A Community of Practice Facilitated by Facebook for Integrating New Online EFL Writing Forms into Assiut University College of Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a design study conducted within the Egyptian context of pre-service EFL teacher education, which implemented a Community of Practice (CoP) design facilitated by Facebook, to integrate some new forms of online writing. Based on some preliminary empirical results triangulated with literature review, a preliminary design framework was proposed to guide this study. The main aim was to investigate through some interventional tasks the possibility of integrating some new forms of online writing while participants were working as a community, both face to face and online. The tasks were intended to gradually expose participants to some online forms of writing not familiar within their education programme, and which were identified as useful to them in their context. Participants in this CoP consisted of 70 from a total number of 109 3rd-year EFL student teachers at Assiut University College of Education (AUCOE) who, based on a screening interview, were identified as possessing the basic required electronic skills. Tasks were administered both face to face and online (mainly through Facebook). In response to them, participants contributed with posts and comments, which were qualitatively analysed to inform the process of evaluating the intervention by establishing some conclusions in the form of design principles and lessons learned to be cycled back into future attempts within the same context. For reporting on the CoP, a design narrative technique was employed to capture the main learning events and weave them together into a meaningful story. The following appendices are included: (1) Observation Sheet Used in the Pilot Study; (2) Open Interviews for Identifying Research Problem Introduction; (3) Semi-Structured Interviews and Survey Questions for Eliciting Participants' Feedback; and (4) Statistics of Group Logs & Interactions.