"Communicative spaces in action" - experiences of developing group mentoring for ict implementation in teaching and learning in higher education

"Communicative spaces in action" - experiences of developing group mentoring for ict implementation in teaching and learning in higher education This paper explores how a group mentoring solution for university teachers' professional learning and ICT use in teaching was implemented in one research university in Finland and how this guidance model was developed through the action research cycles. The starting point of the action research was to make the processes of information and knowledge sharing in the academic community more visible and to examine how to better support university teachers for adopting ICT in teaching and learning. The project provided communicative spaces for knowledge sharing through series of group mentoring workshops in two pilot departments during one academic year. The applied knowledge sharing and group mentoring model is a combination from Propp's (1999) CIP model and from Nonaka's and others' (2000) knowledge creation scheme. The paper presents the strategies used for constructing and piloting the group mentoring model and discusses some of the key obstacles what emerged when guiding the collective information and knowledge sharing in the academic work and teaching culture.

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