Does VIPEr improve teaching? The evidence certainly suggests that it does. This summer I worked with an undergraduate student investigating the impact of IONiC/VIPEr faculty participation on professional practice. And while the data is not all in yet, the results certainly look good.

We are approaching the question using a “Communities of Practice” theoretical framework. Communities of Practice have been around forever, but they have been formalized more recently as a “theory of learning” by the work of Etienne Wenger and others.

“Communities of Practice presents a theory of learning that starts with this assumption: engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we learn and so become who we are.”

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Etienne Wenger, Cambridge, 1998

For participants, Wenger describes three “modes of belonging”

•       Engagement – doing stuff with others

•       Imagination – creating, connecting, extrapolating

•       Alignment – coordinating efforts

We can certainly see all three modes in the work of IONiC participants. People engage through attending workshops, presenting at our spring ACS meeting symposia, and posting on forums and Facebook. People imagine by developing and adapting creative new learning objects. And people align by following the learning object template when they share their ideas on the VIPEr site.

Through our research we have 1) characterized the different ways that participants engage with the IONiC community by looking both at site statistics and at ACS meeting and workshop participation, 2) analyzed the self-reported impact of IONiC/VIPEr on professional practice through our VIPEr user survey, and 3) conducted interviews with participants with a variety of experience in the community in order to dig deeper into how participation has changed them.

Stay tuned for updates on this work as we dive into analyzing the interviews. We’re not sure yet where to present our results and we welcome your suggestions. We continue to be impressed by the hard-working, energetic, and caring IONiC/VIPEr community!