Times have changed.
The culture during which the United States’ current
education system was created—the industrial world of the 19th and early 20th
centuries—no longer exists. We are now living in a global marketplace where
innovation is powered by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and
driven by knowledge. In response to this cultural transition, private and
public sector leaders are working together to determine how colleges, universities, and informal education providers can best engage today’s students in meaningful ways, improve their achievement, and enable them to develop 21st-century skills that
will ensure that the United States’ workforce is well prepared to thrive in the
new knowledge-based global economy.
It was a little over twenty years ago that the Internet became
available to the average American, and educational leaders are now faced with
the task of redefining cultural and societal norms to include the use of ICT in
educational settings at every level. What many educational leaders are asking is how can they—some of whom have
less experience in this new media than their students— best provide guidance
and leadership? How can faculty members and Subject Matter Experts facilitate their students in the use of
technology in sophisticated, pedagogically sound, and responsible ways? These
are just two of the many difficult questions facing educational leaders now. Finding the answers to these questions (and many others) might begin with
the acknowledgment that many fundamental characteristics of yesterday’s model
of education—including the physical structure of schools and the traditional
roles of both student and teacher—are not always optimal for today’s “digital
native” learners.
Institutions of education are currently being
attended by increasing numbers of students who have grown up using computers,
video games, digital music players, video cameras, and cell phones to gather and
process the information that they use to construct their own understanding of
the world. They regularly meet and interact with their friends online. Online
communities have become so much the norm that the very concept of
community has changed significantly. Traditionally, the definition of community
has focused on proximity and kinship. Today, a new definition of community
is emerging that is not necessarily place-based at all, but is more focused on
a connection among community members based on a common interest. In fact,
researchers now consider the strength and nature of relationships between
individuals to be a more useful basis for defining community than physical
proximity.
In response to the cultural transition and new definitions
of community brought about by the integration of ICT into almost every aspect
of daily life, thought-leaders in both private and public institutions of learning are seeking more
effective ways to meet digital natives on their own turf. More and more faculty members and Subject Matter Experts are recognizing that it would likely benefit the entire learning
community to provide space where they can meet with their students in carefully implemented
online communities of practice where members of the community can:
- share a common domain of interest,
- participate in collaborative activities and discussions,
- help each other out and share information,
- build trusting relationships that enable them to learn from each other, and
- develop a shared bank of resources for the community’s use that might include things like web-based tools, stories about shared experiences, and solutions that address recurring problems.
The widespread integration of ICT presents both great
challenges and great opportunity to the country’s educational systems. It is
interesting to consider what new levels of academic excellence might be
achieved today when every member of the learning community is provided the
opportunity to interact, explore, co-construct and share their knowledge within
the context of new technological learning environments and in authentic communities
of practice online.
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