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John M. Slatin, Ph.D.
Institute for Technology and Learning
University of Texas at Austin
Email: jslatin@mail.utexas.edu
According to Etienne Wenger (1998), a community of practice is
characterized by mutual engagement in a joint enterprise using
(and creating) a shared repertoire of tools, artifacts, ideas,
and information. Wenger writes that the boundaries of such
communities do not necessarily coincide with formal institutional
or organizational boundaries-classrooms, grade-levels, etc. But
successful teaching and learning in computer-based environments
often depend heavily upon pedagogical designs that foster
development of and participation in such communities, and, in the
present instance, on the computational environments that support
them.
The fundamental premises of Wenger's social theory of learning
are (or seem to be) deeply inimical to the assumptions underlying
the title of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of
1994 (amended 1997). IDEA's mandate that each child receive an
"appropriate education" in the "least restrictive environment"
conducive to his or her learning has led to significant increases
in the number of children identified as having disabilities who
are placed.in "inclusive classrooms" together with peers who are
not disabled. Judging by the frequency of references to classroom
discipline in the literature of inclusiveness, one important
side-effect of IDEA appears to be an increase in concern about
the difficulty teachers experience in maintaining order in
classrooms where students with disabilities are present. Such
difficulties are likely to increase even further in proportion to
the extent to which learners are treated only as individuals, and
not also as participants in a community with a shared sense of
purpose.
This presentation will explore the possibility that Web-based
teaching and learning environments can promote successful
learning in the inclusive classroom by shifting the focus from
making information accessible to individual students to providing
support for those students' participation in emergent communities
of practice where learners with disabilities collaborate with
teachers and peers in a joint enterprise that none of the
participants could create independently. Illustrations will be
drawn primarily from a Web-based, interdisciplinary project
called TX2K: The Texas 2000 Living Museum, developed by the
Institute for Technology and Learning at the University of Texas
at Austin.
Shifting focus in this way requires that we resist what Brown
and Duguid (1995, 2000) call the "container model" of the Web as
a vehicle for delivering information to individuals isolated from
one another in place, time, and awareness. We must learn instead
to treat the Web as a medium for the interplay of participation
and reification which Wenger sees as critical to successful
communities of practice. To reify is to turn an abstraction into
a thing and then risk mistaking that thing for the original
abstraction, as when information about the way one person in an
organization carries out a task gets codified in mandatory
procedures for the entire organization, or when test scores are
seen as completely synonymous with learning.
In online collaborative environments, however, participation
often proceeds by means of reification. That is, learners
register their participation by writing messages and submitting
them to a Web-based forum, where they appear as persistent
elements of an evolving text. It would seem, then, that the Web
should provide excellent support for communities of practice
which enable individuals with and without disabilities to
participate on an equal basis, to the full extent of their
individual capabilities. But it is precisely here that Web-based
teaching and learning environments often break down. Real-time
chat clients are often inaccessible to would-be participants who
use speech-based browsers or screen-readers, and many
asynchronous forums rely exclusively on visual layout to
represent the relationships among messages.
The shift away from the container model is more difficult than
one would think it should be. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
argue in their important essay "The Social Life of Documents"
(1995), the structures of the Web encode the social practices
from which they emerge and to which they give rise. What is not
so encoded is no less instructive in this regard than what
is.
Wenger writes that a focus on participation has important
implications for the way we think about learning and what it
takes to support it. A focus on designing Web-based environments
to support participation in collaborative activities by learners
with and without disabilities reveals a curious hole in the Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines, published in May 1999 as a
Recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium. Except for a few
checkpoints having to do with Web-based forms, the the Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines are silent on support for
accessibility in what Jakob Neilsen (2000) calls user-produced
material, and indeed the Guidelines are silent on the question of
support for collaboration in general. This is true of HTML
itself: the specification includes no elements whose primary
purpose is to support collaborative activity. (By contrast, the
more powerful and more complex XML offers many ways to imagine
such structures.)
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