COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE ON THE NETWORK: INDICATORS AND CONDITIONS FOR YOUR DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The school practices of University students are an opportunity for really meaningful learning processes to take place, as they allow our students to deal with real problems (or cases) that occur in schools. In this sense, the features of the concept of community of practices make us hesitate about their usefulness as a link between the school and the working context, and about their appropriateness as a suitable resource to take advantage of the didactic opportunities that such periods offer. Nevertheless, all learning communities are not effective for task development, not even getting to be something more than a group of people enrolled in a course, sharing a site in the Internet which only some of them use to communicate. In this research we start from the application of an intervention project using WebCT for collaborative work by a group of students who are in their school practices. After the application of this experience we assessed the scope of the factors that characterize the communities of practices. Finally, through specific analytical procedures we tried to corroborate the influence that certain factors have on the constitution and development of practices’ communities.

Keywords

• Aprendizaje en red
• aprendizaje colaborativo
• comunidades de prácticas
• comunidades de aprendizaje
• comunidades virtuales
• practicum.