Life at the bottom of a soup bowl: the flavour of learning communities in the information age

We have weathered some difficult times and as a result have moved past being "polite," and a pseudo sense of community, to a true sense of community where each feels free to express their beliefs and feelings in respectful but honest ways. Knowing that the audience to whom one intends to communicate consists of supportive equals makes it far easier to achieve honest, open communication.

During the second year of the 21 BEAT St program, students wrote a poetic drama based on the lives of people in the margins of the world called "We are the Poets", which they presented at the Pedagogy of the Oppressed conference, as well as for local venues. This drama is currently in publication in a book titled Language, Literacy and Social Justice. All students published in either online or through more conventional literary outlets. Several did internships in Washington D.C. at our server company, Caucus Systems, several more are now webmasters for universities or work for local and national technology companies. Connections between businesses, arts, education and community continue to expand.

So, how will learning communities be characterized in the Information Age? They will combine current learning environments, schools, organizations, real-time communities with virtual extensions. New ways of thinking about teaching are needed and a new global worldview is emerging as a result of the Internet collapsing former boundaries. This sets the stage for future collaborative learning communities that will encourage learners to relinquish tightly held cultural perspectives and learning approaches. Learning communities of the future necessitate new ways of thinking about how we learn, live, work and play, and with whom.

For the moment, anyway, some powerful factors limit the development of virtual communities. These must be overcome before we can begin to reap the true benefits of a transformation in educational paradigm. Of paramount concern are issues of equity of access. In the virtual world, affluence and computer literacy are the first and most important elements of community building. Unless this matter is quickly addressed, we run the risk of creating a new underclass of information-poor citizens, unable to take effective part in the direction of society.

As virtual communities are currently largely text-based, which is the ideal for literacy education, those who possess superior skills in written English find themselves in very real position of advantage and influence in the text-based online medium. Those with limited English proficiency, however, are currently at a severe disadvantage in the structures of online communications. This may be somewhat ameliorated in the future with the advance of multi-media technologies.

There is also the matter of facilitation. The step from traditional, transmission-model classroom pedagogy to the transformational model required for effective online learning, where the curriculum and even the very knowledge is a communally-owned emergent property of the many-to-many process of inquiry, is a step which, sadly, threatens rather than excites most teachers.

If we, the teachers and facilitators can learn to make the same cognitive leap made so easily by these perfectly ordinary high school students, there may yet be some hope for the educational system. If we can learn to let go of our "ownership" of some kind of "canon" of "truth", and instead become co-learners with those we once labeled "students" there is a chance that the process of learning in the 21st century may begin to return to our society some of that sense of community and connection which has been gradually destroyed by the very way of life we have sought to preserve.