Nurturing a Community of Practice through a Collaborative Design of Lesson Plans on a Wiki System

Abstract

Eleven graduate students, experienced mathematics teachers, participated in a semester long activity in which they collaboratively designed and developed lesson plans on a Media Wiki system. The described study examined the processes involved in this collaborative effort and its contribution to the development of mathematics teachers' community of practice. Data were collected through tracking each Wiki page written by the participants, their reflective journals, a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and researchers' notes of the whole class discussions. Evidently, the use of the Wiki system triggered a process of change, and the participants quickly evolved into a small and very Wiki-active community of practice. The results indicate that this teachers' community of practice was concerned with two major issues: social ones and technical ones. The social issues related to the teachers' consideration as to how to provide and receive feedback, as well as uncertainty about the possibility of losing the ownership over their creative work. The technical issues had to do with various difficulties participating teachers faced while writing in Wiki syntax.