Framing Situated Professional Knowledge in Online Learning Communities

This paper deepens the theoretical understanding that underpins collaboration through social interaction in professional online learning environments. It explores the use of framing as a theoretical lens to assess "situated" learning in online graduate education. We explore how collaborative knowledge construction is framed in an intense 10 week graduate IS Project Management course. We present a taxonomy of frame challenging, problematization, and legitimation to demonstrate how individual and collective forms of knowledge construction contribute to group learning about professional practice in the context of action. We close with a model that demonstrates how community knowledge is co-constructed through sequences of contextualized frame-proposal, reflective comparison with own experience, frame-problematization and debate, and generic-legitimation of a consensus frame.