Teacher Collaboration in a Networked Community

In this paper, we examine the collaboration problems teachers encountered in the course of instructing students using collaborative computer software to connect distributed classrooms. We describe issues surrounding teacher collaborations arising from three types of sources: Organizational chaos of teaching, physical and temporal dispersion of events and causes, and individualism in teaching practices. We illustrate how our situation presents new challenges and opportunities to better facilitate and motivate teacher collaborations, ones that may become typical in the future of education and thus are important to analyze now. Finally we describe some technological solutions to problems arising from traditional and novel teacher collaborations.

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