CoP with the aim to measure the degree of

satisfaction of the members with respect to the com-

munity activities and reasoning on the effectiveness

of the CoP. Evaluating a CoP is not a trivial task: it

is easy to get overwhelmed with the variety of evalu-

ation approaches and metrics available. Once an on-

line community of practice becomes active, leaders

need to develop an evaluation plan to understand and

Figure 3: The total number of visits.

Figure 4: The tag cloud of the bookmark activity.

Figure 5: The overall CoP activity. Blue and grey bars for

Blog, Forum and Faq represent their total number while

their grey bars represent the total number of answers to

them. Files and Pages bars represent their total number.

document success in their community. In many con-

texts, evaluation approaches, which measure commu-

nities activities and performance, are also referred to

as metric analysis. Here we show the evaluation of

the CoP performance by means of two key activities

submitted to the CoP members, represented by a pre-

and a post-test questionnaire.

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343

5.1 The Pre-test Questionnaire

Through the pre-test questionnaire we measured some

general variables like the members experience on the

use of Web 2.0 tools. It was based on 16 questions

concerning mainly the learning goals, the starting ICT

and Web 2.0 skills and the work experience. Interest-

ing questions were:

1. Have you ever participated to online courses to

date?

2. Have you ever participated in Communities of

Practice online?

3. Which of these tools (forum, chat, blog, rss,...) do

you use or have used at least once?

More than 70% of the members had already par-

ticipated in an online course and in the same way the

majority of the sample, i.e., the 71%, had not experi-

ence in CoPs. On the other hand, Fig. 6 shows that the

majority of the members had experience in the use of

some Web 2.0 instruments like forum, chat and blog.

Figure 6: The answers to question 3: the Web 2.0 skills.

According to the above considerations, taking into

account what shown in Section 4 as well, we can con-

clude that the sample of the CoP members was very

articulated with an average skill on Web 2.0 tools.

5.2 The Post-test Questionnaire

Here we present the results of a questionnaire submit-

ted to the CoP members after having taken the course.

It was composed of 21 questions concerning different

aspects of the didactic experience. We report two im-

portant questions:

1. Did the course meet your expectations?

2. Do you feel yourself prepared to act as a coach to

your colleagues in the use of Web 2.0 tools?

We used a 5-points likert scale to measure the an-

swers. From Fig. 7 we see that the 62% of teachers

has been satisﬁed by the course: it met their expec-

tations. This is a very important key for the success

of any course. Finally, Fig. 8 is a ﬁrst proof of the

effectiveness of the course. We discussed with the

teachers about an aspect which is worth mentioning.

The reﬂexive use of Web 2.0 to teach Web 2.0 tech-

nologies was found particularly engaging, so that this

can be considered as a point in favour of adopting this

approach on a larger scale. The added value is that

using the same tools that the student is learning to ex-

ploit reinforces the ﬁnal achievements and is much

more engaging, along the line of learning by doing.

Figure 7: The answers to question 1: the expectations.

Figure 8: The answers to question 2.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we presented a CoP of teachers, called

UnderstandIt, to learn the Web 2.0 instruments and

tools. We implemented the CoP by means of the so-

cial engine ELGG and the community ended its learn-

ing process few time ago. Here we show the ﬁrst

results of such an experiment, showing both the net-

work activity and an evaluation process, performed

by means of the submission to the CoP members of

two questionnaires, the pre-test and the post-test ques-

tionnaires. The ﬁrst results are encouraging: the ma-

jority of the members feel prepared to coach other

colleagues to teach Web 2.0 instruments and tools in

their didactic activity and feel the course met their ex-

pectations. As a future work we plan to do a deeper

analysis of the log data together with taking into ac-

count all the statistical correlations between the pre

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and the post activity questionnaire in order to make

other measures of effectiveness, test-based as well.

Also we plan to repeat the experiment in a broader

context.

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