Creating elearning experiences

What is a learning community?

To consider a learning community, there must be a community where mutual activity amongst participants exists and all participants commonly share learning values and beliefs. Each community member should engage in the activities of the group and interact with each other over a period of time to develop new ideas and foster the learning environment. The act of participation is generally referred to as a community of practice. A community of practice is the verb of a learning community. An online learning community is basically a virtual space that encourages users to collaborate and get together to share those ideas and learning experiences that those individuals have had. (Wikipedia.org 2008)

Web Standards Group

The web standards group was formed to provide web designers and developer’s tools and necessary resources to build standards compliance web sites and create accessible sites using valid and semantically correct code. The term web standards refer to the technologies used to create the virtual environment when browsing a web page. The technologies are made up of languages HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). Other languages that come into play with web standards are CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and DOM (Document Object Model). To objectively enjoy the reason for the formation of such a group as the Web Standards Group it is logical to understand the history behind, why standards were introduced.

History of Standards
“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call “web standards,” are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.” (The Web Standards Project 1998). Web browser developers have been involved with the development of web standards since inception. However the lack of uniform support for the key standards has left a content hole when many could not view page content or perform desired transactions. Thus the formation of standards groups, to educate developers on the standards and to assist with “broken” browser rendering. (The Web Standards Project 1998)

Web Standards Group as a learning community?

The Web Standards Group is most definitely a learning community. There are many aspects of social learning inside and as described in Brown J.S & Adler R 2008 “Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only ‘learning about’ the subject matter but also ‘learning to be’ a full participant in the field. Learning to be happens increasingly and more naturally when individuals participate in the community of practice. Participating and knowing about the general framework of the community is also important. Knowing when to recognize whether a problem is an important problem, or a solution an elegant solution, or even what constitutes a solution in the first place? (Brown J.S 1999) The Web Standards Group has over 5500 members in over 100 different countries who the majority would subscribe to the “mailing” list. The mailing list is similar to a forum. However, everyone on that mailing list receives an email of the individual’s question on some standards compliance issue. This means that the wealth of knowledge expands faster than if someone had to visit a forum on a web page. The Web Standards Group also provides various training workshops and networking seminars to help those users who are a part of the group, to develop their skills further in web standards. There is also a weekly email sent to subscribe with various links to other sites whose content may discuss an issue that has been raised during the week with the email list, or be more generally related to standards and web development.

Value adding to Masters in E-learning?

The group would not necessarily be value adding to an individual wanting to learn how to create e-learning content by definition. The group would be useful to a developer who has the job of building the structure to support the e-learning content that needs to be delivered to a wide audience. Following web standards to create online systems will benefit everyone seeking online education and would not be limited to only those individuals who can see and/or use a mouse. With standards compliance we can bring e-learning content to all.

Expectations of WSG

Some expected outcomes from being a member of the Web Standards Group would be the benefit of a social learning community that has knowledge nodes around the globe to help with all good things web development and web standards related. It would also be paramount to contribute to the discussions in order to have knowledge assessed by peers and learning from criticisms if they arose.

References

Brown J.S & Adler R, 2008, ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0′, Educause review, Jan/Feb 2008, pp 16-32
<http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1206661710>

Brown J.S 1999, ‘Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age’, viewed 20 March 2008,
<http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown.html>

Wikipeadia.org, Online Learning Community, viewed 20 March 2008,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_learning_community>

Wikipeadia.org, Learning Community, viewed 20 March 2008,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_community>

Wikipeadia.org, Community of Practice, viewed 20 March 2008,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice>

The Web Standards Project, WaSP: Fighting for Standards, viewed 21 March 2008,
<http://www.webstandards.org/about/mission>

The Web Standards Group, viewed 21 March 2008,
<http://www.webstandardsgroup.org>

(http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown.html)