The computer science high-school teaching community of practice possesses a rich collection of distributed practical knowledge consisting of individual teachers' expertise regarding pedagogy. However, without a proper means of communication and rules of discourse, the individual pieces of knowledge might not be transferred properly within the…

"Los testimonios," or life stories, shared in this volume reveal that academia represents a labyrinth of challenges for aspiring and emerging Latina scholars--a story these authors know all too well. As Latina "veterana" scholars, who have traveled this arduous journey, the authors recognize that their collective efforts have…

This paper provides an account of the development of online communities at Ultralab for students engaged on masters-level programmes, doctoral research and continuing professional learning. It considers the ways in which the engagement of learners, and their consequent participation, is seen to be dependent on several factors--the learners'…

Communities (including online communities) appear to provide powerful contexts for the professional development of teachers. Yet, despite the apparent educational potency of groups, professional development research has almost exclusively focused on describing and explaining the learning of individuals. In a world where technology supports…

Current understandings of information literacy are drawn from research within library and educational contexts, in which information literacy is identified as a suite of skills that facilitate the learning process. In these contexts, information literacy education focuses on information discovery through the development of a systematic set of…

Acknowledging the fact that teachers are at the heart of any educational reform effort, the European Union funded project EarlyStatistics aims to enrich European children's learning of statistics by offering their mathematics teachers a high-quality online professional development program. A central conviction underlying the design of the program…

The article reports results from a research facilitated learning project carried out in an engineering department in an oil and gas company. The objective of the project was to enhance an awareness of and the ability to use, dialogue and reflection-based learning approaches. The results document that the project-based engineering setting induces…

This paper discusses the use of online learning communities for library professional organizations to promote collaboration and learning. The addition of an online learning community component to a library organization expands collaborative and educational opportunities for members through a virtual environment. Although technologies used to…

This paper comments on strengths and weaknesses of the papers on communities of practice in this special issue of "Technology, Pedagogy and Education." First it discusses the character of communities of practice and the question of whether schools are environments that are conducive to the development of teacher communities of practice. It then…

This paper discusses a model for teaching leadership to first-year students as part of a learning community. It outlines the purpose and structure of the course and presents ideas for how different disciplines could be combined with leadership in learning communities. Teaching leadership to first-year students as part of a learning community…

This article is concerned with understanding continuity and stability in teaching, and their significance. It looks particularly at the work of Anthony Giddens on structure and agency, that of Martin Heidegger on the limits of discursive and theoretical analysis, and the communitarian strand within ethics. It applies this discussion to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review a systemic organizational change initiative for improving collaboration, innovation and value creation at a global telecom. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a comprehensive internal assessment Telenor identified core issues and challenges in supporting collaboration after several years of…

This article describes an analytic approach for situating teachers' instructional practices within the institutional settings of the schools and school districts in which they work. The approach treats instructional leadership and teaching as distributed activities and involves first delineating the communities of practice within a school or…

Facilitating schools to develop more collaborative cultures is seen as one of the major challenges in promoting teachers' continuing professional development. This article recounts how a fifteen-month project designed to promote greater collegial learning and professional development emerged and developed within one school. Evidence suggests that…

This paper examines the pedagogic learning of a group of new lecturers at an international research intensive university who were participants on a formal teaching development programme. The lens of situated learning theory is utilised to gain new insights into the learning arising from the development programme but also to reveal certain…