VOLUME 5 ISSUE 3
Special Issue ICEL New York 2007

Developing Critically Thoughtful e-Learning Communities of Practice

Philip L. Balcaen and Janine R. Hirtz
University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, Canada

In this paper, we consider an approach to developing critically thoughtful e-learning communities of practice—where participants are deliberate about the use of specific intellectual tools supporting critical thinking. The intellectual tools referred to above include focused use of background knowledge, warranted criteria for judgment, thinking concepts, teaching strategies, and habits of mind. The notion of critical thinking used within the paper is founded on the belief that people are attempting to think critically when they thoughtfully seek to assess what would be sensible or reasonable to believe or do in a given situation. This need to reach such reasoned judgments may arise in countless kinds of problematic situations in all disciplines and can inform a routine approach to interactions and making decisions within any e-community.

In the work we address Garrison & Anderson’s (2003) argument that such critical thinking should play a central role within the ecology of e-learning communities and provide our view of what such communities might look like. To do this, we offer four categories of strategies helping to develop such communities. These are: collaborative agreement on goals; facilitator(s) modelling and teaching the five categories of intellectual tools supporting critical thinking; and shaping communicative interactions within the e-learning environment to encourage thinking. We use the categories to organize and explore examples of dialogue from our current study to illustrate what such thoughtful communities looks like. The examples used are taken from the first six months of a current two-year study where 36 practicing pre-school to grade 12 teachers have volunteered to participate in professional development aimed at implementation of a new social studies curriculum within the Province of Alberta, Canada.

Keywords: critical thinking, communities of practice, tools for thought, e-learning.

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