Therese Laferriere

I am choosing a community of practice in which high school teachers have been participating in since the Fall of 2004.  This is a distributed community of teachers in vocational education, ones likely to work alone in their high school and have close links with the workplace as their supervise students who are in a social and professional insertion program and are likely not to get a high school diploma before they are seventeen years old.

Applying activity theory (Vygotsky), I would describe the onset of the community as follows:

The subject:
A knowledge transfert agent working for a knowledge transfert agency

The object-outcome:
The knowledge transfert agent (and her agency) wanted to explore new ways of transferring knowledge and got interested in the idea of trying the community of practice model. Therefore, the interaction of the agent with the environment in the attempt to provide vocational teachers more information likely to help their practice became mediated by new conceptual and technical tools: the community of practice notion and its three basic characteristics (mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertory); an online collaborative space named Work2gether with affordances for document sharing and sharing of experiences and thoughts.

The community:
A virtual community that now involves 41 persons emerged. Most of the participants were teachers but they were also a few counselors, one school principal, and one facilitator.

To the above activity triangle, Leontev, as pointed out by Engestrom, added two more (see the attachment provided in the first contribution): one that emphasizes an emerging new division of labor (new roles) in a community that makes use of new tools, and one that points to the new rules and routines that are emerging (within a given community).

The new division of labor:
In this community, the facilitator is still taking an important role, including that of posting documents for participants that prefer to send her an e-mail with an attached file to be deposit in the collaborative space. However participants have exchanged a total of 109 documents between the Fall of 2004 and November 2005, and this is impressive.  And it is clear evidence of peer contributions to one another's improvement of their individual practice, as opposed to the usual way knowledge transfert occurs in a community -- teacher's talk in the classroom.

New rules and routines:
The facilitator goes online almost everyday, and a few participants a couple of times a week.

Enough for now.  How about engaging yourself in a similar analysis with one virtual community that you are familiar with. This process will likely help us to identify possibilities, hurdles, and tips when it comes to designing sustainable virtual communities of teachers (or else).

I suggest that we first choose a virtual community of teachers (or another group of educational professionals or a group of professional from another sector), and apply to it Engestrom's expansive learning theory.  Here attached I provide an article that could be sufficient for participants to read in order to begin applying the theory.