Creating Online Learning Communities On this 8 week Journey, we'll delve into the history of online learning communities and discover the current state of the art. Exemplary learning communities will be presented and participants will each choose one to take part in. We'll explore the qualities and patterns that make for sustainable online learning communities, principles that can guide you and your collaborators in designing and creating your own unique learning community. Special attention will be given to the skills of facilitating authentic dialogue, collaboration and self-directed learning in cyberspace. We'll work with asynchronous and synchronous community tools, and we'll preview 3D tools and communities for a glimpse of the future. Using a basic tool of community-making, we'll set up a discussion list that will keep you connected with your fellow explorers for support and collaboration once the 8 week exploration has ended. This journey is an excellent lead-in for the Edge-ucator's Path apprenticeship--an in-depth learning community design journey and immersion in distance edge-ucation. Our Journey will unfold within a unique, easy to use, web-based distance learning environment that supports audio and video, with 24 hour, seven-day-a-week tech support available. Begin the design journey with a network of similarly passionate peers. Discover the elements of creative, thriving learning communities. Experience the ongoing support of the Edge-ucation Matrix, a META-learning community. "...no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it. This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it." ~Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language Next seesion: Fall, 2000. Gather online with a small group of edge-ucational innovators exploring new models for learning. Group size is limited to 20. Email for inquiries and reservations. Facilitated by Claudia L'Amoreaux. Fee: $425 [For an in-depth preview of the Journey, read Claudia's contribution to the Creating Learning Communities collaborative book project. Creating Community Through Gardening: Cultivating Ecological Consciousness This 8 week exploration of the art and science of gardens is designed to respond to the individual learner’s personal, professional, and social needs within the climate of his/her bioregion. The highly interactive dialogue will be informed by background literature and extensive web sources. Ecological principles will be interwoven in the context of hands-on gardening experience. Emphasis will be on recognizing patterns that connect ourselves within our natural and social universe. We will be encouraged to glean the wisdom offered by master gardeners and the good earth itself. “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Facilitated by Barbara Vogl, M.Ed. As past member of the Board of Directors of the Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project and the Americorps Service Corp projects for gardens in schools, she is experienced in community organizing for neighborhood and school gardens. She is co-facilitator for Systems Thinking/Chaos Theory Network sponsored by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and is editor of their bi-monthly publication, PATTERNS. Next seesion: Winter, 2001. Gather with a small group of edge-ucational innovators exploring new models for learning. Group size is limited to 20. Email for inquiries and reservations. Fee: $425