Supporting Changing Cultures Through Emerging Practices

Abstract

This chapter explores how an online conference can be productively used by educational technology professionals and educators who teach with technology in Africa to share and learn about tools, perspectives, and practices in the emerging field of educational technology with peers from across Africa and beyond. Communities of practice can play a key role in the professional development of educational technologists and educators learning to teach with technology. The impact of communities of practice on educational technology practices across a university is enhanced where educational technology professionals and change agent educators act as boundary professionals who can learn practices from encounters with related communities both locally and globally and then to transfer elements of these back home to their day-to-day practice. Such encounters can be stimulated through several means including face-to-face and online meetings and conversation, workshops, and conferences, whether face to face or online. We discuss how participants were able to use the affordances of an online conference to engage in boundary conversations across multiple communities of practice. From our experience, online conferences both echo and refashion face-to-face conferences.