Despite the technical frustrations I faced this week as I worked my way through the course assignments, I was able to find motivation to persevere with my digital presence plan through the convincing readings in Unit 3. My understanding of the impact an organizational structure can have on how members of a digital learning environment interact with one another, gave me reason to once again step outside of my former comfort zone, in hopes to gain the fullest advantage of the learning community I now find myself apart of.

Veletsianos described community in terms that aligned with researchers before him. Most profound to me of the various sources he referenced in “Digital Learning Environments” (2016), was to Wenger’s type of community, a Community of Practice (CoP); or a group with a common passion for something they do, and who can each do it better as they interact regularly with other members of the group (1998). I read this as empirical validation of something that I was already experiencing; that yes, we are better as team, or as is the case for us Malat-ers, as a cohort. By nature of being enrolled in this program, we are each demonstrating a passion for what we do, or what we aspire to do. The idea that we will each become better at what we do by nature of interacting with each other, is certainly a reason to trudge through the technical hurdles we (I) might encounter, and to form meaningful connections as we create our own learning community.

References

Veletsianos, G. (2016). Digital learning environments. In N. Rushby & D. Surry (Eds), Handbook of Learning Technologies (pp. 242-260). UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Wenger, E. (1998). Index. In Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, pp. 309-318). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.