Stephanie, I came to a similar conclusion last night. I printed out the powerpoint presentations in the infomation section and read them. Very very interesting. Then I checked your first post where you used the term student 'Student learning communities'. I just mis-read it, sorry. :-) The word student just completely escaped my attention.
My actual work/day job interest is almost entirely with adults. Sometimes they are learners in the real novice sense - eg pre-service one year pressure cooker courses for teachers, generally after a first career. Othertimes they are highly trained and focused professionals (eg a primary school principal) who are filling in some gaps with part time study.
Background and glue. I was going to say exactly the same thing about what is there or not there to bind individuals to a community - or not. I've heard the term 'glue'. Thickness or relationship or connection. The glue of a future/current involvement in a particular proffession/job is strong. It it's not there, and is more diffuse, I'd imagine different dynamics come into play.
This is particularly true:
From Student Learning Communities (vs. CoP's) by stephanie on Thursday, 27 April 2006 10:14:00 p.m.:
On
the other hand, if we're looking at student learning communities,
students don't necessarily have the experience and expertise to draw
upon. The learning community may be a vehicle to develop experience in
a discipline or field, together. I'd say students, say politcal science, sociology, law - on rarely have this perspective early on in their study. It's actually quite hard to get - it takes time and focus. It takes time to even figure out what the discipline is and what it entails and means.
I worked in an office next to the masters room at the physics department at the University of Canterbury a while back. There was huge sweat and toil to fix the problems that involved computer hardware, computer programming, maths and statistics that were as big as the physics stuff.
These regular informal seminars I sometimes went to were a place to try to get to grips with the overlaps, and share knowledge and expertise. In retrospect I note several things: students have things to share with each other (even if they just learned it last week) - the role of the lecturer/supervisors helped with global perspectives - there was no sense of pure physics, there was always some cross over to other subjects - lots of time was wasted, but you couldn't tell what was wasted or not until later - this is hard to do with big 100 level classes.
This is a learning commuity inside a subject area probably more like you are talking of, but not with the cross curriculum links. in the PowerPoint, even without the audio, I was very taken with the descriptions of learning communities intentionally built across disciplines and built into a week's programme in an insitution. Sadly I know the insitutional barriers to this at the local Uni here would be great.
Stephanies point 2: Self regulated learning. Agreed.You have raised a few questions here.
I will now change contexts to compare two programmes I work with. Both pre-service teacher training, one Early Childhood and one Primary (Elementary), both 3 years.
The most successful one (IMO) has a longer, slower buildup. The participatns are defined on day one as novices entering a profession, and they are included in the process of making the transition. The idea of the reflective practioner is developed and modelled. Self reflection is modelled, scaffolded etc. And assessed. :-) (A constant staff dialogue surrounds this last phrase!!)
There is a strong focused goal here: to become a teacher or to get a job as a teacher. This strong focus definitely helps. There is not the strong goal in say an English-arts course. The ultimate end for a student could be anything from a project manager, writer, franchise owner etc, but in the study time you are not focused on this. This kind of learning community I have had no experience of, but I can see the huge benefits - thinking about my time at uni I would have both benefited and enjoyed it. Even so, here I'd say (as a theorist) an important aspect is to make explicit the aim of the exercise, the benefits of the community approach, the value of the integrated/interactive types of course activities. The penny will drop. Possibly.
When I taught High School, I did make it explicit that I was there to set up the environment and act as a resource - they were to work together collaboratively to learn. It was 'them engaging with the subject' and it would be hard, but worth it. Not me pouring facts, knowledge and ideas into their heads. If ever I go back teaching (which is possible) I'd love to see if I can find out more what helps make this transition to intrinsically motivated learners.
Well, learning communities. I guess my reflection on the CoP site of things is because most of my work is in a defined domain (like clinical education, video editing, teaching, e-teaching etc) and is professionally oriented (they will probably go out and work in this area, if they aren't already) and where some are very experienced.
As I said above, the description of the learning communities was interesting. And very attractive.