Annotated Bib 2.5

DeWert, Marjorie, Leslie Babinski, and Brett Jones. “Safe Passages. Providing Online Support to Beginning Teachers.” Journal of Teacher Education 54 (2003) : 311-320

This article really shows the importance of building some sort of community for first year teachers. This article was written about a study that brought together inexperienced first year teachers with experienced teachers and university faculty in an online community that allowed them to share experiences and raise questions about issues they were facing in their classrooms. The questions and concerns that the teachers are raising have a correlation to many of the issues first year teachers at a community college face. Unlike other articles I read this article focused on a smaller project and showed strong results.


Ardichvili, Alexader, Vaughn Page, and Tim Wentling. “Motivation and Barriers to Participation in Virtual Knowledge-Sharing Communities of Practice.” Journal of Knowledge Management 7.1 (2003) : 64-77.

This article looked at reasons why people do and don’t contribute and take part in online knowledge sharing communities. They studied an online community at Caterpillar Inc. to determine how and why the online community was being used. The article gave me great insight into motivations for using an online community. Both the good and bad and some topics I have been hearing from my peers. Some of the most interesting points brought up were that if a person viewed knowledge as a public good they were more likely to share knowledge with a community. An interesting barrier to sharing knowledge was the fear of looking bad to your peers. The idea being if you post a question or problem you’re having that people will look down on you for not knowing it. This is exactly the same things I have heard from people when I ask them to post writings to my initial online community blog.

Brown, John, and Paul Duguid. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science 2.1 (1992) : 40-57.

I choose this article to try and gain a better understanding behind the concept of communities of practice. The idea behind this paper was to examine the communities people create in jobs outside of the structured hierarchy that is on company flow charts. The overall idea is that companies must respect these communities that work outside the normal flow of information because these communities could be sharing and creating knowledge that needs to be shared with the company as a whole and if their communities are not valued this information and their practices could be buried.


Barab, Sasha, et al. “Designing and Building an On-Line Community: The Struggle to Support Sociability in the Inquiry Learning Forum.” Education Technology Research & Development 49.4 (2001) : 71-96.

This is a deeper explanation of how the ILF community was laid out. The previous article I read focused more on the later stages of the community while this paper laid out the entire history of the process, from design to implementation to redesign. It shares the success and struggles of this implementation and makes me realize the nightmare that I am up against. This is just an outstanding article, packed with useful information that is based on both research and real life experiences of building an online community.



Treacy, Barbara, Glenn Kleiman, and Kirsten Peterson. “Successful Online Professional Development.” Learning and Leading with Technology 30.1 (2002) 1-4.

A simple article that covers some of the basics of online professional development. It mainly reiterates main ideas and points I have come across before. The importance of face to face meetings in an online environment, the importance of having motivated and knowledgeable people participating and creating the online enviroment.