Building a community of practice through Liferay

Paula Hodgson
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

Web 2.0 technologies are becoming popular for social networking, and there is growing interest in the education sector in extending these technologies for educational purposes because they provide greater opportunities for learners to be actively engaged in a variety of learning activities individually and with a networked audience. In contrast, there is limited scope for customization and personalization of traditional content management systems to support student learning. However, available Web 2.0 tools are not sufficient to support teaching and learning in a single integrated learning environment, although different applications are available from various application providers -- which implies that students have to visit separate websites to access different Web 2.0 applications.

This paper offers a case study on the use of an award-winning open source portal, Liferay, in which an integrated learning environment (single sign-on) with appropriate Web 2.0 tools can be chosen when delivering learning activities for courses. The portal provides a three-tier learning space that is designed to cater for individual learning, private group learning and class learning.

Students taking a course in 'Organizational Learning in Business Enterprises' were expected to acquire theories on organizational learning, develop skills and raise their awareness of appropriate attitudes in business practice. This course was designed to model organizational learning in real practice. Students were encouraged to discuss personal learning experiences and related theories both in the face-to-face tutorial activities and in the online forum, reflect on their learning process by writing blogs and do their group projects through a wiki portlet. Students could instantly receive current contributions posted by peers through Real Simple Syndicate (RSS) feeds in different learning spaces. More important, the breeding ground for a community of practice was achieved through the mixed mode of computer-mediated discussion and face-to-face interactions, in which students with different learning styles could find their voices and thus interact with one another (Fauske and Wade 2003; Graham et al. 2003).