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Bridging the distance between research and practice: Creating a community of practice for piloting an educational simulation.
PROCEEDINGS

, Boston College, United States ; , Vermont Institutes & National Institute for Community Innovations, United States

E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education, in Washington, DC, USA ISBN 978-1-880094-54-9 Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), San Diego, CA

Abstract

Projects and organizations that want to deploy new e-learning tools find it helpful to bridge research, development and practice by piloting with users to learn what works, what needs adapting, and how to create support systems for full scale implementation (Royer, 2002; Sanders, Brown & Zellner, 2002). When the users are distant from one another in space and time, communities of practice can be formed that utilize face-to-face and online communications to support the users and capture their feedback (Bennett, Hupert, Tsikalas, Meade & Honey, 1998; Bransford, 2001). This paper describes initial efforts with six higher educational institutions that are piloting use of an innovative simulation called SimSchool (Gibson & Halverson, 2004), funded by a 2003 grant from the "Preparing Teachers to Use Technology" program of the US Department of Education. Topics covered include an overview of the new application, the recruitment and selection of testing and partnership sites, plans for piloting, early implementation and ongoing support, and lessons learned so far.

Citation

Zibit, M. & Gibson, D. (2004). Bridging the distance between research and practice: Creating a community of practice for piloting an educational simulation. In J. Nall & R. Robson (Eds.), Proceedings of E-Learn 2004--World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (pp. 1044-1057). Washington, DC, USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 28, 2024 from .

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