Learning in Communities

Most learning takes place in communities. People continually learn through their participation with others in everyday activities. Such learning is important in contemporary society because formal education cannot prepare people for a world that changes rapidly and continually. We need to live in learning communities.

This volume gathers together all of the scholarly materials directly emanating from a workshop held in August 2005, when a multidisciplinary group of scholars met at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology to discuss ‘learning in communities’. Initially, a sectioned report on the workshop was published as a special section in the Journal of Community Informatics in 2006. Subsequently, a special issue of 5 full papers was published in the Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and a special section of 2 full papers was published in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

• CSCW
• Collaborative Learning
• Community networks
• Learning Communities
• computer-supported collaborative learning
• education
• infrastructure
• knowledge management
• learning
• learning organizations
• multidisciplinary

From the reviews:

"Learning in communities is for people involved in lifelong learning in all its manifestations: knowledge management, distributed learning, cognitive apprenticeship, communities of practice, or any of the other terms used in this diverse field. It is a book of wide scope, bringing together many viewpoints. … this book, in series of texts on human–computer interaction, is by academics for academics." (Alexa Campbell, Technical Communication, Vol. 56 (4), November, 2009)

• College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA

  John M. Carroll

John M. Carroll is Edward M. Frymoyer Chair Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include methods and theory in human-computer interaction, particularly as applied to networking tools for collaborative learning and problem solving, and design of interactive information systems. Carroll serves on several editorial and advisory boards and is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions.  He received the Rigo Award and the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Silver Core Award from International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP), and the Goldsmith Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is a fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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