Bounded Community - Dominguez

To me community learning is related to peer learning. While observing an elementary classroom, the teacher, after giving a math lesson would let the students get together with one or two partners. She mentioned that the activity was valuable because students could relate the lesson in their own language allowing those who did not fully understand the instruction to hear and work through the concepts again with peer support. This seems like a similar concept to community learning; where learners teach while learning. This is more easily done in a classroom setting where there is plenty of personal interaction, more challenging in an exclusively online environment where learners can feel isolated from instructor and classmates. Equally important, collaboration is a critical skill to have and translate over to your work environment.

Best strategies and techniques:
1. Safe and supportive conditions - This is in order to establish trusting relationships. There is no effective communication without trust.

2. Collaboration - Important since in an online community there are not as many natural interactions that can occur as there are in a traditional classroom setting.

3. Progressive discourse toward knowledge building - Advancing knowledge as the key purpose of the community.

4. Mutual appropration - Every individual in the community teaching and learning together.

Another important piece not to be overlooked is evaluation of the community. Everyone needs to know what is working and what is not in order to maximize the potential of each individual and the community as a whole.