Title: Community-based learning in the networked society

Authors: Piet Kommers, Eugenia Kovatcheva

Addresses: Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, University of Twente, Box 217, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands. ' Department of Information Technologies, University of Sofia, Bulgaria

Abstract: The networked society has intensified the dynamics of interaction among professionals in the last decade, and the overall trends show that much more still has to come. The key question of this special issue is what qualitative changes we are facing in the coming years, when the learning between practitioners in education reaches a level of what we dreamt of in the 1970s when school-based curricula, team teaching and altruistic ideologies took off. As an extrapolation of the |Communities of Practice|, this introductory article will highlight intra- and interpersonal professional learning, and suggestions for its new orchestration by stakeholders rather than by institutional leaders. As the main theme, the WWW based community will recur throughout the various application fields. The final conclusion will focus on the networked society and its sociological threats and opportunities; teachers| continuous learning should be closely related to the lifestyle of the youth culture, and learning should be practised amongst peer teachers from time to time.

Keywords: networked society; learning communities; teacher education; lifelong learning; youth culture; communities of practice; COP; professional learning; web based communities; virtual communities; e-learning; online learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2008.017676

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2008 Vol.4 No.2, pp.253 - 267

Published online: 26 Mar 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article