Creating Social Spaces to Facilitate Reflective Learning On-line

Alice RobbinSchool of Library and Information ScienceIndiana UniversityBloomington, Indiana 47408arobbin@indiana.edu An earlier version of this essay was delivered at "Learning 2000: Reassessing the Virtual University," VirginiaTech, September 27-October 1, 2000When this paper was first conceived last Spring, my colleague Rob Kling and I intended to discuss some ofthe socio-technical challenges we faced as educators to create the social spaces that ensured reflectivelearning at the graduate level in a web-based environment. Our own experiences reinforced the conclusionthat effective learning experiences were dependent on a large array of factors related to higher educationinstitutions [1]. This past summer, however, I moved from Florida State University School of InformationStudies to Indiana University School of Library and Information Science (SLIS). That move interrupted myanalysis of two years worth of data on student learning in a web-based, graduate level introductory researchmethods course that I had taught at Florida State and had intended to present at this conference. During thistransition I radically revised my fall semester's course in information policy whose syllabus and resourceswere to be available at SLIS's web site. This process had the serendipitous effect of forcing me to rethink thepaper.What I began to understand, as we moved into the first weeks of the Fall 2000 semester, was that Rob and Ihad identified the problem correctly as one of "creating online social spaces for reflective learning at thegraduate level," but that perhaps our focus was somewhat misplaced. It was not so much the socio-technicalinteractions, which are, as we know, significant, but, instead, the more philosophically grounded issuesrelated to pedagogy about how to nurture reflective thinking and learning within a community of practice.My talk identifies only a few of these issues that we need to attend to more explicitly as we develop the"Virtual University" at the graduate level, so that our instruction represents more than a "continuingeducation" program of certification through multiple choice and standardized testing. My claim is that weneed to focus on what constitutes effective pedagogy and learning and whether we are succeeding asinstructors, independent of the mode of transmission.I make no pretense of offering anything new. On the issue of "critical thinking," there is an extensiveliterature reflecting a large body of more than forty years of research in cognitive and social psychology andeducational research. There have also been extensive methodological investigations designed to measureeducational performance and outcomes. There is an important literature, perhaps less well known, on"communities of practice" that has begun to influence the thinking of a number of information and socialscientists over the last several years. I think we ought to be paying close attention to all these differentdomains of knowledge, but particularly the work on communities of practice, because of the insights itprovides about the social dimensions of learning and their connections to the educational institution and itsplace in society.