Using the World Wide Web to Build Learning Communities in K-12

Many are the conditions which must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community …. The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breath life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery, it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. – John Dewey (1938) Social accounts of learning and human knowledge have led to attempts to reorganize schools as learning communities. This paper examines the utility of the World Wide Web for aiding in the construction of school-based and work-based learning communities. An ordered list of interactions is provided to characterize the depth of students' entry into new learning communities. Current offerings on the World Wide Web are then surveyed in terms of these categories. Finally, proposals are advanced for enhancing the architecture of the WWW to facilitate its use for the creation and operation of learning communities.