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Community of Practice
A Community of Practice, as defined by BusinessDictionary.com, is an informal, self-organized network of peers with diverse skills and experience in an area of practice or profession. Such groups are held together by the members desire to help others (by sharing information) and the need to advance their own knowledge (by learning from others). Also called community of interest (2013). This has been the role of Hootcourse, a platform to gather a group of professionals to develop their PLN (Personal Learning Network) beyond their universities or social circles.
http://hootcourse.com/
is
an
easy-to-use
online
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professionals can become members of a community of interest, whose sole reason of existence is to help its members to learn from one another. By
having a Twitter account, anyone can become a member/user of Hootcourse. The platform allows its users to join a course (community of practice) or to create a course (community of interest). If applied to online teaching, this virtual space becomes a virtual classroom for students and instructors to share information pertaining to their major or field of study. Hootcourse, as a Community of Practice platform, allows the instructor and learners to have very well-defined roles. The instructor, by means of hoots also allocated in Twitter, can send reminders of upcoming due dates for papers and assignments. The teacher can also share new information either by providing links or comments to help students focus their learning efforts. It can also be a way to canalize questions and doubts that learners have, since they can be answered by a peer or the instructor.
On the other hand, students can use Hootcourse to send their homework, which can be easily hosted in other connected platforms such as blogs in http://blogger.com, http://posterous.com, or http://WordPress.com or right there in the same Hootcourse site, where it reads essays. By means of the course hash tag (#course), learners by means of their Twitter accounts- can follow what is new or what is now happening with their Community of Interest, -the course they are taking with you at the
university. But what remains important in this case is that students can commit themselves to be checking either their Hootcourse or Twitter account to have access to information being disseminated by the Community of Practice members. What I like about a Community of Practice such as Hootcourse is the potential it has for sharing and learning. From the instructors point of view, I can easily keep track of students questions, papers, assignments, and sharing of information with one another or with the group. With no more than 140 characters, I can either provide concrete, timely feedback to students or guide them towards real and meaningful sources on the Web to continue to develop their building of knowledge experientially.
To conclude, I want to ensure that my students understand the importance of what a Community of Practice is and how they can exploit it for their own benefit. As soon as this is understood, I will definitely introduce the platform (Hootcourse) so I can train them on how to join their class online and that they can have access to information on their mobile devices (smartphones, iPods, iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, and the like) 24/7.
To fully develop and comprehend this teaching issue, its advisable to research and expand these areas: 1 2 3 4 5 Understanding a community of practice Uses of community of practice in education Hootcourse as a community of interest platform Potentializing the use of Hootcourse in college studies Community of Practice as PLNs and VLEs Professor Jonathan Acua-Solano ELT Instructor, Course Designer & Teacher Trainer based in Costa Rica IATEFL Member and NCTE Affiliate Resource Teacher at CCCN Senior ELT Professor at Universidad Latina Freelance ELT Consultant four OUP in Central America For further comments or suggestions, reach me at: @jonacuso Twitter jonacuso@gmail.com Gmail
BusinessDictionary.com (2013): Community of Practice, definition Ferriman, J. (2013, Feb 17) Social Media in the Classroom
Other blogs and sites I often write for my students at the university are:
1. Pronunciation 1 3. Pronunciation 2 2. Readding Skills 1 4. Computering Applications in Education