Enculturation in Action: Developing Understanding about Technology- Enhanced Classroom Learning Communities

This case study describes, analyzes, and elucidates students' developing understanding of technology-enhanced classroom learning communities (TCLCs). Recognizing that an important aspect of students’ developing understanding is enculturation, where students transform their participation to build competency within the TCLC culture, this research also examines the emergent social norms of communities within a classroom. The importance that the learning sciences have assigned to learning communities and the growing trend of technology-enhanced learning in educational practice, provide the grounds for this study’s importance and relevance. Until now, research on TCLCs has focused more on their design and outcomes and little on how students’ understanding of what they are actually emerges and develops. This research has drawn on data from a semester-long course that is both designed as a TCLC and teaches about TCLCs, by integrating unique reflection sessions and online collaborative activities with relevant content from the learning sciences. Data collected from classroom observations, interviews, and writing in an online Wiki collaborative editing environment are the basis for an interpretive micro-analysis to develop a more theoretically-based framework of students’ changing understandings of TCLCs. Educational implications are guidelines for the design of future TCLCs