VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS OF PRACTISING MATHEMATICS TEACHERS:The Role of Technology in Collaboration

Abstract

The collaboration of practising teachers in a virtual environment introduces the technology tools themselves both as mediators and as participants – as co-actors – in the collaborative process. Although there is a growing literature on the collaboration of practising teachers, the role of virtual technology tools is typically not addressed. In this chapter, we turn our attention to two cases, one in Brazil and one in Canada, as we explore how tools mediate and interact in the way teachers collaborate and construct knowledge. A challenge in this exploration is that technological tools change dramatically over short periods of time. Some aspects of teachers’ online learning that are brought to light by the two cases from Brazil and Canada are: (1) virtual collaboration can happen in very different ways and using very different tools and methods; (2) online technology tools can transform abstract mathematics objects like polygons into tangible objects of communal attention and action; (3) collaborative knowledge construction tools like wikis help re-shape the collaborative process and transform roles played by teachers and instructors; and (4) multimodal communication through drawing tools, rich text, and video changes the “face” of mathematics. The virtual, non-human objects that are part of collaborative collectives of humans-with-media are not tools that we simply use for predetermined purposes. Humans-media interactions, which are quickly evolving with changes in the online world, are organic, reorganizing and restructuring our understanding of what it means for practising mathematics teachers to collaborate in a virtual environment.