TeacherBridge: Knowledge Management in Communities of Practice

The TeacherBridge (Basic Resources for Integrated Distributed Group Environments) motivates collaboration and supports online tools for teachers’ professional resource management by providing a socio-technical infrastructure for community networks. While this project focuses initially on local science and mathematics teachers, resources developed are designed to be globally diffused to a wide variety of online communities. This paper discusses the characteristics of online communities of educators and how home networking technology and knowledge management systems can support collaboration and knowledge sharing in such communities. We study examples of existing and well-known online communities of educators and introduce our own system, TeacherBridge, which supports teacher professional development by supporting peer-based collaboration and community. We also analyze and evaluate the characteristics of TeacherBridge with activity theory [12] and minimalism [37]. Activity theory provides an analytical framework for how TeacherBridge can be used as a socio-technical infrastructure for online communities of educators; minimalism guides the development of successful online communities that are easily accessible and facilitate teacher participation in knowledge sharing activities