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K-12 education reform research suggests that new models of teacher professional development (TPD) are needed to establish and support communities of teachers engaged in school reform. We are working with several TPD organizations to develop a new on-line TPD community concept called TAPPED IN. Together, we are forging what we believe will be a self-sustaining TPD community in an on-line environment that enables us to employ existing Internet technology to study modes of collaboration embodied by next-generation commercial Internet technologies. In this paper, we present the theoretical foundations of our concept, the rationale behind the design of the TAPPED IN virtual environment, and our community-building approach.
Schlager et al. (1997) studied this question.