ABSTRACT

The question “What is the fundamental nature of affect?” is one of the most important and least studied psychological question in the life sciences. If we could understand the neuro-evolutionary nature of affect, we might better understand all other forms of consciousness. Obviously such issues cannot be addressed cogently without neuroscientific strategies. Here I summarize my approach, which seeks to overlay (to supervene) basic affective issues onto the intrinsic instinctual emotional systems that evolution constructed into mammalian brains in “deep time” (Panksepp, 1982, 1998a). My overall aim has been to understand the nature of human affective experiences, and this approach is gaining some recognition by investigators of human emotions (e.g., Buck, 1985, 1999; Damasio et al., 2000; Solms & Nersessian, 1999). This synopsis will be largely focused on our work on the topic during the past three decades.

ABSTRACT

When we think of emotions, fear is the one that most readily comes to mind. As an experience shared among humans, it is, perhaps more than we like, an integral part of human existence. In the science of emotion, furthermore, all theorists that accept the notion of basic or fundamental emotions agree that fear is one of them.

Currently, numerous educators and policy makers are advocating a move away from teacher-centered models of instruction and toward more learner-centered and community-based models. However, at present the word “community” is at risk of losing its meaning. We have little appreciation and few criteria for distinguishing between a community of learners and a group of students learning collaboratively (Barab & Duffy, 2000; Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2000; Wineburg & Grossman, 1998). Given the proliferation of terms such as communities of learners, discourse communities, learning communities, knowledge-building communities, school communities, and communities of practice, it is clear that

Too little of the education literature provides clear criteria for what does and does not constitute community; the term is too often employed as a slogan rather than as an analytical category. We also know little about the educational value of employing a community model for supporting learning.

The field of Instructional Technology has a long tradition of design to support learning, using both soft technology (e.g., coaching or mentoring) and hard technology (e.g., computer-assisted instruction). A new commercial communications technology is released in the marketplace, and then within a few years the scholarly journals develop a series of claims, and some preliminary data, about the potential for teaching and learning. Current enthusiasm that a community of practice (CoP) would be a compelling tool to support learning in organizations is well beyond empirical evidence and is inconsistent with related theory for nurturing CoPs. The major assumption of this chapter is that there is a historic tautology in the field of educational technology that is extremely seductive and persistent. The major thesis is: the enthusiasm for online communities seems premature in the sense that the technology is the natural vehicle for CoPs.

The readers of this volume are certainly well acquainted with Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) seminal work on communities of practice. One can reasonably credit the authors with dramatically influencing both research and development efforts in an extremely wide variety of contexts. Legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice is a compelling and relatively fresh theoretical approach to the complicated pattern of workplace learning and related identity formation. Caught up in this enthusiasm, several of the first author's students have conducted case studies examining professional business consultants, engineers, and defense lawyers.

The idea of “virtual communities” has captured popular, as well as scholarly, attention. Numerous websites and dot.com companies advertise their “online communities.” In hundreds of books and articles, virtual communities are championed by educators, cognitive scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, computer scientists, and even CEOs. This outpouring of interest takes place in an America that is increasingly concerned about the loss of face-to-face community (Putnam, 2001). Advocates of online communities hope that by leveraging technology, they can recreate a “we” that has steadily eroded into many isolated “I's.” There is confusion, though, about the definition of a virtual community, which includes anything from a tight-knit group of people who share important parts of their lives on a day-to-day basis to an amorphous chat group that can be joined (and left) by anyone with a valid password. Many educators are participating in this movement as well, exploring the educational value of employing a “community” model for supporting learning. The idea is that through participating in a community, novices can learn through collaboration with others and by working alongside more experienced members.

Our chapter relates to an ongoing and continuously evolving research and development project that has as its goal the design of a socio-technical system (a technical environment and related social structures and activities) that will constitute a good model for distributed teacher professional development programs conceptualized as knowledge-building communities. We focus primarily on a part of our work that is situated within the Secondary Teacher Education Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We begin by describing the original ambitious vision for this program that we set out to implement, including its theoretical basis. Then we discuss how both our initial failures and the theoretical framework itself led us to more carefully consider how the historical and institutional contexts of such community-building efforts might influence the social processes of learning and teaching within the community. To illuminate this idea, we present a contextual analysis of the program as a prelude to an interaction analysis of a representative discourse from a group learning activity within the program. Throughout this chapter, we consider lessons learned from studies such as these and from our immersion in the experience of designing a socio-technical environment for supporting community-based teacher education. Drawing on these lessons, we describe our modified goal and the latest results of our efforts to develop an online system for structuring and supporting group learning, including the online mentoring of such learning, within teacher education programs.

Currently, many educators are adopting community of practice theory (CoP) as a framework for designing environments to support learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). An assumption underlying community of practice theory is that learning occurs not only as a cognitive change in the learner but also as a social trajectory within a group. The social identities of learners change as the learners become recognized as experts within a social group that shares a set of practices. Wenger uses the example of insurance claims processors to illustrate how communities of practice work. The actual practice of claims processors is as much a product of the informal social networks and war stories of experienced members as it is a product of the formal procedures mandated by the company.

Not surprisingly, CoP as a descriptive theory has been applied as a design framework for online learning in addition to an analysis framework for examining workplaces bounded by a common location (Johnson, 2001; Schwen & Hara, this volume). The hope is to combine the information sharing and shared enterprises that characterize physical CoPs, along with characteristics of longstanding communities that have emerged on the Internet. Although the definitions of Internet community differ, most of the work on online communities makes a distinction between groups of people forming cohesive social structures in an online space and groups of people who just happen to use an online space (Barab, 2003).

The design of any piece of technology intended for human use – whether for entertainment, work, or education – is ideally iterative and user-centered. Designers cannot anticipate all the needs of users, but most begin with a prototype and revise it based on user feedback. This is even more true of online learning communities, where designers must understand the needs not just of individual users, but of groups of users and their complex interrelationships as facilitated by the technology. Designers begin with theory, create a prototype, test, and then revise. However, it is not just the technology that can be revised, but also the underlying theory. Technological design and pedagogy have the potential to co-evolve in this new medium.

In this chapter, I will describe in detail one example of this co-evolution: a new perspective on motivation in constructionist learning environments, which evolved through quantitative and qualitative observations of an online learning community called MOOSE Crossing. These observations led to a significant design change to the environment (the addition of a system of “merit badges”), and this in turn led to further reflections on pedagogy.

BACKGROUND: CONSTRUCTIONISM IN A COMMUNITY CONTEXT

In Mindstorms, Seymour Papert has a vision of a “technological samba school.” At samba schools in Brazil, a community of people of all ages gather together to prepare a presentation for Carnival. “Members of the school range in age from children to grandparents and in ability from novice to professional. But they dance together and as they dance everyone is learning and teaching as well as dancing. Even the stars are there to learn their difficult parts” (Papert, 1980, p.178).

Robert is from Iowa, now living in a small town near the Rhone river valley in central France with his French wife and two children. He teaches English as a foreign language in the local high school, where he has only a handful of colleagues who share his educational interests. He turned to the Internet five or six years ago to find “intelligent contact with English-speaking people.” More recently, he joined an email list about an online pedagogical approach called InternetInquiry. Then, while planning to lead local workshops on “teacher training in educational technology,” Robert joined Tapped In (http://www.tappedin.org) – a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) designed to promote teacher professional development – and soon “fell in love” with the environment. By the time we interviewed him seven months later, he had designed his online office, attended more than forty seminars – including monthly sessions on the topic of InternetInquiry – and launched his own weekly seminar about language learning.

In this chapter, we describe and analyze Robert's experience in Tapped In and related changes in his professional practice. While his experience is not necessarily typical of participants in Tapped In or other online communities, the particular details of his activities illustrate issues common to many educators who seek to develop their professional practice through participation with colleagues in online communities.

These are early days in the exploration of how the concept of community –challenging enough in its own right for inquiries in social science, politics, and education – is to be understood in the emerging hybrid worlds in which people live. These worlds are not simply governed through face-to-face communication. Conversations and relationships are, for a growing number of people, mediated through new tools enabled by computing and telecommunications. These are exciting times, akin to the first decades of the written word and the discourse that might have ensued around what it meant to have the new “virtual talk” that texts created. An examination of Socrates' dialogues in Plato's Phaedrus may provide some insight into what such discourse might have been like as Socrates questions the wisdom of writing and books. In these dialogues, Socrates outlines the myth of how the ancient god Theuth gave writing to Thamus, the king of Egypt, and although Theuth advocates that his discovery of writing “provides a recipe for memory and wisdom” that ought to be imparted to other Egyptians, Thamus challenges the gift:

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable transformation in the theoretical landscape of educational research. Classical in-the-head conceptions of thinking and learning are now sharing the epistemic spotlight with the sociocultural and sociohistorical theories of Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria (Kuutti, 1996). These new perspectives argue that learning is fundamentally a social activity, inextricably tied to participation in communal practices (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, Baker-Sennett, Lacasa, & Goldsmith, 1995). Accordingly, there has been a growing interest in the notion of community in educational circles, and the ways in which social groupings can be designed to advance individual and collective cognitions.

Like any theory of learning, sociocultural perspectives are susceptible to misinterpretation and oversimplification. The notion that development “is a process of participation in sociocultural activities” (Rogoff et al., 1995, p. 45) offers a new way of thinking about cognition and meaning, but it can also lead to unwarranted optimism regarding the educational efficacy of community-based strategies. While sociocultural theory has been widely interpreted as a call for framing pedagogies around social engagement, it would be a mistake to assume that any form of group activity will yield desirable educational outcomes. The word community is popularly (and sometimes erroneously) applied to a broad range of social organizations, from informal Internet chat rooms to carefully crafted models of classroom activity (e.g., CTGV, 1992; Brown & Campione, 1990; Riel, 1992; Scardamalia, Bereiter, McLean, Swallow, & Woodruff, 1989). Clearly, some kinds of community engagement offer more educational promise than others.

In this chapter, the terms culture and community are problematized, and their centrality to participant learning at and with The Math Forum (mathforum.org) is discussed. Culture, as it is used here, refers to the rituals and norms that come to be associated with a site and its functioning. Community describes recognition of connections to and identification with other participants.

The Math Forum is an interactive and inquiry-informed digital library, or virtual resource center, for mathematics education. Previous chapters have addressed the ways in which The Math Forum has leveraged the concept of community in order to become a dynamic and resource-rich educational site (Renninger & Shumar, 2002; Shumar & Renninger, 2002). In the present chapter, this analysis is taken a step further. The culture of The Math Forum is described as providing its participants with a unique set of opportunities for learning and for making the relationship between the individual and the community one in which individual and community needs can both be met. Site culture enables contributions from individuals that by definition help to build out and sustain this community.

Math Forum participants include Math Forum staff members and a mix of teachers, students, and other individuals such as parents, software developers, mathematicians, math educators, professionals, and tradespeople, many of whom also volunteer their time as mentors for the site. Participants differ not only in terms of their roles, but in their experience, level of expertise, and interest for mathematics (Renninger & Shumar, 2002).

The psychological model we hold for the mind influences the way we think and act in designing and participating in intentional learning settings. Social and cognitive scientists have been expanding educational models of learning with their examinations of the distinctions between individual cognition and social cognition, promoting a conception of shared mind. Using terms such as collective sense-making, distributed intelligence, dialogue, group mind, systems thinking, or activity theory, they suggest a view of learning in which there is a shift in power relationships, a respect for practitioner knowledge, and an emphasis on group learning through intentional activity, collective reflection, and participatory decision-making. This view gives rise to a range of popular phrases in the field of education, including: learning communities, communities of learners, Learning Circles, learning organizations, knowledge communities, communities of practice, professional community, and learning organizations. These terms are attempts to characterize new forms of social/cultural learning. They are often used interchangeably, despite the fact that each evolves out of a different research tradition, thus highlighting different aspects of collaborative work and group structure.

Our objective in this chapter is to provide common language for understanding the different forms of social organization, goals, and outcomes of learning in communities. We suggest three distinct but overlapping forms of learning within communities (task-based, practice-based, and knowledge-based learning) and discuss practical design implications of these distinctions. In doing so, we keep a focus on how networked technologies support these variations in perspectives on collaborative work.

In their book The Social Life of Information, Brown and Duguid (2000) analyze examples of learning in the context of professional practice and the ways in which information technology supports or fails to support professional learning. Failure is related to neglect of ways in which people learn, their resourcefulness in solving problems, and the communities of practice in which they participate. As the opening quotation suggests, training (and technology that supports a training model of learning) tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice. Only by engaging in work and talking about it from inside the practice can one learn to be a competent practitioner. They conclude that “practice is an effective teacher and the community of practice an ideal learning environment” (p. 127).

Over the past several years, we have been developing and refining the sociotechnical infrastructure of a virtual environment called Tapped In® (www.tappedin.org) that is intended to support the online activities of a large and diverse community of education professionals. We have described the design principles that underlie our efforts and documented how educators have used the environment for their own purposes and in the context of formal professional development (Schlager & Schank, 1997; Schank, Fenton, Schlager, & Fusco, 1999).