Knowledge-building community model

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Knowledge Building Communities – CoP with deliberate and formal production of knowledge outside of active context (p5). Construct, use, reconstruct, and reuse knowledge in deliberate, continuous cycles. Seeks to advance collective knowledge and support growth of individuals for the intentional development of experts within community. Function to make program, organization, or community knowledge externally available for iterative evolution (p14). End product is a living document (vs static in TB) for explicit intension (vs tacit in PB) (p15). Focused on building, managing and using info over time( p18).

Knowledge building is work on the creation and improvement of ideas. The dynamic is social, resulting in the creation of public knowledge. In contrast to knowledge situated within the individual mind (the traditional concern of education) and knowledge situated in the practice of groups (the concern of situated cognition and communities of practice), public knowledge has an out-in-the-world character. Public knowledge can itself become an object of inquiry and the basis for further knowledge building. Thus there is the possibility of a knowledge building dynamic that drives the continual creation and advancement of new knowledge. What makes knowledge building a realistic approach to education is the discovery that children as early as grade one can engage in it. Thus there is a clear developmental link running from childhood education on into advanced education and adult knowledge work, in which the same process is carried out at increasingly high levels. This article will be based a lot on Bereiter and Scardamalia's writings. See CSILE for the moment.

A knowledge-building community is a collection of people that collectively works to product knowledge. A scientific community is perhaps the most obvious example of a knowledge-building community. The communities that self-organize to rate movies, books, and recipes online also represent knowledge-building communities.

The knowledge-building community perspective provides a provocative framework for thinking about organizing instructional experiences. Students can participate in a knowledge-building community by deciding what knowledge will be created, by creating the knowledge, and by evaluating the knowledge.

Sustaining knowledge building communities: E-learning and knowledge building environments - Blake Melnick

Sustaining knowledge building communities online requires the creation of electronic environments that support both formal and informal learning, and capture significant tasks and activities that are central to the day-to-day work of the participants. These environments must provide supports for real world activities and learning, while providing the potential for something more. That something more is knowledge building, or the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003). Knowledge building is emergent; an environment that supports it must evolve from the contributions of team members and demonstrate collective knowledge advances (Scardamlia, in press). The environment must be fluid, meet the changing needs of the participants, and enable something lasting—something that will enhance the knowledge work of their local community, and potentially the knowledge work of their profession.

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~bwilson/building.html

Technology

• CSILE and Knowledge Forum
• Wikis, in particular sophisticated wikis like Mediawiki on which this one is based
• C3MS and other kinds of portalware
• LMSs (by repurposing the way they are intended to be used !).