October 27, 2004 - Cycles & Experts
I have been thinking about cycle questions for my ARP for quite a while. When I say I’m thinking about them, what I really mean is that I keep thinking about need to identify some. However, in the last month….none have really surfaced. Perhaps this is because I’ve been so busying locating resources and looking at how others have accomplished the task and I trying. Through my research, I’ve realized that communities of practice are very difficult to create and cultivate. I’m wondering why this is so. So all these ideas from my reading float around inside my head and get me very excited. Yet, its difficult to move back from the big picture to identity the “baby steps” that are needed to get started.
As I was writing this journal, I was also helping Tara with her MicroWorlds project for 664. While waiting for her to ping me back, I began to think about distributed learning and expertise. I realized that in a computer lab setting, students are often discouraged to use each other as experts in an effort to maintain order in the classroom. In order words, in many of the computer labs that I’ve observed, students are reminded to keep their eyes on the teacher, to ask questions of the teacher, and to follow along with the teacher. What is actually happening is students are being discouraged from developing into a learning community where they are tapping the expertise of each other. Wow! This happens in regular classroom also. Many times this sharing of expertise is looked upon as a sort of cheating or a disruption. How does this relate to the community of practice that I am initiating? The same situation occurs for the staff in the field. They ask their questions of their supervisor overlooking their peers because there is no easy way to connect to those peers in the field. Ah, so much expertise out there that is not being tapped because our current system does not provide opportunities for it.