¶ Providing a digital environment to support a community of Practice
This first EdTech workshop is all about the design of digital environments to support communities of practice (or every other learning community). Please find more information below.
¶ EdTech-Workshop Agenda
- Date/Time: Monday, May 4th, 12.00 PM - 1.30 PM (UTC +2), online
- Video-Link: https://learnin.video/ws-edtech (no login required, CHROME browser or App (for mobile devices) needed).
- ToDo: If possible, read this Wiki article and create an account for yourself for this Wiki on https://learnin.wiki/register or login with your Google account.
As we are very tight with schedule, the creation of content and environments etc., EdTech Work-Stream will use this page to inform and guide you.
¶ EdTech-Workshop Outline
The focus of our workshop is the question of what is particularly is needed to support a community of practice or any other group of people, engaged around a certain topic. As providing technology for education and learning environments is always a question of the needs, the technical and organizational possibilities and the know-how of its users. So we also have to look at the question from various perspectives.
The workshop will highlight certain general aspects and will let the participants describe their own digital environments. The goal is the creation of local or national digital environments and also to get used to "our" environment, used at LearnIn, for our collaboration and the future activities of LearnIn.
For the creation of LearnIn's digital ecosystem or environment we have been using following software and tools. The most recent one is this Wiki.
¶ Used Software and Tool
At LearnIn's Regional Task Force we are using various tool and platforms to organize the work we are doing. We have build up in the last four weeks all by ourself a digital environment, that gives us the opportunity to collaborate, communicate, work on tasks, inform others and document our work at the same time. The table shows what we are using and what for we chose the tool or environment.
| Tool / Software | What for | Alternatives (Open Source, Freemium or free product related) |
G Suite (Google) (free for Education) → learnin.community | Collaborative workspace, email (gmail), Drive, Documents, Presentation, Groups, SSO, Analytics | |
Rocket Chat (open source, installed on a cloud server) | Team communication, chat, channels, discussion groups | |
Jitsi Meet (open source, installed on a cloud server) | Video chat 1:1 and groups, integrated into Rocket.chat |
|
| Miro (paid, free for single without collaboration) | Online collaborative whiteboard platform, Kanban board, illustrations, design | |
| Rebrandly → go.learnin.info/... | URL Shortener with domain integration | |
| Amazon Web Services (paid) | Virtual Server Instances (EC2), DNS (Route 53) |
|
wiki.js (open source, installed on a cloud server) | Wiki, content curation, documentation | |
| LearnIn Projects (CRI Paris, free) | Projects, workspace for Communities of Practice | |
| Bookwhen (paid) | Registration for Workshops etc. | many alternatives. We tried to install a few open source tools but didn't succeeded |
To understand what knowledge is needed to build up a digital ecosystem like that, we have created a profile of an EdTech specialist. LearnIn thinks that technology has to support pedagogy and should never be there for itself. We don't support a "there is an app for that" approach. Following frameworks and models might help to understand each of the three pillars of LearnIn and the similarity to other models.
¶ Frameworks and Models
The TPACK framework (Wikipedia entry) is a good starting point to understand and describe what is needed to provide a digital environment to support educational groups and CoPs alike. "Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. The TPACK framework extends Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge" (→ tpack.org). Have a look at the illustration below:
