Embedding professional knowledge: The 'middle layer' in an online community ecosystem

Abstract

This paper reports on an interpretive case research project that investigated how online communities facilitate the embedding of professional knowledge. The study context was a New Zealand programme that aimed to integrate ICT into school teaching, while building a student-centred pedagogy. For many participants, this amounted to paradigm shift, challenging the nature of the teacher's role. An informal, unofficial Web 2.0-based community was found to play a key role in embedding the new paradigm. This community formed a bridging, or middle layer between local communities and an international network. Members of the middle layer acted as knowledge intermediaries, undertaking various social and technological practices to drive the embedding process. These practices included filtering incoming knowledge, feeding it to followers, recycling and recombining ideas, and providing a just-in-time support system. The middle layer can be seen as forming a key part of a knowledge ecosystem, within which patterns of feeding and recycling occurred. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.