Online Community Building

This fall, I joined the Global Physics Department for the first time.  The Global Physics Department is a weekly webinar on physics education topics.  When I attended the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meeting this summer, I met a lot of people who spoke enthusiastically about the benefits of the webinar and got interested in checking it out.  The group takes a hiatus during the summer, so I had to wait until this September to take the plunge.

Each week, someone working in the field of physics education delivers a presentation on a project of theirs or an area of particular expertise.  The presenter typically ignores the text chat where the attendees react to the presentation in real time and do some socializing.  Many of the participants are people I've connected with on Twitter thanks to the #physicsed and #modphys hashtags, but the Global Physics Department provides a very different kind of interaction.  Since we are all watching the same presentation at the same time, the conversation takes on a depth that does not often occur on Twitter.

The presentations themselves have also been extremely valuable so far.  I've only attended two meetings to date, but have learned about some exciting resources like Direct Measurement Videos and the Concord Consortium directly from their creators.  In addition to hearing how the creators suggest using these tools in the classroom, the text chat is filled with teachers sharing their ideas and their experiences with the resources.  At the end of both meetings, I've left with new tools and new ideas about how to use them.

The Global Physics Department has been a valuable complement to the professional learning network  (PLN) I've already been developing via Twitter and blogging.  I look forward to learning a lot more from other physics educators.

In an online classroom, students need to be provided with the same kinds of opportunities for community and peer learning that I've found in my PLN.  In order to consider how I can support this kind of community in an online classroom, I developed some community building strategies for high school students in a science class.