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Sharon Derry and colleagues are designing a socio-technical system (a technical environment and related social structures and activities) that should constitute a good model for distributed teacher professional development programs conceptualized as knowledge-building communities. Their work is situated within the UW-Madison's Secondary Teacher Education Program. In a recent paper they describe the original ambitious vision for this program and its theoretical basis. They discuss how initial failures and the theoretical framework itself led to a more careful consideration of how the historical and institutional contexts of such community-building efforts might influence the social processes of learning and teaching within the community. They consider lessons learned from studies such as these and from their immersion in the experience of designing a socio-technical environment for supporting community-based teacher education.

The paper is titled "From Ambitious Vision to Partially Satisfying Reality: An Evolving Socio-Technical Design Supporting Community and Collaborative Learning in Teacher Education." It is available in PDF form here:
http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/stellar/images/PDF/AmbitiousVision.pdf.