Category Archives: Virtual communities

Intuitive

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My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.

Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.

I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.

I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.

And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.

Group size

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Martin LeVoi referred to ‘critical mass’ – the size that an online group needs to be in order to be effective. Thought I’d go and check this out. ‘Critical mass’ doesn’t appear to be a technical term in regular use in the literature, but there is some discussion of group size.

Glass and Smith looked at 80 studies of F2F classes which concluded that smaller clases were better with respect to student achievement, classrom processes and teacher and student attitudes. Hayes suggested that distance learners need small groups so they can share and critique project work. He felt that a group of five would allow students to enjoy a rich exchange and feel part of a learning comunity without wasting time sifting through umpteen postings.

A virtual community must have enough participants to allow a significant level of interaction. Gilly Salmon suggests that an ideal size is up to nine.

Four is often considered the ideal in F2F situations because the group is large enough to hold diverse opinions, to draw on different experiences and to approach the subject in different ways. It is not so big that someone can hide and not pull their weight.

Rice suggests a critical mass of 8-10 – generating sufficient volume of interactions without being overwhelming.

Second Life

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overheard.jpg

 At the DZX222 weekend, Martin LeVoi gave a very interesting talk on how the virtual res school had originated (1994: 12 students, 14 staff, all the students had to have computers and mobile phones shipped to them). Now that it’s been running annually since 2002 and is attracting 700 students in one year, Martin is still thinking of ways to be at the cutting edge. One is obviously Moodle – everything at the OU is going to have to adjust to the VLE in the next few years. 

Martin also raised the issue of Second Life http://secondlife.com/ which is a virtual world where you go and live a second life in avatar form. I’m torn between thinking this is pointless and thinking it might be good fun. It’s obviously very lucrative – the onscreen currency can be converted into hard cash and there are people who make their living in this virtual environment. I read in the New Scientist about one who earns his living as a hitman. Anyway, that’s off the point. Universities are starting to appear there. The OU could construct a virtual campus and students could meet and discuss in avatar form. At the moment it’s rather clunky, partly because there’s no lip-synching on the avatars, but this could be where the Jennie Lee building goes next time it is demolished and reconstructed.

Oh, and they like you to note that their pics are copyright:

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Creating relationships (7.2.06)

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Ingvill says that ‘in studying an educational activity such as project work, it is essential to take into acoount that participants have existing and established relationships.’ That’s obviously true of her work in the classroom, but I wonder to what extent it would relate to an asynchronous conference? There may be pre-existing relationships from other courses. I suppose there are more likely to be generic relationships – people expect their relationship with the supervisor to be like past relationships, they expect students to be pretty much like other students they have encountered online.

Quentin Jones (10.1.06)

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Quentin Jones (1997)

Virtual communities, virtual settlements and cyber-archaeology: a theoretical outline

JCMC 3(3)

Defining a cyber-settlement and a virtual community

Cyber settlement is a cyber-place that is symbolically delineated by a topic of interest and within which a significant proportion of interrelated group-CMC occurs. A virtual community is a set of social relationships forged via a virtual settlement.

A cyber settlement requires:

* Minimum level of interactivity Interactivity is the extent to which messages in a sequence relate to each other, and especially the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness of earlier messages. This demand for interactivity means that an email list which distributes information is not a virtual community.
* Variety of communicators More than two communicators. This excludes database queries and interactions.
* Virtual common-public-space where a significant portion of interactive group-CMCs occur This excludes private communications which go through no common space. Without this notion, the notion of virtual community loses its value because it is indistinguishable from many other forms of CMC.
* Minimum level of sustained membership

Caroline Haythornthwaite (2000) (10.1.06)

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Haythornthwaite, C., Kazmer, M. M., Robins, J. and Shoemaker, S. (2000)

Community development among distance learners: temporal and technological dimensions

JCMC, 6 (1)

Student quotes include this:

“I’ll have to tell you that it has been one of the most stressful times in my whole life… I started to have a lot of anxiety…. Just wondering if what I was posting sounded okay or if it sounded so bad… Finally I just had to take time off work.”

Another example of a very strong negative reaction to an online learning community.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue1/haythornthwaite.html

Caroline Haythornthwaite (1998) (10.1.06)

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Haythornthwaite, C. (1998)

A social network study of the growth of community among distance learners

Information Research, 4, 1

* Communication frequency is associated with the maintenance of more relations and the use of more media.
* Patterns of media use are highly influenced by the media established by the instructor for class interaction
* Email is important for pairs who communicate more often.
* Actor positions in collaborative work, exchanging advice and socialising relations are similar, but this position does not correlate with their position in an emotional support network.
* Different actors are involved in the emotional support network than in other networks
* Group interaction patterns become less flexible over time.
* An individual’s perception of their own sense of belonging to the class is most strongly correlated with their centrality in exchanging advice networks.

http://informationr.net/ir/4-1/paper49.html

Design principles (18.11.05)

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Back in 1994, Mike Godwin drew up these principles for making virtual communities work:
* use software that promotes good discussion
* Don’t impose a length limitation on postings
* Front-load your system with talkative, diverse people
* Let the users resolve their own disputes
* Provide institutional memory
* Promote continuity
* Be host to a particular interest group
* Provide places for children
* Confront the users with a crisis.
It would be interesting to see whehter anyone took these principles and ran with them. Do users resolve their own disputes, or do they leave? What are the benefits of including children in a community? What diffeence does it make to a community when you impose a word limit on postings?

In general, I think this old (9!) stuff tends to be irrelevant. So much has changed. Users, software, designers are all more sophisticated. Do Godwin’s principles have more than historical interest?

Gill commented:
All very good guidelines. However, in view of the results of your U800 survey (in which many of your respondents felt intimidated by the online conferences and thought that they were a vehicle for the more confident students to brag about their TMA scores amongst other things – hope I’ve paraphrased correctly) I now begin to wonder about the frontloading with talkative diverse people aspect.

It seems like a double-edged sword. If you do not have talkative diverse people, then the conference will die through lack of use. If you have a core of talkative diverse people, there are bound to be some who feel intimidated.

My experience (as one of the talkative diverse people that got front-loaded onto H806) was that the collaborative activities where we were split into quite small groups, helped the less confident to grow in confidence. Many of the non VLE based courses, i.e. those where collaboration online is not an assessed part of the course, may suffer because the quieter members have no impetus to get over their fear and gain confidence.

From the responses to your survey that you described to me, many people felt excluded from the online interactions and therefore felt no desire to join in.

I guess what I’m saying is that you need some activities that oblige all students to join in at the start. Just making the online conferences available with a group of chatty members in the hope that all will make use of it may not work too well.
Comment from euphloozie – 26/11/05 12:22

Design rinciples (18.11.05)

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Now I’m reading a piece by Peter Kollock. I think it was a conference paper, as it’s quite short. He looks at theories of community which could be applied to internet communities.

Looking at them, I think i shows that the theory was generally wrong – these aren’t guidelines for all types of community as they don’t fit virtual communities.

So, communities and virtual communities are different. OK, nothing very surprising there.

He looks at Axelrod’s requirements for the possibility of cooperation. I don’t know how widely cited these are – but I can pick holes in them after about 10 seconds’ thought, so I’ll ignore those.

Then he looks at Ostrom’s design principles of successful communities:
* Group boundaries are clearly defined
* Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions
* Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules
* the right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities
* A system for monitoring members’ behaviour exists; this monitoring is undertaken by the community members themselves
* A graduated system of sanctions is used
* Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
These seem very democratic – I’m not sure a feudal community would work with this definition. In fact, I think ‘most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules’ is the most problematic. Would this work in a convent, a tyranny, a primary school..?

They’re interesting considerations, but I don’t think I’d taken them as the basis for setting up a FirstClass conference.

Contacting researchers: Burnett in Tallahassee (17.11.05)

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I’ve decided to make a point of emailing researchers when I have read their article and found it useful.

This was recommended in U500 last year, and seems like a good idea. Apart from the fact that they might get back to me with some useful ideas or references, it also helps me to fix their identities in my head, and to consider their ideas so that I can make a short comment to show I’ve read the article, and ask a meaningful question.

Here’s what I’ve sent to Gary Burnett:

Dear Gary,

I’m a PhD student in the United Kingdom researching virtual learning communities. I’ve just been reading your article ‘Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology’ in Information Research and found it very interesting. I now have a stack of articles from your bibliography piled up on my desk 🙂

You stated in the article that ‘…all interactions within a virtual community take place in public’ but you also cite Katz, who argues that the public interactions within a virtual community are just the tip of the iceberg and that much of the most useful information exchange goes on in private, in one-to-one email exchanges. I wondered if you had considered including such interactions within your typology or if you felt them too inaccessible to be classified?

Regards
Rebecca Ferguson
Open University

Anesa commented:
Did you get any reply from him?? Was wondering if I should do this … but thought I should only ask them if I really thought I wanted a clarification. Did you want a clarification or did you think up just a question to get into contact with him?
Comment from anesahosein – 01/12/05 16:33