Studies on Patterns and Variations of Learning Community of Practices in Global Context

摘要

The study first claims that learning community of practice play a significant role in the fields of virtual or online learning. But there are few evidences or knowledge so far about how school students behave in the virtual learning environment in terms of learning behaviors and interpersonal interaction. APEC Cyber Academy (ACA) is an international networked learning environment designed specifically for K-12 students. The primary goal of APEC Cyber Academy is to tap in the affordances of ICT to provide learner-centered, collaborative, and international learning experiences to K-12 students and teachers around the world. The study incorporates ACA as the empirical study instrument. For collecting empirical data, the study administers an online international collaborative learning program on ACA. The study explores patterns of community of practice, which is a combination of participants' online learning behaviors and interpersonal interaction, in global context. Ultimately, there are two pillars with respect to the goals of the study. One of the goals is to explore the patterns in interpersonal interaction and how people engage in learning community in the virtual learning space in general. The other goal of the study is to investigate and explore differences among Students across countries in particular in terms of learning behaviors based on the aggregated data from the first pillar. The study responds abovementioned goals with empirical data and statistic measures. Results of the study confirm the asserted theoretical framework and reveal that students of various countries perform differently in terms of community of practice in virtual learning space.