Rhizomes and plateaus: A study of digital communities of practice in University College English Teaching

This article presents a pedagogical design for English teaching at Teachers College that utilises collaborative web technologies in a community of practice. The pedagogic focus is on the individual learner’s role in the group and on the group as a part of a larger digital, learning community. The pedagogical design focuses on building the students’ competency to produce knowledge through information fragments in an ahierarchical, rhizomatic network. Furthermore, the pedagogical design explores the potential of a ‘digital habitat’ in which the community of practice can thrive and where technology and pedagogy can embody a strong synergetic entity – a ‘plateau of intensity’. The pedagogical design seeks to deal with two insights form the data; the students’ own digital technology doesn’t enhance their learning and the students claim to learn more through supervision than through lecturing.