A Community of Practice for the Development of Teachers’ TEL Skills: A Social Network Analysis Perspective

Teacher’s, at all levels, are confronted daily with the need to acquire, refine, and apply their skills in Technology Enhanced Learning. It is since many years that professional development initiatives for teachers, and adoption of technology-based tools, have been undertaken to foster new ways of teaching; yet much is still needed, as the recent needs for distance learning, in countries where the schools and universities were closed for social health reasons, has revealed quite dramatically. In this paper we describe an experiment of use of a Community of Practice (CoP), where teachers of different disciplines participated, with the aim to (1) get in contact with technologies of relatively easy adoption, and (2) interact with colleagues, to discuss with and learn from them. The experiment was conducted within the framework of a EU project aiming to bridge the gap between teachers and pupils in the use of the Web technologies. The CoP was designed based on the foundational Wenger’s concepts of domain, community, and practice. It supported an educational program on Web2.0 educational technologies for Vocational Education teachers. We present a discussion of the social aspects of the CoP dynamics, using evaluation metrics coming from the Social Network Analysis research area.