Building Community One Message at a Time

1
Building Community - One Message at a Time

• CASAE Annual Conference 2005
• University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario
• Sherida Ryan, Doctoral Fellow, OISE/UT
• sryan_at_oise.utoronto.ca

2
Building Community - Advantages

• Speed Rapid access and response.
• Interactivity One-to-one, many-to-many.
• Reach No temporal or geographic boundaries.
• Partial membership in multiple communities.
• Increased diversity.
• Portability Laptops, wireless networks, public
  Internet access, cell phone connectivity.

3
Building Community Virtual Communities

• Social aggregations that emerge from the Net
  when enough people carry on those public
  discussions long enough, with sufficient human
  feeling, to form webs of personal relationships
  (Rheingold, 1993 p. 5).

4
Building Community Essential Components

• People Variety of communicators.
• Social interaction Minimum level of
  interactivity.
• Social identification or sense of belonging
  Defined purpose group norms, minimum level of
  sustained membership.
• Place or space a virtual common-public-space
  where a significant portion of interactive
  group-CMCs occur (Jones, 1997).

5
Building Community - Website
http//www.pensionsatwork.ca/
6
Building Community - Challenges

• Technical Access to ICT infrastructure.
• Literacy Functional, informational and social
  (cyberliteracy).
• Interpersonal Identity plasticity.
• Permanency Record of messages.
• Political Decentralized control of information.
• Linguistic Predominantly unilingual.

7
Building Community - Stages

• Distributed communication ? Distributed interest
  networks ?? Virtual group ??? Online community
  ???? Online Communities of Practice.
• Individual ? Network of people sharing an
  interest ?? Group ??? Community ???? Communities
  of Practice.

8
Building Community - Questions

• What opportunities and barriers to learning have
  you experienced in online forums?
• What types of online moderation processes
  maximize effective learning, practice and action?
• How can the development of interpersonal trust,
  an essential component of social learning, be
  facilitated in the online environment?

9
Building Community - References

• Jones, Q. (1997). Virtual-communities, virtual
  settlements cyber-archaeology A theoretical
  outline. Retrieved April 11, 2005, from
  http//www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue3/jones.html
  
• Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community
  Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading,
  Mass Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.