Yearly Archives: 2006

Successful communities (18.11.05)

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I had this under another entry, but it became a major issue, so I’ve moved it to its own posting.

Interesting about Ostrom is that she is looking at successful communities. What makes a learning community successful? Its learners are inspired? All learners construct some knowledge? Knowledge is constructed? All students pass the course? All students get good grades? I guess it’s possible for a learning community to be successful in its designers’ terms (student retention is excellent and grades are good) and in students’ terms (workload is not too high and grades are good) without it being successful in terms of being a generic learning community (eg information is shared but little or no knowledge construction goes on). I suppose in that case it would be a successful community but not a successful learning community.

So, does the OU definitely want learning communities? Say they started a FirstClass conference and it really got on to something and constructed a whole new theory BUT this overwhelmed students and a lot of them just gave up, would this be a successful learning community? Would the OU be happy with this?

I guess the OU has its own agenda, and wants to promote certain types of learning communities, which are open and inclusive. After all, Oxbridge has been successful in creating elitist learning communities where lots of knowledge is constructed by lots of people are being excluded.

So, it looks as though there are different types of learning community. The OU, I guess, wants inclusive learning communities which empower all students to learn (and, as a sub-text, aid retention and grades).

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.

Ruth Brown response (18.11.05)

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Ruth got back to me fairly quickly and now I have a useful reference to follow up.

Hello Rebecca —

I’m glad that you found my research interesting. Yes, it was based on my
Ph.D. dissertation which is in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln
library. It is also available through ProQuest which can be found on the
internet. ProQuest can actually send you a digital version of my
dissertation.

No, I have not published anything lately on this topic. I’ve gotten
sidetracked by other interesting topics.

–Ruth
Ruth E. Brown, Ph.D.
associate professor

Contacting researchers: Ruth Brown (17.11.05)

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Why did I find it necessary to say I was a first year?

Dear Dr Brown,

I am a first-year PhD student in the UK, researching social presence and the development of online learning communities.

I have just finished reading your JALN article ‘The process of community-building in distance learning classes’, which I found very interesting. I found the 15-step process of community building particularly helpful. I wondered whether you had published anything else on this subject? I haven’t been able to track any of your other publications down through our library – it isn’t always strong on publications from the US.

Was the article based on your PhD thesis and, if so, would I be able to access that?

Thank you for your help,
Rebecca Ferguson
Open University, UK

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

Role models (17.11.05)

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Burnett says: ‘ part of the “different flavour” of a given community can be seen in the particular norms and pattern of acceptable behaviours within the community. That is, each community emphasises its own particular patterns of interaction, and sets its own norms and expectations.’

That’s fairly obvious, I guess, but it fits in with the idea of tutors and experienced students modelling behaviour at the start so that the community gets off to a good start.

Of course, that assumes that the tutor and the experienced students have had good experiences before. Are there any models of successful virtual communities that are archived for people to look at?

What sort of training do you have to go on to become a moderator for a course?

Gill commented:
I’d recommend Gilly Salmon’s book entitled E-moderating. There’s a copy on my bookshelf if you fancy borring it 🙂

Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 18/11/05 09:29

Border lines (17.11.05)

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Anesa’s thinking about where the borders of linear programming lie. I’m thinking about where the borders are on virtual communities.

A lot of people I read (I’m reading Gary Burnett on information exchange in virtual communites, at the moment) characterise a virtual community as what you see happening online. It’s the people posting and it’s what they post.

The community has a lot of subsets: newbies, who are just getting the hang of it; members, who have taken a recognised part in a sizeable and interesting thread, lurkers who are hidden away on the fringes.

However Katz (Luring the lurkers – archived on slashdot) argues that the online stuff is just the tip of the iceberg and that you don’t understand a virtual community at all if you only look at how it interacts in public.

For him, many lurkers are interested parties who are often willing and able to communicate on a one-to-one basis but are not happy with the risks and costraints of posting to the whole community. Katz’s piece may be grey literature but it’s a really useful view of lurking.

Katz also says that, while the public face of what happens in his blog is that there is an enormous amount of flaming in fact, hidden from the public gaze, is a huge amount of one-to-one supportive and helpful communication.

Ruth Brown (see below. (Must post more notes on her article.)) also looks at the extension of the community away from the public forum. For her, the top membership level of a virtual community are those people who are communicating away from the public forum – the ones who are emailing each other, ringing each other and meeting face to face.

Posting length (17.11.05)

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I’m thinking about the role of posting length in building a virtual community. I think that long postings put people off, because they look carefully constructed and full of information – they are more difficult to read and they are intimidating because they appear to show that the poster has thought about and knows about the subject.

Posting length is an interesting thing about blogging, because I tend to blog a couple of hundred words. If I want to see more I add another post. I know that’s not how all blogs work, but it works for me, and it makes my thoughts easier to review when I go back though my blog, as information and thoughts are split up.

Perhaps online tutors and experienced community members should model short, speech-like exchanges to encourage students to become involved in virtual communities.

If too many postings are too short, though, it also becomes a pain to read because it stretches endlessly down the page or you have to click to umpteen postings and they’re all fairly boring.

And what about thread length? If a thread is very short, that suggests it’s either new or it’s not very interesting. On the other hand, if a thread is very long it’s off-putting because there is just TOO MUCH INFORMATION. I’m in a virtual community that currently has a thread purposefuly set up to be the longest thread on the community. It’s all light-hearted and amusing and each individual part is easy to read, but 356 postings and counting? Puh-lease!

And what is the role of small talk in virtual learning communities? On the one hand it’s useful because it gets people talking, makes it easier and less threatening to post, promotes knowledge of members of the community. On the other hand, if you have limited time you want to cut to the chase – you don’t want endless discussion of the traffic on the M25 that morning, or of people whose budgie has just died.

Gill commented:
Although while I was doing the H80* online courses, the topic of cats was so popular I think we ended up with a discussion or conference dedicated almost entirely to it.

What does that say about us I wonder….

Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 18/11/05 09:36

Being in the in-crowd (16.11.05)

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I seem to read a lot about the positive aspects of communities, virtual comunities and learning communities. What are the negative aspects? Has anyone looked at them?

Real-world communities often define themselves in terms of the other, in terms of what they are not. Is that true of online communities? Do online communities do that but with a much smaller population? Of the people who have signed in, and are nominally members, some are the in-crowd, some are on the fringes and a lot (the majority?) are a silent, lurking group who can be construed in negative terms – too lazy to post, too stupid to post, taking but not giving, a threatening presence, a judging presence…

I guess we all lurk in some communities, however briefly, so lurking has benefits for those who do it. Jumping straight into a community and posting without a period of lurking would usually be a mistake, so growing communities do need lurkers.

Should a community have a system for pulling lurkers in towards the centre? For example, on FirstClass, lurking individuals could be addressed directly because their identitiy is available in the message history. This would probably happen in a successful real-world learning community – those who sit quietly on the fringes are usually invited to give an opinion or speak at some time.