Reflection on Wenger reading for 2/7

Wenger begins with a contrast of normal (traditional) learning perspectives with a social perspective. I agree with Wenger's description of learning communities, learning as social participation, and that communities of practice are everywhere. The issues that we face as educators are ones of creating interactions within learning communities or possibly even before that, creating learning communities. The initial decision is who should be in the learning community? Then we need to find and decide on ways to facilitate communication among the members of the community. Web technology is a largely unexplored, or at least unstudied, way of facilitating conversations of learning communities. What types of tools, software, or web 'programs' are available and appropriate for educational settings? How do we monitor these tools? Current use of these tools function well in an open environment. But we know that as we encourage or require students (under the age of 19) to engage in conversations in these environments they cannot be completely open as they are in other contexts.