Investigating the role of informal online communities of practice (CoPs) in professional learning: the experience of second/foreign language teachers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined Ukrainian language teacher notions, attitudes, feelings, and experiences related to participation in informal online Communities of Practice (CoPs) as an alternative means of professional learning. Findings from samples in Canada and Ukraine indicate opportunities for, and some challenges to, professional learning within virtual (online, Web-based) communities. In addition to traditional data collection methods, the study involved a novel case study analysis of two focus groups (4-6 teachers each), one in Lviv, Ukraine, which was physically co-located, and another in Edmonton, Alberta, conducted using the Adobe Connect online meeting platform. Group members in each city participated in a Repertory Grid activity, the aim of which was for participants to move towards consensus on elements and constructs they felt characterize informal online CoP experiences for professional learning???itself an exercise in community-building (Gaines & Shaw, 2012b). A theoretical framework was developed to guide the investigation, called the ???Autonomous Learning Framework for Informal Online CoPs (ALFIO-CoPs),??? which helps to elucidate knowledge creation in informal online inquiry communities. The framework was used to address some of the factors which influence the broader informal online CoP experience for personally meaningful professional learning. The Ukrainian language teachers involved in this investigation strongly approved of the informal online CoP for professional learning, some even suggesting that it is the only distinct form of alternative online professional learning, while viewing other online networks and groups as more casual or personal in nature. As professionals, they recognized that emotional self-efficacy, technological self-efficacy, and technological pedagogy are uniquely supported in these communities, owing to such factors as community self-determination, mentorship, apprenticeship, and the ubiquity of the learning experience. Nonetheless, other factors, such as awareness of this form of professional learning, Internet access, time commitment, praxis issues, and professional recognition of the community experience were among the challenges to participation identified by the teachers involved in the study, and which warrant further research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".