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.
