Community Capers

It’s taken a long time but since 1992 MirandaNet members have been learning how to communicate on line. Now an e-mature community our discussions are becoming more and more sophisticated. We now have examples of interchange where members are creating new knowledge online. They then use these community texts in their own professional context to impact on policy and practice. At the moment I think this is our most advanced contribution to the debate about whether social networking is a time waster or a new social phenomenon that can advance human activity. My hope is that if more people learn how to use this facility we will begin to have democratic participation.

Christina

Braided Learning: Promoting Active Professionals in Education

Christina Preston

Braided learning is a theory that has emerged from the observation of modes of online learning as the MirandaNet community of professionals has matured in digital competence. The MirandaNet Fellowship is a professional organisation of educators, researchers, policy makers, and developers of software and hardware who have a uniting conviction that teaching and learning can be transformed by the use of digital technologies. Established in 1992, the Fellows began their association online in 1994. Over the last 12+ years, MirandaNet has developed into a mature, online community of practice (Preston, 1999, 2005). This history has reveals a three dimensional process of learning and practice which entails coming to understand and participate in a creative, progressive ‘braiding’ of text, opinions, and ideas. These processes reveal how learning by professionals, for the purpose of strengthening both the profession and individual understanding, unfolds in the online context.

There are three identifiable stages in the process professionals in MirandaNet adopt and practice in their professional, online, learning. In the first stage the community engages in creating a braided text online that supports diversity and change of opinions. Some members act as e-facilitators or braiders who help to shape the argument, provide interim summaries and change the direction of the discussion (Preston, 2002; Preston & Holmes, 2002; Cuthell, 2005). These are stored along with forum discussions and teachers case studies in the MirandaNet Braided E-journal (Preston & Cuthell, 2000-2006). In the second stage, braiders demonstrate meta-learning by constructing braided artefacts, which re-interpret the online debate in different styles for different audiences, e.g., newsletters for their local communities and reports for their school senior management team. In the third stage, accomplished fellows take the initiative to set up working parties to explore a subject in more depth. At this point the participants become active professionals, using collaborative knowledge to build new theories and policies that will impact their profession in the longer term (Preston 2007). The following draws the elements of this braided learning process together in more detail through an exploration of MirandaNet practice that continues to mutate.

A Community of Practice as a Nucleus of Learning

This concept of a Community of Practice (CoP) is key to understanding how braided learning works online. The term CoPs was coined by Lave & Wenger (1991) with acknowledgement that it refers to a human process of working and learning together that has been operating for centuries (e.g., as in medieval craft guilds). However, newly explored in a socio-cultural context, the concept provides a useful perspective on knowing, learning and knowledge building in professional life, and has been particularly useful for online contexts for focusing attention on the interests and practices that keep communities together rather than just the geographical co-location (see also Wenger, 1998; and the sections in this paper by Kazmer, and by Montague).

MirandaNet is such a community of practice. It has been described by researchers as a CoP “with an active and passionate core’ (Stuckey, 2005, p. 66), and in a UNESCO report as a successful CoP that effects change in teaching and learning worldwide, using digital access to provide a platform for the disenfranchised:

Such collaborative problem solving is important to many ICT teacher educators, who have relatively little access to technical support or to view new developments. Exchange visits between countries have strengthened community members’ resolve. The exchange of information is two way, as it flows from the wealthy to the less well resourced and back again (Resta, 2002, p. 29).

MirandaNet’s CoP is founded on voluntary, informal participation, and active, directed learners. Members decide on their learning agenda rather than waiting passively to be taught from a curriculum decided by others. This active learning accords with Sachs’ (2003) belief that educators, like doctors, should be active professionals closely involved in the development of policy and practice (MacGilchrist, Myers & Reed, 1997). In MirandaNet, this active practice moves further out into the community as educators in the more mature stage of their collaborative, braided learning come to influence professional policy and create theories and policies of their own.

Staged Models of Learning

Braided learning joins other models and research that described stages in online learning (e.g., Salmon, 2000, 2002; Haythornthwaite, Kazmer, Robins & Shoemaker, 2000) and/or group dynamics, but differs in representing a community that is not delimited by the need to complete a course, write a final exam, or deliver a product. Braided learning does have in common with these models stages relating to access, motivation and socialization in joining the community, exchange of information and experience relevant to the joint venture, development of joint practice, and development of shared meaning. In particular, Braided Learning is grounded in Salmon’s seminal five-stage model for online learning, developed in relation to business courses (see http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml). These stages address:

• Individual access and motivation to use computer-mediated communication
• Online socialization and formulation of online identities
• Information exchange among learners relevant to the courses
• Knowledge construction through collaborative discussion and interaction
• Development of meta-thinking and application of knowledge and online skills to their own goals and purposes that are often exam related.

Observation of MirandaNet practice shows that both individual members, and the CoP as a whole, progress through stages of access, motivation and online socialisation, information exchange, and collaborative knowledge and meta-knowledge building. Braided learning processes begin to appear when members engage with MirandaNet, revealing who they are. As a community, the relevance of such disclosures was recognized after a few years, and profiles for members, which would now be called blogs, were introduced in 1999. They continue in the information exchange stage when members begin to publish their case studies and articles in MirandaNet’s e-journals. The CoP as a whole began to see and benefit from this kind of publication in 1999. Although braided learning begins in these stages, its most important contributions come in the stage of collaborative knowledge building. Thus, Braided Learning as a theory of learning practice most significantly addresses the way in which knowledge is jointly construction through online texts created by and for their fellow CoP members. In MirandaNet, this kind of learning has been observed since 2000, when the community had gained a mature capacity to use the listserv to enrich their professional learning.

Braided Learning Stages

Stage One: Braided Text

The first evidence of Braided Learning is the appearance of braided text. Debates can be started by any member on any subject relevant to the group. In these braided digital exchanges, members interweave their comments, judgments and evidence to create shared insights, which have influence on current professional thinking, formally or informally. (Text is the primary medium of exchange in MirandaNet as it provides a means that is accessible to as many users as possible; it is possible that, in the future, communities may see braiding occurring in use of other means of communication).

This dynamic process of braiding depends on trust between the participants, plus humour and passion; it builds over years with knowledge of past exchanges that cannot be communicated easily to the outsider. This kind of online closed publication can support contradictions and disagreements. Conflicts are not necessarily smoothed over or resolved in the pursuit of greater understanding. Nor is the style homogenised, as it might be in a more public presentation. Individual approaches can be recognised which is not possible in official publications or reports.

This stage of building a collaborative online text is a form of learning by collaborative knowledge building. Members learn by participating in this jointly owned braided text, and by observing the process. There is evidence of learning when particular participants post about their increase in knowledge on the topic or about a change of opinion as a result of the online debate. The validity of the text depends on the full membership of the e-community having immediate input to the debate online.

Braiding, in the form of posting evidence of learning, is of key importance to this CoP. Without posting about learning, i.e., without reflection on what has been gained from online discussion, the texts remain undistinguished and no more collaborative than a question and answer forum. Braiding is important as more than an image; weaving individual threads of text together makes a stronger knowledge fabric, one that represents, and creates the representation of the community as a whole.

Learning to Braid Text

In MirandaNet senior Fellows contribute by promoting braiding. They run courses for learner-braiders in order to enrich the group discussion. Others volunteer for this role either because they have the confidence as senior members or they have a natural talent for understanding how braiding is done and when the skill is needed. Braiders may show their meta-learning by changing the direction of the debate or bringing it back to the subject; they may summarise the debate at various stages to remind the participants what has happened or draw out the conclusions signaling the end of the period of online collaborative knowledge construction. These braiders also encourage reluctant discussants to explore their theme further, calm the agitated and revitalise areas of discussion by clever questions that suggest they know less than they actually do - all good teaching techniques. The difference is that the braider cannot see the participants and must, therefore, be more sensitive to other clues. The braiding helps to clarify aspects of the e-community vision on a particular topic and increase a sense of participation and ownership.

Stage Two: Braided Artefacts

The second stage of braided learning is associated with Salmon’s fifth stage of Development. In this stage braiders reinterpret text for a variety of purposes, creating a braided artefact. MirandaNet braiders create these texts for those outside their CoP, reaching a wide range of audiences depending on the circumstances of the braider. Such artefacts are also often summarised for the MirandaNet online newsletter and archive, which means they also reach and act as example for the CoP members as well.

Stage Three: Influencing and Making Policy

There is a third stage of learning in which the braiders, individually or in groups, learn to use the braided artefacts that express the meta-thinking of the group to have influence over the policies which affect them professionally locally, nationally and internationally. The speed of creation and the international outreach of MirandaNet braided artefacts have group authority that is enhanced by the reach of digital technologies, and the permanence of the online archives.

Some artefacts have been used as the basis of an article in the educational technologies section of a national newspaper. For example, a synthesis of a debate about the reasons for a sudden reduction in the numbers of regional advisers in digital technology in England was reported in the UK Guardian newspaper. Other artefacts have been used by teachers in reports written to influence the decisions of senior managers. For example, an ICT coordinator summarised the advice he was given about social software on school networks to inform the head teacher who was threatening to close down these network services. Another artefact was sent to the government in response to a request for contributions to a consultative document on e-learning (Department for Education and Skills (UK), 2003). Since members come from 43 countries these patterns are repeated internationally.

Moreover, some uses suggest that braiders are not just influencing policy, but are also creating new theories and policies. For instance, sometimes working groups are convened as a result of a braided artefact composed by a member who wants to take the topic further. These working groups then raise funding to explore the subject more thoroughly in research projects. They build face-to-face events into the funding whenever this is viable because collaboration at this level online requires high levels of group understanding and trust. Although young learners may be able to strike up this kind of relationship entirely online, MirandaNet professionals find they still need some social interaction to underpin collaborative theorising. At this point the professionals begin to create policy and theory through their evidence, rather than merely influencing the policies developed by others. At this third and final stage the braiders emerge as active professionals, taking charge of their professional destiny.

Summary

The professional network of MirandaNet has, over its lifetime since 1992, grown into a mature community of practice that has its own model of learning and passes that on to new members of the community, and beyond. The textual basis of this community affords visibility of ideas, and creation of braided and reflective texts. The community is able to create interim summaries and repositionings through braided texts and continue these into more refined braided artefacts that reach outside the community. Overall, this community shows a new way of learning – braided learning – that builds on the affordances of digital technology to effect and support a learning community of practice that can engage in the highest levels of collaborative thinking, developing theory and policy.

This is a draft of a paper we have published with Caroline Haythornthwaite in First Monday- you will the details here find it here. http://www.mirandanet.ac.uk/pubs/

References

Cuthell, J. P. (2005). Beyond Collaborative Learning: communual construction of knowledge in an online environment. INSTICC, Miami, Web Information Systems and Technologies.

Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003). Towards a unified e-learning strategy: Consultation document. Available online at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations/conResults.cfm?consultationId=774.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

MacGilchrist, M., Myers, K. & Reed, J. (1997). The Intelligent School. London, Paul Chapman.

Preston, C. (1999). Building Online Professional Development Communities for Schools. Professional Associations or LEAs. M. Leask and N. Pachler.

Preston, C. (2002). Braided Learning: teachers learning with and for each other. National Interactive Media Association: Learning Together, Tokyo, Japan, NIME.

Preston, C. (in press). Braided Learning: an emerging practice observed in e-communities of practice. International Journal of Web Based Communities.

Preston, C. & Cuthell, J. (2000 - 2006). Braided Learning E-journal, MirandaNet Fellowship. (www.mirandanet.ac.uk/ejournal/ejournal.htm).

Preston, C. and B. Holmes (2002). Capturing the Online Knowledge, Building of Educator: ICTS, Authorship and Living Design. ITTE Conference, Dublin, Ireland, ITTE.

Resta, P. (2002). Information and communication technologies in teacher education: A planning guide, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - UNESCO.

Sachs, J. (2003). The activist teaching profession. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Salmon, G. (2000). E-moderating: The key to teaching and learning online. London: Kogan Paul.

Salmon, G. (2002). E-tivities: The key to active online learning. London: Kogan Page.

Stuckey, B. (2005). Growing on-line communities of practice: Conditions to support successful development of internet-mediated communities of practice. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Research Centre for Interactive Learning Environments, University of Wollongong, Australia.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

There are many of the conditions for successful community development seen in the MirandaNet Fellowship story. I want to reiterate a few of the key strengths, the case study research revealed, that truly make this an exemplar community.

MirandaNet’s strengths over the years of development:

• building true partnerships between academia, in-service educators and technology companies and vendors
• holding an unrelenting focus on professionalism, respecting the practice of teaching with ICTs
• clearly valuing the celebratory and social aspects of building social capital within educator groups
• offering new professional roles for in-service school teachers (researcher, leader, presenter, collaborator, mentor)
• sustaining a self-supporting infrastructure and financial model that brings activity to the members
• the stratified community structure that scaffolds internal support, close relationships and capacity building
• the contagious and unflagging energy, vision and leadership of the community director and founder supported by others who have stepped into leadership roles
• the project-based nature of the community research activity - whether individual action research or community consultation people are doing more than talking together
• the high profile the community, and its members, have attained in the field, educationally, politically,  and with technology providers.

The next week or so of blog posts will be offered by a number of community members beginning with the community director Christine Preston.  These posts will offer the most up-to-date insights into the community priorities, activities, and future. We will close this case study with a real time field trip to the community at the close of next week. Times and dates will be confirmed soon.

Network communities are a form of technology-mediated environments that foster a sense of community among users. One of the design dimensions of network communities is developing a sense of persistent, shared space as an environment that frames the presence of multiple actors and provides mutual awareness. The shared space of a network community offers the potential for verbal and non-verbal communication at all times, but the space does not exist only when explicit communication is taking pace. There is a “there” there, even when participants are quiet or absent’ (Cuthell, 2005 p.322).

This community is largely based on a hybrid of activity, preferring to organize face-to-face events wherever possible. The community organizes five or more seminars a year, depending on the availability of funding. Personal relationships and professionalism are cemented and celebrated in these workshops and other face-to-face events like the ten-year party held in 2002.

MirandaNet Fellowship has two Internet-mediated communication systems. The public site MirandaNet is open to the broader educational community. A large number of the resources of the MirandaNet Fellowship are available over the public side of the community web site. It is accessed by over 1000 visitors a week seeking resources and advice. The most accessed parts of the community site are the member profiles with associated partnerships and the case studies. The community resources, projects and publications link to the priorities and standards of, and are linked on, the National Grid for Learning, an English Government Clearinghouse of educational resources.

MirandaLink is the community’s private or closed conference system. Since 1999, the community has been in partnership with Oracle sculpting the facilities of Think.com to build the community interface and tools. This partnership has allowed the community to develop customized tools and interfaces and to focus resources in face-to-face activity wherever possible.

The community consultancy actively generates its funding through bids for research projects, pilots of new technology, advice on policy development, and the creation of local and international partnerships. The community has been successful in tenders for government and industry projects and has lately been the one of the key consultancies invited to tender for strategic projects in England. In a recent program where teacher innovators were nominated for an e-learning project, ten of the forty accepted participants were MirandaNet Fellows. The partnerships and consultative projects are a major part of what sustains the activity of this community and makes engagement equally worthwhile for members and partners. At the most grassroots level, the funding that the community attracts for action research and pilot programs, is often able to release teachers for short periods of time, compensate them for expenses, and support the school with resources. In some circumstances the technology piloted in the research, for instance laptops, may be retained in the school after the research is completed.

The community management and Scholars work has postioned MirandaNet as an expert advisory body in the field of educational technology. The passion and vision of the Director and now the Directors of the seven International Fellowships have sustained the currency and relevance of each community to both its teacher members and the industry sponsors. Constantly bidding for projects and seeking industry funding is a large task but the activity of MirandaNet could never be sustained without it. It is highly unlikely that an unfunded and wholly volunteer organization could, over fifteen short years, develop the professional profile and credibility that MirandaNet currently holds.

People rarely leave this community. It has maintained a steady growth pattern from the opening five members to the current 300+ members. There is ebb and flow in terms of their level of activity and working party involvement but there was clear evidence, from the stories told at the tenth birthday party of the community, that members deeply value their ongoing association.

The MirandaNet Fellowship, by virtue of its structure and norms, develops strong ties and interdependency between the members, clients and partners. This is a small selective and clearly bounded community.. The two-tiered framework of Scholars and Fellows creates mentoring and leadership relationships amongst peers. The research project partnerships, between people in different educational contexts, create strong bonds between members as they come to rely on and relate to each other when working together. Members build individual and group knowledge and capacity through their relationship with each other.

There are both public and closed forums on the Internet site to support members’ thinking and working together. Through their membership in MirandaNet members have the opportunity to explore new practices with cutting edge ICTs in a consultative organization, where professionals talk, listen and work together. Whether in an industry, academic or advisory capacity, MirandaNet Fellows all work to provide services for each other and ‘reify’ (Wenger, 2002) their practices in artifacts shared over the public site with the larger external educational community.

Participants in MirandaNet projects and research activities are able to publish work in a professional arena and to build up a status amongst their peers. At any one time there may be between five and twelve independent projects supported by the community. Project bidding was a major part of the director’s role until a person was hired to concentrate on winning bids. Unless specialist knowledge is required, most project teams are formed by sending out information to the community and asking who wants to be involved. The community is selective in the types of projects in which it engages. Companies do vie for MirandaNet to work with them but the director clearly stated that some products and/or company cultures were not considered good enough for MirandaNet to work with. Through involvement in MirandaNet, teachers don’t have to leave the classroom to reflect on their practice and to gain support for innovation. Members are afforded the opportunities to work as a leader within their own school and across project related schools.

There is a constant flow of messages, relating to project updates and new topics for discussion, between members over the community e-mail list and private discussions of the Miranda Link. This flow is punctuated and focused by the monthly e-mail newsletter. The newsletter draws member attention to reports and updates from current activities, educational policy updates and changes, funding opportunities and engagement opportunities. This community keeps members up-to-date with new government initiatives and priorities in relation to ICTs in education and discussion in the community has been used to formulate responses to media coverage, government press releases and ministerial requests.

The rhythm and connection of the community is further supported by face-to-face workshop and events held throughout the year. The workshops help members to stay abreast of the cutting edge technologies and pedagogical practices in school and curriculum areas. Face-to-face events in MirandaNet also allow members to socialize. The organizers have deliberately made face-to-face activities very social and entertaining and to treat the teacher members well when they come together. This is important to both teacher professional esteem and the development of ties within the community. Indeed the community director reported that MirandaNet gatherings were very highly regarded for being fun, motivational and opportunities for celebration. In Christina’s own words, “I deliberately make that a part of raising teachers’ self esteem. We do have a very serious entertainment side to the whole thing.”

MirandaNet has a clearly articulated purpose. This is best expressed in the community’s mission statement. “MirandaNet strives to enrich the lifelong learning of professionals involved in education. Using advanced technologies the Fellowship spans social, vocational, cultural and political divide to create lifelong learning solutions for the education marketplace” (Cuthell, 2005, p. 324) . The community norms have a clear view of teachers as professionals and the members work to have teachers operate in the roles and activities accorded that professional status.

There are issues of timing that have contributed to MirandaNet’s successful development. The climate was right for teachers to find a stage for celebration of their practice and gain professional acclaim. The way in which industry and education in the UK have become such effective collaborators might also be quite unique. The British government has actively worked to build good relations between technology manufacturers and vendors and the bastions of education and research. Against this climate MirandaNet was able to establish a collaborative environment that represents a win-win for all parties with no compromise in the values of either. The Industry Partners are leading technology corporations the caliber of Toshiba, Promethean and Actis in the United Kingdom. These partners may fund projects or offer leading edge technology for school-based pilots.

Teachers work as evaluators and researchers and the industry provides the technology and resources to enable the research projects. No product endorsements are built and teacher recommendations serve to describe effective ways to incorporate new technologies into constructivist classroom pedagogies. Teachers are clearly the beneficiaries as MirandaNet establishes them as collaborators and researchers able to publish valued work for their peers. In this way the MirandaNet Fellowship is grounded in classroom action research programs. The community is able to leverage the long standing partnerships between academic institutions, schools and technology corporations that have developed within the community, to carry out large and small scale research programs.

MirandaNet’s activity is clearly situated in schools and authentic contexts for the integration of ICTs. This situativity makes MirandaNet’s research capability compelling for teacher researchers, academics and technology vendors alike. The community founder Christina Preston described the community activity as being “working groups of people moving forward together”. The supportive culture of the community shines through when at the tenth birthday party, in a discussion of the community traditions of the community, participants said they felt this was a place to take risks and people would be there to support them in that. They described it as “jumping off a cliff with their eyes closed”.

Project-based activities have included a wide variety of technologies and groups over the fifteen years of the community’s life to date. Two examples of the community’s past involvement in research can be seen in the Scoop and Interactive Whiteboard projects (our guest bloggers next week will give us an update on the latest projects and activities). Members trialed the Scoop technology (now called Think.com) designed by Oracle, as a tool for educational communities. Over a year members reflected on and made explicit their requirements for such a community tool and the designers were given feedback and ideas for refinements. In another project, the Fellowship, and partners Schoolscape@Future EU Minerva project and Promethean Interactive Whiteboards, established a professional development program for teachers, in the use of the latest whiteboard technology. From this professional development, teachers in turn, developed case studies and resources which were shared throughout the community. MirandaNet’s project and research activity develops knowledge for the community and each project in turn gifts resources, in the form of reports, case studies and curriculum plans, to its members and the wider educational community. This publishing raises the profile of the community and furthers its capacity to attract partners, clients and members.

The goal has been to develop individuals, effective teams and partnerships, and the capacity of the profession with regard to the use of ICTs in education. This goal and community model is replicated in each of the six additional MirandaNet chapters spawned about the globe. Each chapter is headed by a local academic chair and is built on the MirandaNet Fellowship multi-partnered, multi-level structure.

Cuthell, J. P. (2005). What Does It Take To Be Active? Teacher Participation in Online Communities. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 1(3), 320 - 332.

MirandaNet is managed by a small secretariat consisting of the Director and founder, a web editor, an administration manager, and a Fellowship secretary. The Fellowship activity is overseen by an Advisory Council made up of 25-30 very senior academics, technologists, industry representatives, and government agency and education system representatives from across the United Kingdom. The Director, Christina Preston was well known in the Educational ICT area, both in academic and industry circles, well before she launched the MirandaNet Fellowship. It was largely her passion and vision, and on many occasions her personal finances, that guided, buoyed and prodded the community into the level of respect it now holds in the UK and International educational sector.

The MirandaNet infrastructure is underpinned by a discrete three-tiered structure and a clear pathway to a role in the community core. This structure is one of the Fellowships most unique attributes. Where many pundits will suggest that communities are all only about horizontal learning and  are antithetical to hierarchy, the MirandaNet Fellowship proves a very successful exception. In this community an accepted member begins with Member status which allows them to enter into the discourse of the community. They have full access to the e-mail list, newsletters and web site profile and published resources of the community. They may then move to become Scholars, mentored to carry out a local action research project and to publish their findings to the community. Having met collaboration and publication obligations to the community, a Scholar may then be awarded a Fellowship. Fellows are the inner circle of mentors to the community. Fellows may hold office in specific areas as Consultant Fellows, Mentor Fellows or Speaker Fellows. Being a Fellow in MirandaNet is regarded as a both prestigious and very marketable in terms of a curriculum vitae and as proof positive of accomplishment in teaching with ICTs.

Members develop their profiles and status through opportunities for discussion, research and publication, project team work, presentation and shows, mentoring and leadership in the community. The leadership role of Fellows is integral to the community’s ability to realize a research capacity. Fellows work as leaders, collaborators, mentors and peer reviewers for fellow members. Scholars and Fellows, working in a voluntary capacity, often present on behalf of MirandaNet and the corporate partners at conferences, workshops and trade exhibitions.

It is worth examining briefly the role of the Consultant Fellows as consultancy and funding is a key enabler in this community’s ongoing work. The community leadership for research projects is supported by a Core Team of Fellows. This team includes project consultants; senior associates, consultants and academics with various ICT specializations. Project consultants are highly respected leaders, practitioners and researchers in the field of educational technology and active Fellows in the MirandaNet community.

Partnerships are also a key in the MirandaNet Fellowship. Some partnerships evolve through the prescribed structure of the community and the attendant roles. Members, as they progress to Fellow, are able to operate in collaborative groups as mentors, peer reviewers, buddies, team members and leaders. Partnerships also exist at senior and executive levels with the educational institutions, government agencies and vendor groups. These partnerships are actualized through the community dialogue, research projects, the Advisory Board membership and funding opportunities. A large part of the attraction for these highly respected senior partners, at least in the early days, was the credibility and high regard in which the community founder was held in this domain. She was a very successful educational software developer and researcher and had established relationships with many of these organizations in past collaborations. Fifteen years later the attraction for new members is the high regard with which the total community is held. This respect is in part due to the calibre of its membership, but also due to the community’s reputation for consistently producing high quality research from authentic contexts.

The Director’s role as leader, sponsor and champion and her interaction in this community cannot be overstated. She has worked to generate projects, tenders and professional development opportunities for the community. The Director described her role as sometimes being a matchmaker between the community partners and international relationships. Because of those efforts this community’s finance and support affords the collaborative professional activity of the members. This self-funding model is also quite unique amongst IMCoPs. In MirandaNet members can work on funded research projects income from which affords other activities of the community.

The MirandaNet Fellowship is a community of UK and International educators, educational researchers, technology consultants focused on the domain of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in school education and in supporting action research best practices.

MirandaNet Homepage

MirandaNet’s evolution began after the 1992 closure of the Toshiba sponsored Project Miranda at the London Computing Centre. The team of academics involved wanted a way to stay working and learning together about ICTs in schools and MirandaNet was born under the vision of its founder Christina Preston.

An ongoing stream of research, assessment, and demonstration projects over the years has provided a rich learning environment in this community. Projects have for instance explored the use of laptops, electronic whiteboards, web resources and e-facilitation in K-12 contexts. The Fellowship’s work has been funded through grants, tendered and sponsored action research projects, and industry partnerships. Core group members act as part of a professional consultative organization, where professionals talk, listen and collaborate with government, industry, teacher educators and researchers.

This is a structured community where those accepted for membership enter as MirandaNet Scholars. After making a clear contribution to the community through a personal workplace research project and publication, Scholars may be promoted to become Fellows. Fellows are the experienced inner circle of the community who offer mentorship and expertise back to the community.

The community membership has been supported by web and e-mail-based technology, as well as public and private web forums and more recently the community has adopted Web2.0 technologies and online live meeting facilities. Fellows, as a group and within geographical limits, have opportunity throughout the year for face-to-face interaction through the community workshops, seminars and MirandaNet presentations at related educational conferences.

A few things really set this community apart from many educational counterparts and may be testimony to its longevity and the very low attrition in membership over its nearly 16 years in existence. The next four posts will examine MirandaNet’s development through the lens of the four community components; people, common ties, social interaction, and place. And next week we will be joined by some amazing guest bloggers from the community, beginning with the Founder and Director Christina Preston, to give us insight into the current community activities and the value they derive from community engagement.

Through this blog we will hear about communities from a number of perspectives. I will relate my research perspective, we will meet the community managers and members, take field trip to each community and have several opportunities to listen to you the audience open up issues and reflect on each community’s strength and value to the field.

The first community in this study will be the MirandaNet Fellowship

Over the month of July the case study will offer:

1. A community case story on the blog (July 6-16)
2. Guest blogging about activities/projects in the community by community members introduced by the community director Christina Preston (July 17-31)
3. A guided field trip to the community space/s through Learning Times (one day week of July 20-26)
4. A round table event in the Community Capers site in Second Life (one day week of July 27-31)
5. Publication of a summary case resource on a wiki - acknowledging all who contributed over the month (July 31st)

Come join us over July to be inspired and to learn and support colleagues about the globe in their community development efforts.

This research outlines my conceptual framework built out from the four definitional components to include core conditions and key attributes. The framework was developed through open and axial coding of rich text data collected from multiple sources (interviews, observations, documents, web site audits, artifacts and published and promotional materials).

The convener is the one person most likely to have high levels of continuity and contact with members in roles right across the community and understand community infrastructure, activity, development and history.  Since the research was focussed on the management role in community development the key informants for this research became the community conveners. This blog and the collaborative activities planned to surround each case study are for me an unmissable opportunity to dynamically verify, moderate and challenge the findings by soliciting opinions and perspectives from a broader community membership. It will also be an opportunity to examine if and how these conditions may vary with time as communities have continued to mature and embrace new structures and technologies since the original research data was collected.

The three levels of the conceptual framework are components, conditions and attributes.

• Components - definitional components of community
• Conditions - the key issues arising for each component
• Attributes - ways the issue was realised or addressed

For example:

• Component: People
• Condition: has leadership (parent) as a condition
• Attribute: a passionate core group (child) was one observed attributes of successful leadership.

The four pages linked on this blog briefly outline the key findings for the four definitional components of community and what managers and conveners can do to support them. I want to introduce these now in preparation for our first in-depth review and community case study in July. Each case study will be chosen to exemplify, elucidate or broaden understanding of one of more of these core conditions.

Just aggregating the definitions of community in the literature over the last sixty years only serves to confound rather than clarify an understanding of what community comprises. The sociologist Hillery (1955) sought to determine the common definitional components of community. His research determined that four common components occurred in 69 of the 94 definitions of community; people, common ties, social interaction and place. Interestingly the only component common to all 94 was people. Hillery’s simple set of four components still held true when applied by subsequent researchers and commentators (Hamman, 2000; Poplin, 1979) many years later. The validity of these definitional comments was further confirmed in my research with an examination of a pool of twenty five definitions collected from recent community, online community and CoP literature. Issues not considered by Hillery were readily able to be subsumed as attributes of the main four components. New definitional attributes found in these recent definitions largely related to temporal and developmental issues of community. Hillery’s set of four high level definitional components became, the core of a conceptual framework, the lens through which advice from disparate domains, research works, methodologies and community case studies could be viewed.

How are each of these components themselves described? Explore this table of the Association of recent definitional components to Hillery’s four themes.

An analysis of the definitions did reveal, as Poplin had noted, new language and terms have been applied in recent descriptions. While the concepts in the definitions were found to be highly interrelated and interdependent they were able to be associated with the four Hillery components. While not meant to represent a mutually exclusive categorization, the table linked above offers an association of concepts around the Hillery themes and represented in this way it serves as a snapshot of community that might be used to begin recognizing it.

Each component was considered to be associated by being a motivator for, contributor to, or result of the theme in question. For instance a shared history can be considered a common tie in community whether the history is developed within or before joining the community. A shared history with others in a community might serve as much as an attractant to joining the community as it could be a product of the community. Likewise, participation structures may be a mark of place in an online community or may be the vehicle through which the place is created.

Hamman, R. B. (1999). Computer networks linking network communities: A study of the effects of computer network use upon pre-existing communities http://cybersoc.blogs.com/mphil.html.

Hillery, G. (1955). Definitions of community: areas of agreement. Rural Sociology, 20, 111-123.

Poplin, D. E. (1979). Communities: a survey of theories and methods of research (2nd ed.). New York: MacMillan.