What do we mean by "community?"
- Details
- Category: General Info
- Published on Saturday, 03 December 2011 13:17
- Written by Justin M. Schwamm, Jr.
- Hits: 153
At Tres Columnae, we are an international community of learners, with subscribers from the United States, the UK, and countries from Australia to Mauritius! But a Community is more than just a group of people!
It's obvious that “two heads are better than one” when it comes to learning. Even if one of the “heads” is a book or a computer, there is still a source of information and a recipient of the information. Higher-level learning, where skills and understandings need to be developed, often requires more than two heads, and (within obvious limits of crowd size) it always goes better when there are more heads to share with each other.
Yet in too many schools all over the world, meaningful interaction among learners is absent. It is obviously absent from the individual seatwork that is still so prevalent, and it is absent from whole-class “discussions” (more accurately called by their old-fashioned name of “recitations”) in which all interaction consists of teacher-asked, student-answered questions. Sadly, it is often absent from tasks that are planned or designed to be collaborative or cooperative. When students have been socialized to be passive consumers of information, it is difficult for them to throw off that role and become active participants in a small-group task. Too often, small groups consist of one or two students “doing the work” (frequently in silent isolation) while the others “watch” (or doodle or socialize or work on other material).
At TresColumnae, however, participants quickly become an important part of a real community. If you choose not to comment on a story, or not to participate in a Virtual Seminar, your own performance is diminished and your understanding is impaired, so you quickly learn to become a participant as well as an observer. After participating for a while, you discover that everyone's performance and understanding will increase as everyone's participation increases – a powerful lesson for community. In this way, we restore the possibility of authentic community in learning.
At Tres Columnae, we are also members of the Joomla! community, since the curent version of our site runs on Joomla! CMS. We've also been participants in the TikiWiki community (for Version Alpha of the site) and the Drupal community (for Version Beta).