| The recent emergence of social software technologies as tools for learning is introducing new capabilities for the knowledge-sharing, collaborative, and discursive activities of communities of learning. This study, guided by a community of practice design framework, integrated a community blog into a community of students enrolled in a semester-long student teaching and methods seminar for a teacher education program. Utilizing a multi-method research framework, this study examined (a) the knowledge-sharing, collaborative, and discursive activities the learning community adopted the community blog for; (b) the factors within and characteristics of the learning community that mediated the online discourse that emerged within the learning community; and (c) how the community blog contributed to the development of the community, as evidenced by the community's activities and discourse over time. The results reveal that, overall, the community blog did augment the learning experiences of this pre-service teachers' community by enabling several of the community's existing learning activities, as well as several learning activities that were not available to the community before. However, some groups within the community benefited from the community blog more than others, suggesting that the adoption of social software into communities of learning is neither a pervasive affair nor a ubiquitous one. Finally, several factors were found to moderate the level of adoption of the community blog by the community, including student time and workload pressures, the facilitative engagement of the instructors with the community blog, and the level of integration the community blog activities had with the seminar. In total, these findings illustrate that social software technology has the potential to enable many of a learning community's activities and ultimately contribute to the development of a learning community. However, that potential is mitigated by how well social software is integrated into a community of learning, the extent to which it is facilitated, and the communicative and collaborative needs of the community itself. |
