WEB-BASED VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNICATIONS IN INFORMATION SPECIALISTS’ LEARNING PROCESS

Abstract

The article deals with virtual learning communities using in web-based environment of institutions of higher education. It is researched the essence of web communities of web 2.0 level. Virtual communications as the main factor of data and knowledge sharing process in such communities are characterized. It is emphasized the important role of electronic moderation which is the first step to introduction the virtual essence of a teacher at the certain level of community representation. Today, virtual learning communities are not the next popular information trend but, conversely, are the result of deep processes and phenomena within online community. One of the types of researched communities is expert communities, their main approaches are virtual meetings of community members, networked knowledge sharing process and communication among them. Expert communities in education have reached a special status, as the results of teamwork exceed the potential results of individual members of the community. As communication it is considered as an interchangeable data or signals transmission that has a well-defined interpretation so it can carry out both between living entities and between technical objects and systems. In proposed research, communication is the process of sharing data and knowledge among community members through community support platforms, for example, in the form of posts in discussion forums, blogs, and wikis. There are many opportunities providing e-learning communication – from e-mail tools, discussion forums, online learning platforms and portals to virtual learning channels. It opens significant opportunities to data and knowledge exchange both in the form of documents and images and in the form of "live" Internet communication. Modern processes of co-learning are a kind of learning cooperation processes which final goal is to form a level of learning community with a focus on communication processes. At the same time, in IT-oriented information and post-information society, the main emphasis is shifting to the items of forming innovative processes and building service-oriented communities. It is due to the current state of IT-sphere, which is focused on software services production more than production of specific software products.