@pretic web site: http://www.apretic.be/

@pretic consists in a community of teachers working in Belgian primary, secondary and high schools. These teachers are interested in exploiting ICT in their classrooms and in using IT in order to prepare their courses. But their main concern is to deal with the management of what is called in every school of the French community of Belgium a Cybermedia Center (that is, a computer lab, its server and other IT tools, such as video projectors).

 

We'll refer to them as 'PR' ('Resource People', 'Personnes Ressource' in French).

Origin of the community

At an early stage (1994), several members of the present community were engaged in a training program whose main objective was to prepare them to become an ICT trainer for their colleagues. They also had to supply pieces of advice about the use of some educational tools. Later, a mailing-list was created.

All the PR were also invited to participate in meetings organized by the CGC (Cybermedia Center Management Cell), to know what kind of problems had to be solved in the daily use of the equipement. The CGC got the responsibility for the regulation process ordered by the stakeholders of the CCM project.

In 2001, some of them decided to create an association called APRES (Secondary School Resource Person Association) with an objective of acknowledgment of the PR role. Furthermore, they allowed access to it for primary and high school teachers interested in the use of ICT and the association was renamed @pretic. They then built a web site were they intend to share knowledge about their practice of PR or teacher including ICT in his courses.

Openness of the group, evolution of members

There's a distinction to be made between @pretic as an organization and @pretic as a PALETTE CoP. The organization has its own members. The CoP is the PR community, that is, anyone who has interest in @pretic's activities.

In the last quarter of 2006, a new mailing-list was created for the 'PR Community' to have a meta-discussion about their life as a CoP.

Main intention

Allowing @pretic's members to exchange useful information about hardware configuration and software problems, but also to propose and share new educational tools and opinions about how they could be used.
Who moderates

The STE-CRIFA, a pedagogical research center from the ULg, is in charge of moderating @pretic as a CoP. @pretic as an organization is moderated by its founder.

Modalities of knowledge management

The @pretic CoP members have access to a large archive of e-mails (it holds thousands of them). The topics are as various as one can imagine in such an 'ecosystem'. Some of them are obsolete (for instance, 'How do you install a networking stack in Windows 3.1'), some of them are punctual (for instance, 'How do we organize the meeting on September 22nd, 2004'). They aren't pertinent anymore for our CoP.

They have a dire need of some kind of sorting and re-organizing of this knowledge.

Currently used technical services

There's an @pretic website located at http://www.apretic.be. There are three running mailing-lists. One for the PR of Belgium's Walloon region, One for the PR of Belgium's Bruxelles-capitale region and the 'meta-list', which is more CoP-oriented.

Contact inside the community

Stéphane Rieppi (ULg) is the mediator of the CoP and is the person to reach for any question regarding it.

Possibilities to set up a focus group with users

Meeting between the CRIFA team and the PR are organized in a regular fashion. Both plenary meetings and face-to-face meetings are organized as often as needed.