TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON THE INTERNET — A STUDY OF THE SWEDISH INFORMAL ONLINE LEARNING COMMUNITY LEKTION.SE

Dr Anders D. Olofsson, Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden

Membership in online learning communities provides teachers possibilities to continuously reflect upon and deepen their understandings of the teaching profession. In this article a Swedish online learning community, called lektion.se, is focused and some early findings from an ongoing larger project aimed at understanding teachers’ use lektion.se for their professional development is presented. The purpose in this paper is to investigate if and how the discussions in the forums on lektion.se influence the teachers’ professional development. Lektion.se as a potential online learning community for shared teacher professional development is touched upon in the end of the paper.