Published in Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing W. Nejdl and K. Tochtermann Eds. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4227, Springer, 61-73 (2006) ISBN: 978-3-540-45777-0

Promoting teachers’ collaborative re-use of educational materials

Emanuela Busetti1, Giuliana Dettori2, Paola Forcheri1, Maria Grazia Ierardi1

1 Istituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche del CNR, Genova – Italy {emma, forcheri, marygz}@ge.imati.cnr.it

2 Istituto di Tecnologie Didattiche del CNR, Genova – Italy dettori@itd.cnr.it

Abstract. In this paper we describe the main lines of a teacher preparation model aiming to promote a culture of sharing and re-use of educational resources. Our methodology is based on the analysis of conceptions of trainee teachers as concerns the production and re-use of educational modules and on the use of a collaborative environment, especially designed to support the construction and development of a community of practice of teachers working on Learning Objects. This approach is meant as a means to support in a collaborative way the construction and diffusion of pedagogical innovation.

1 Introduction

Collaboration through communities of practice is increasingly considered as an effective way for teachers to cope with life-long professional development [14], [5]. We add that such communities could be fruitfully used as a tool to establish a continuity between pre-service and in-service teacher training, favouring the exchange of competence and ideas among teachers with different experience and backgrounds and supporting the development of a culture of sharing and reflection. This could help avoid the individualistic approach to the teaching profession which is currently rather common and hinders the diffusion of innovation. In particular, we argue that communities suitably structured to collaboratively work on Learning Objects (LOs) could results effective in this respect.

Digital LOs were initially conceived as a tool to make distance education efficient, by easing teachers’ re-use of self-contained chunks of educational material for course construction. They were subsequently recognized to have the potential to be helpful for education in general [12], since into LOs repositories teachers may find innovative proposals to improve their regular educational practice (such as materials to carry out problem-based activities), as well as simple technological tools (such as java applets for simulating scientific phenomena) whose implementation might be beyond their competence. However, the diffusion of LOs has been slowed down as a consequence of the fact that computers, despite

having been introduced into schools from the eighties and being actually used by many teachers, are not yet deeply integrated into school activity: not only does classroom practice often remain unchanged but even many teachers are still dealing with accepting ICT [6], [13]. Moreover, research has highlighted a number of difficulties that still hinder teachers’ appreciation and actual use of LOs in school, such as the scarce information on the objects’ quality and the limited congruence of the metadata standards with the current indications of learning theories [7], [10].

In accordance with other authors [8], we suggest that LOs’ diffusion is actually an issue of technological transfer and should be addressed as such. In order to give a contribution in this direction, we propose a methodology for teacher training which integrates personal reflection on LOs with sharing educational material and the related experience of use within communities of practice created on purpose. We implemented this idea by designing and building the prototype of a collaboration environment, and we experimented it in a pre-service teacher training course. We also carried out a study of the conceptions of trainee teachers on the re-use of the educational material in order to give direction to our work and check the feasibility of our approach.

In this paper we describe our methodological framework and outline the output of the experiences carried out with trainee teachers. With his study, we aim to support in a systematic way the collaborative construction of pedagogical innovation, promote a culture of sharing and re-use of educational material and suggest a uniform way to connect pre-service and in-service teacher training.

2 Teacher training through collaboration on LOs

2.1 An approach to sharing educational material

Starting point of our proposal is the observation that, from a pedagogical point of view, re-use of educational material should be focused not only on products but also, and especially, on experiences of use of such products in different contexts [2]. This turns LOs from static materials (as they result in a purely technological view of re-use) into something constantly in evolution, since each experience of use obviously differs from the previous ones, depending on the situation where it takes place, the individuals involved and their pedagogical orientations and personal teaching styles. Reflecting on the variety of experiences carried out with a same material constitutes for the teachers an occasion of learning. Engaging in a re-use activity centred on sharing reflections and comparing experiences can result, for teachers, an effective way of learning and hence become a powerful tool for professional development. Re-use of an educational module in different contexts, moreover, often leads to the re-elaboration of the initial view of the module itself and hence gives rise to a number of variants of it, produced by different teachers to adapt it to different teaching needs and styles. Considering such variants can result useful also to the initial producer, since it leads her/him to take into consideration different perspectives on her/his own work. In this view, re-use constitutes a knowledge transfer process in which both user and producer can equally take part

actively, with mutual advantage. Such activity can therefore constitute a good basis for a community of teachers engaged in learning from each others’ experience while sharing educational material, and can help building and circulating pedagogical innovation. It can also help creating a deeper sense of community and overcome the problem pointed out by Parr and Ward [11] of teachers feeling scarcely inclined to share their own productions if they don’t perceive the participation in a community of practice as useful and rewarding.

Collecting in a repository variants of a given object produced by different users, and associated reflections, gives rise to a conceptual network of educational material on a given topic, as sketched in Fig. 1. Comments represent the reflections on the experiences of use of different teachers. The presence of variants and comments and connections among them greatly increases the expressive power of the educational material. The creation of a conceptual network of this kind starting from a given learning object is the expression of the collective learning of a community of teachers.

Fig.1. The conceptual network of educational materials originated by collecting user-

produced variants and comments to an original LO.

2.2 Preparing teachers to share pedagogical materials and experience

It is necessary to prepare teachers to put in practice the above approach, especially since sharing knowledge and experience is not customary in most school systems, and hence a tradition in this sense needs to be established [9]. This entails organizing suitable activities to carry out during pre-service teacher training, apt to promote a culture of sharing and re-use of educational resources. Several components should, in our opinion, be included in this preparation: • Giving the trainee teachers some basic knowledge about LOs, by explaining

their meaning and potential, use of the metadata etc. In order to be effective this activity should be preceded by a study of the conceptions that teachers have on the re-use of educational material, so as to be in condition to explicitly address their doubts and help them building a positive attitude towards sharing experience and pedagogical material in their profession.

• Helping to construct reflective and experiential knowledge by means of an activity on educational modules along the lines mentioned in Sect. 2.1. Reflection on experience should be carried out not only individually, but also collectively, so as to fill a gap that is often present in teacher preparation. Trainee teachers, as a matter of fact, are often not used to collaborative work, due to the limited importance given to this aspect in many school and university systems. This often leads in-service teachers to find collaborative contexts difficult, especially with colleagues who have different backgrounds, hence missing good opportunities to improve their professional knowledge and contribute to give their students a more articulated preparation.

• Taking into account teachers' background, which includes both topic-related specific knowledge and pedagogical awareness.

• Making the trainee teachers get acquainted with ICT tools, basic knowledge and terminology which are functional to work easily in technology-based collaborative environments and with technological educational resources.

Fig. 2. A model of pre-service and in-service teacher preparation centered on sharing of educational modules

The aim of this approach to initial teacher preparation is to build a common ground of shared conceptual and pedagogical knowledge on LOs that can form the starting

point for learning-oriented, joint, in-service activity and hence constitute a bridge between pre-service and in-service training. It also aims to provide a base of methodological and operative competence apt to favour teachers’ collaborative working and learning through communities of practice. The overall structure of this approach to teacher training is sketched in Fig. 2.

2.3. An environment for sharing LOs and experience of use

In order to implement this approach to teacher training, we designed the collaborative environment LODE (Learning Objects Discussion Environment). We implemented a prototype of it (which is available in Italian and in English) by suitably adapting ATutor, an open source, fully inclusive, web-based Learning Content Management System (http://www.atutor.ca/).

LODE’s main characteristics, with respect to the collaborative environments currently diffused, is that it is specifically oriented to working with LOs. Hence, not only does it offer the usual variety of communication modalities and file sharing, but also it allows the insertion and cataloguing of new LOs and comments, as well as the definition of connections among them.

Each LO corresponding to an educational module is represented by means of an ATutor course. The content of the object is stored by one or more files linked to the LO home page. Each LO has a forum associated, to discuss issues related to its use. Comments can be inserted by any number of people for every LO (including the LO’s author); they concern outcomes of experimentations or proposals for pedagogical and operational changes. Moreover, users can define logical connections of different types among objects. At present, four kinds of them are provided: derives from, substitutes, includes and complementary to. This information is part of the metadata set associated to a LO and is represented in LODE environment by the label “links to other LO” ( see “legami con altri LO” in the bottom of Fig. 3).

It is possible to search for material in the environment by any of the metadata on both LOs and comments. It is also possible to browse through the complete list of objects and related comments. A glossary of the terms used in the metadata, a general forum and a help function are also provided.

In order to make the input of LOs simple, metadata have been kept limited to the values strictly necessary to characterize a LO with respect to the educational practice. We paid only limited attention to standards for reuse, both because interoperability issues are outside the scope of our research, and in our view they add a level of unwanted complexity as concerns the applicability of the pedagogical model we propose, as our trainees are new to the LO concept. After considering the most acknowledged metadata standards and specifications developed by international organizations, such as IEEE TTSC LOM, DCMI and related projects such as Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) and EDNA (Education Network Australia), we selected a set of LO metadata mainly from the LOM scheme, though moving away from it, especially regarding the LOM category “Educational”. Rather than thinking of extending this scheme, we

preferred to realize a proposal specifically oriented to the school pedagogical context, easily understandable by the trainee teachers and with a limited cost.

Our metadata, then, include: author, language, date, keywords, pedagogical approach, technical requirements, school topics, school level, producer’s intention, educational role, connections with other objects. These values are visualized when a LO is opened (see Fig. 3). Comments’ metadata include only author, date of creation, key words and LO associated.

Fig. 3. The home page of a LO in LODE, showing the metadata and the comments available

on the left hand side

3. Towards implementing our teacher preparation idea

We tested our teacher preparation approach oriented to knowledge and experience sharing, over the past two years, in a teacher training course on Multimedia in education of the Teacher training school (SSIS) of the University of Genoa, Italy. This is a 3-credit course for trainee teachers of secondary school in all disciplines; it is subdivided into modules on different topics, each of which includes both a theoretical and a practical part. Around 120 people are enrolled in it every year. The activities we introduced in the course in relation with this study included an analysis of trainee’s conceptions about the re-use of educational material and an experience of sharing LOs on the LODE platform.

3.1. Preliminary study of beginning teachers’ conceptions on the re-use of LOs

In the year 2004, we added in the mentioned course an activity on LOs, where we guided the trainee teachers to analyse, from the point of view of re-use, a set of educational modules prepared by the previous years’ trainees as one of the assignments to pass the course [3]. The proposed educational modules concerned

different fields and reflected different pedagogical approaches, so that trainees could chose among them based on their background and preferences. Aim of this activity was to make the trainees aware of the problems that can be faced in the re-use of other teachers’ material, and hence prepare them to pay attention to key elements, both when selecting among their colleagues’ materials and when preparing their own materials to be shared with other teachers. Trainees were requested to freely choose a module to analyse in a group of proposed ones, and to deduce its re-use possibilities, technical and pedagogical value, strengths and weaknesses, improvements suggested, etc. They were also asked to mention what features they would select in order to characterize the materials in such a way to make it easy for prospective re-users to chose among them; this request aimed to spot what kind of features trainee teachers would appreciate to find among metadata. We did not give the trainees the summaries and the metadata originally associated with the selected modules, in order not to influence their analysis with the observations and classification reported by the authors but possibly not considered by the trainees who were examining the modules. Then we analysed the trainees’ productions, looking for conceptions on the re-use of educational materials. Our aim was to obtain information on several points: • From what point of view do teachers consider re-usable material? • Which aspects are considered important in a didactical module? Which

important ones are overlooked by the trainees? • Are trainee teachers able to see a role for a given module in their own

teaching? • What kind of information do teachers consider it important to transfer to their

colleagues in view of re-use? • What relation do teachers see among the selected material and the final users?

A first interesting point, which clearly emerged from this study is that content knowledge was the main (and sometimes only) aspect of the didactical material on which trainee teachers focused. Neither the pedagogical approach nor the technological choices seemed to be considered as being strictly part of the module’s overall content and in condition to influence the usability and effectiveness of the analysed material. Trainees mainly assumed to re-use from the given materials the content knowledge (which includes texts, pictures and exercises), adding on their own both the pedagogical approach and the delivery mode. For this reason, they often disregarded any technological mistake or cumbersome pre-requisite. Didactical modules, moreover, were viewed as complete objects, rather than parts of a didactical itinerary.

As prospective re-users, the trainees often did not foresee the range of application possibilities that were prospected by the module’s producers.

Some trainees, finally, viewed the didactical modules as chunks of knowledge based on which teachers could work out something useful for their students. Only a few of them expressed the wish to know the guiding ideas underlying the design of the modules and their previous applications, in order to better plan for their re-use.

This study, which was focused only on individual reflections on LOs, allowed us to spot which aspects require special attention when preparing trainee teachers to the use of LOs. It also provided us with useful information to guide the design

of the LODE collaborative environment (outlined in Section 2.3) to carry out a training activity on sharing and re-use of LOs. Based on this experience, in the following year we proposed to our trainees a more articulated activity which included both individual and shared reflection, with particular emphasis on the second one.

3.2 A collaborative activity on LOs on the LODE platform

In the year 2005, we introduced in the mentioned teacher training course an activity on sharing educational modules, organized along the methodological lines sketched in Section 2. Before carrying out a practical activity on the LODE platform, the trainees had a class on knowledge management and communication/collaboration systems, one on LOs and repositories, as well as a concise presentation of the LODE environment. Several educational modules developed by the previous years’ trainees were uploaded in the environment, to make the work start with some materials at disposal.

The activity with LODE went on for about one month. Trainees were asked to: explore the environment and write a description of their understanding of it; choose a LO to analyse; write a comment of it; discuss possibly different opinions with the classmates who were analysing the same LO; work out a new LO and upload it in the environment, specifying and justifying pedagogical metadata and connections with other LOs. We evaluated this experience based on the observation of trainees’ involvement, the trainee’s productions and the answers to an anonymous questionnaire. The results on the three aspects considered were encouraging [4].

The trainees’ involvement was rather high. Almost all of them became operative in a short time and used the environment to a wide extent. They often carried out more than the work assigned, and some of them even asked us to leave the environment in use after the end of the course so as to be allowed to work with it again in the future. The reports on the environment confirmed a satisfactory understanding of its structure and aims.

As concerns the trainees’ productions, the materials developed resulted to be more clear, articulated and well designed than they had usually been in the previous years. We attribute this improvement to the reflection the trainees had to carry out for writing comments to the materials at disposal, which led them to pay attention to aspects that had been usually overlooked by the trainees of the previous years. The comments produced concerned mainly ideas for school activities to carry out with the commented LOs

They showed an interest for comparing their work with that of their peers, as well as good self-evaluation abilities. They even tried to evaluate what teacher’s competence was necessary for developing and using the considered modules. This led many of them to consider the modules’ evaluation as an occasion to become aware of their own competence and a stimulus to get updated if necessary.

The questionnaire, which was returned by 106 people, included 5 groups of closed questions (to be valued on a scale from 1=very poor to 5= excellent), concerning interest for the environment, ease of use and learning, effectiveness of feedback and support received, usefulness of the communication facilities. Some

open questions concerned the difficulties experienced and the aspects of the environment most or least appreciated.

The mean value of all answers to the questionnaire resulted 3.74, the standard deviation 0.96, the median 4. If we consider negative answers the values 1 and 2 and positive answers the values 3 (sufficient), 4 (good) and 5 (excellent), the total percentage of negative answers resulted 11.19, while the percentage of positive answers resulted 88.81.

As for the interest of the environment for their teaching profession, the respondents expressed a good level of appreciation for both retrieving others’ materials and sharing their own (93.96 % of positive answers). Comments and connections among LOs were appreciated more as a way to express their own reflections than for learning those of their peers.

Ease of use and navigation were evaluated from average to high (85.17 % of positive answers). From the open answers, some difficulties emerged, though, as concerns the use of metadata, both for searching LOs based on pedagogical features and for defining the correct ones when creating new LOs. Ease of learning to use the environment was evaluated from average to high, with a concentration on average values (88.45 % of positive answers). This matches with the observation that the trainees had started working correctly with LODE in a short time. The feedback and help received were considered clear and effective enough (89.64 % of positive answers).

Finally, the questionnaire showed that communication with peers was slightly preferred to communication with the teacher; internal mail was appreciated more than forums, which were seen more as a tool to learn from each other than as a place to socialize with peers.

3.3 A study of conceptions after collaboratively working on educational material

In the school year 2005, after the described activity in the LODE environment, we repeated the analysis of conceptions we had carried out with the trainees of the previous year, in order to check if actively working on educational material to be shared and re-used had any positive influence on trainee teachers’ conceptions. The task assigned and the guidelines provided to carry it out were the same as the previous years. This activity, however, was carried out after working on the LODE platform, and hence the trainees had gained some familiarity with the concept of learning object. They also had at disposal the metadata and the author’s report for each educational module.

This new study of conceptions on educational material confirmed the disorientation as concerns metadata that resulted from the activity in the LODE environment. The trainees tended either to avoid to specify them or to replace them by a wordy description of the educational material’s characteristics. In the first case, they seemed to assume that each material would be reused by its author, and this one would have a good enough memory to remind all important features over the years; they also tended to disregard all technical prerequisites necessary to use a material, such as version of the software application used, plug-ins, etc.. In the

second case, the trainees seemed to disregard the need to concisely cataloguing the materials and sometimes even considered some fields as ambiguous or meaningless, despite the simplicity of the metadata chosen in our environment. This highlights that metadata, though essential for an effective re-use of educational material, are an intrinsically difficult topic for teachers. Despite the many efforts in this sense made in the past years within the scientific community [1], there is obviously need of some further work on their definition.

Probably due to the activity on LOs carried out before this second study of conceptions, the trainees paid attention not only to the content knowledge of the considered modules, but also to their technological part, showing to understand that this can have an influence on their actual use and educational potential. Hypertexts and multimedia were seen as tools to present in new way topics they knew and to support the exploration of new didactical paths.

Unlike the previous year, they did not appreciate big modules treating thoroughly some topics, but showed a preference for small ones that could better be fitted in their didactical plans.

They attributed great importance to the fact that the modules they were analysing had been made by their peers: not only did they consider the task at their reach, but felt motivated to commit to produce good modules themselves, knowing that they were going to be used by their peers in the following years.

They showed, moreover, great interest in the applicative aspects of the modules. Differently than in the previous year, the trainees managed to figure out and suggest a variety of uses of the considered materials bigger and more diverse than foreseen by the materials’ authors. This fact suggests that the activity carried out with digital LOs succeeded in helping the trainees to gain an overall view of teaching more dynamic and open to new and interdisciplinary experiences. This supports our hypothesis that sharing knowledge in a community of teachers, as planned in our model, is a creative activity where also the re-users take part in the production of new knowledge and become motivated to get involved in the process.

3.4 Observations on the commented and produced educational materials

By analysing the modules’ comments and the educational materials produced by our trainees, we noticed some points that highlight the influence of analysing peers’ productions on the modules worked out. A relation between some aspects of the commented material and the produced ones was often explicitly admitted by the trainees in their reports. This influence does not consist simply in copying ideas or parts of products, but shows a personal re-elaboration of different module’s aspects that suggests a growth of our trainees as producers of educational material. Working in a community focused on re-use and re-elaboration of educational material, trainees seem to improve their critical attitude and this supports the sharing and diffusion of teaching competence.

Let us briefly summarize the main characteristics of the commented and the produced modules.

The materials produced mainly consisted in: - multimedia presentations, often including interactive exercises;.

- constructive activities, where students are guided to explore a topic, and teacher’s intervention is rather limited;

- lessons based on a traditional approach. From an educational point of view, the produced modules showed different

structures: - teacher-oriented (to be used by a teacher as support to introduce a topic); - problem-oriented (e.g. problems to be solved by the students or paths to be

explored); - mixed (including both teacher’s intervention and students’ autonomous work); - support for self-instruction.

Students appeared to choose the module to comment based on several different reasons: - background and teaching topic; - variety of possible uses of the module or support to interdisciplinary activity; - interest of the topic with respect to the curriculum, independently of the

module’s quality; - effectiveness of the pedagogical approach in comparison with more traditional

ones. We mention as interesting in this respect the request of a trainee who asked to be allowed to comment, instead of a module in the LODE repository, a module she had found in the well known repository Merlot (www.merlot.org), consisting of a set of Java applets for the simulation of chemical reactions. The trainee also asked to include in LODE a LO consisting in a link to the commented material, catalogued by giving the metadata values that resulted meaningful in our school system, since those used in Merlot reflected a different school context;

We observed different ways to get inspiration from the commented materials for producing their own proposals: - General topic, yet with a different content and a different approach. For

instance, a module of archaeological topic, “The Hill of Priamar” (a visit to an archaeological site nearby) inspired two different archaeological modules, “Know your Town” e “The Libarna Archaeological Site”. The first of them gets from the original one the idea to deepen the history of one’s own town, and includes a link to it; the second one gets from it the idea of a guided tour to an archaeological site.

- Technical solutions. For instance, the module “Introduction to networking” inspired “Introduction to micro-processing”, based on a similar presentation approach (animation of key elements, arrows to point out main aspects, etc.). Analogously, “Main pictorial techniques” inspired “Painting of flowers in XVII century” with the idea to examine a painting starting from a general view and successively zooming on features.

- Ideas of possible directions to deepen a topic. For instance, “The Greek house” suggested the creation of “The Roman house”: despite the similar names, however, the content of the two modules has a different focus, due to the different importance given to public and private architecture in the Greek and Roman cultures. What is interesting in these examples is that the second module was conceived as complementary to the first one, so that the two of them allow a teacher to compare not only architectural orientations but also

methodology of study of archaeological remains. This added value can result very handy and effective for teachers of humanities.

- Multiculturalism. For instance, “Typical aspects of German life”, suggested a way to approach the study of a language as a good occasion to analyses and compare different cultures. Getting inspiration from it, “A trip to Berlin” was produced, which features, though, a different content and different target users.

- Pedagogical approach. For instance, the module “The symbols of Genoa” (a description of ancient Genoa through its political, economical and religious symbols) owns to “Mirò and the Macroculture of Catalunia” the use of an interactive section (with possibility of zooming and manipulating images) on recognizing the meaning of an image’s elements.

- Multidisciplinarity. For instance, “Discovering the meaning of labels on food packages” (which includes elements of science and language) inspired “A guide to healthy eating” (which mixes elements of biology and geography).

Also errors and poor solutions proved to be source of inspiration, since several trainees explicitly claimed their will to avoid features they did not appreciate in the commented modules An interesting example is given by a module on philosophy education, a topic where pedagogical studies have so far been limited. A group of trainees observed that the previous years’ modules on this topic simply translated a traditional teaching approach into technological presentations, with poor results as concerns both the use of technological tools and the presentation of the content topic They worked out, therefore, a more articulated and intriguing presentation which included readings of philosophers’ texts and different possible approaches to interpretation.

4. Discussion and conclusion

The positive response of the trainees in this study highlights the availability and interest of beginning teachers to get involved in the sharing of educational material and collaboratively reflecting on its practical use. The different ways the trainees made use their peers’ work to improve their own suggest that critically working with re-usable educational material can result into a creative activity. The good outcomes obtained suggest that our approach to teacher training is feasible and likely effective.

The trainees seemed to learn to evaluate a priori their possibility to re-use a given educational material in different ways, foretelling advantages and drawbacks related to their use. In this sense LODE could even be seen as a tool to learn a methodology for didactic planning.

The study also highlights, though, that some aspects need to be deepened. The metadata used to cataloguing the material should be revised, trying to find

items which result in line with the standards presented in the literature but at the same time take into consideration the meanings usually given to labels by the beginning teachers, in relation with the different school topics. This issue appears to be particularly difficult, since keywords are often used in different ways within different disciplines, let alone within different cultures. If the development of a

common language for metadata will not be supported among teachers from different disciplines and environments, however, the diffusion of a culture of sharing and re-use will always result limited.

The effective understanding of the concept of LO gained by the trainees should be further investigated. We think it would be fruitful to provide some examples of excellent materials, explaining the reasons for this excellence. Some activity would also be necessary centred on the articulation of educational paths which include a number of given LOs.

This kind of activity with educational material should be tried out with in-service teachers, to spot issues which are peculiar to them and not shared by trainee teachers. One of this issues concerns how to organize the quality control in a situation where there is no trainer in charge of the activity to select the materials to be included in the repository. The quality control is, on the other hand, essential, to motivate the teacher to make use of a repository. Moreover, it appears necessary to investigate how a community of in-service teachers would self-regulate its own learning activity [15].

Another issue that needs to be addressed is to understand what relation should be established between pre-service and in-service teacher training, at both practical and institutional level, to make these two groups of teachers work together on a same repository, with reciprocal advantage and satisfaction.

If this approach to teacher training will gain diffusion, and many communities of this kind will develop, it will be necessary to adapt its design, so as to create a network of communities, where each teacher could be allowed to potentially be admitted to take part in the activity of any community, yet avoiding the confusion of too crowded groups where the loss of personalization would decrease the possibility of learning from sharing each other’s ideas and experience.

Acknowledgements. The work has been partially supported by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, FIRB Research Project ‘TIGER-Telepresence Instant Groupware for Higher Education in Robotics’ and Project VICE- Virtual Communities for Education

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