Topic 3: Learning in communities

At first this topic didn´t sound right to me cause I had a set mind regarding what a community is and a PBL group was not in my mind a community. After taking part of Webinar with Kay Oddone and Alistair Creelman I started changing my mind. I could in my group see a group of people who could be called a community. I saw that I had stronger connection to some of the participants due to same way of thinking, but also I had one or two in our group that I found fascinating and I even found myself understanding their way of thinking. That was my first thoughts into understanding this new way of looking at a community.  

I found a source on twitter to explore podcast who where exploring the so called hybrid mode where they shared among each other tips and tricks and to me it was a great way to participate and achieve knowledge about how to set up a hybrid mode. This podcast was interactive so I could join into the hosts discussion and strangely it made me feel like I was a part of something. Also I got challenges in my way of thinking and how I do things. It was a most agreeable afternoon and I came out of it thinking that man one can form a new community pretty easy if there is something that is mutual in the group. Later on I talked in my PBL group about this podcast and it started up an discussion about hybrid and what everybody thought about it. That discussion lead me to searching for more podcasts about learning online and learning in a community.

Teaching Here and There, a new podcast that explores thinking, teaching and practice of hybrid teaching in higher education. · Teaching Here and There (spotify.com)

Traveling further into this subject I started reading the articles attached to this topic and found a god explanation to how to create the community in Brindley et al. (2009), They explain it in such a way that I can get a structure behind the concept (I do like structure so of course I fell for this). First the group must have Communication which lead into Collaborations (Open - Sharing) which leads to when succesful Cooperations and if all goes well this will be the Community - where peole inspite of individual purpose strive towards a common purpose or goal. I thought that was brilliant put and so easy to understand how a community comes to be.

Referense:

Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).