Building social capital in a knowledge-building community: Telementoring as a catalyst

Much scholarship in the Learning Sciences points toward communities of practice as essential loci for authentic, transferable learning. Mentoring is a time-honored way of initiating newcomers into a community of practice, and in recent years, scholars have explored the design of on-line mentoring programs to support learning in K-12 classrooms and other settings. To date, this work has held to a traditional concept of mentoring which is private and one-on-one. Work in the area of on-line mentoring has also remained quite separate from research into the development of on-line learning communities. Here, qualitative and quantitative evidence are presented to support a new model of telementoring, termed "mentoring in the open". Evidence is presented to support two claims: First, that "mentoring in the open" can improve the effectiveness of individual telementoring relationships, and second, that it can also support efforts to build cohesive on-line learning communities in circumstances where this can be challenging.