Collaborative Web-Based Learning Community

Abstract

Because of the ever-changing nature of work and society under the knowledge-based economy in the 21st century, students and teachers need to develop ways of dealing with complex issues and thorny problems that require new kinds of knowledge that they have never learned or taught (Drucker, 1999). Therefore, they need to work and collaborate with others. They also need to be able to learn new things from a variety of resources and people and investigate questions, then bring their learning back to their dynamic life communities. There have arisen in recent years learning-community approaches (Bereiter, 2002; Bielaczyc & Collins, 1999) and learning-ecology (Siemens, 2003) or information-ecology approaches (Capurro, 2003) to education. These approaches fit well with the growing emphasis on lifelong, life-wide learning and knowledge-building works.