Community

So I have been working on the Community, Self and Identity course at our institution since 2006 and will join again in 2009 as part of the research team. Community has been one of the topics under discussion and more specifically whether virtual environments foster the development and creation of communities. I stumbled upon a SA computer magazine of March 2000, a long time before the advent of facebook, and the proliferation of social networking sites. The section on the successful sites reads as follow:

It seems to me that all of them allowed the users of the system to build the communities rather than imposing their structures from above. And that's what creates a meaningful community, whether real or virtual. The communities must be allowed to have their own dynamic, to grow, shrink and fragment as they wish ...they must be able to establish their own codes of conduct.

Does these comments still hold true for us today in education? Does our educatinal learning managements systems cater for this need of users? I am not convinced that it does. To begin with the way courses are sturctured seem to coerce students into participation in online conversation as there is always a mark attached to that participation. Students are divided into groups that they really don't have a choice in and when the course or module is over so is the online service. I would find communities formed on such bases more of an artificial coming together for the sake of a task. If there happens to be a community formed, there will be very little chance for the community to thrive or be dynamic after the course is completed. Should we want to encourage a community of practice to evolve beyond the bounds of a course or module we should provide students with the tools to do so rather than give them the tools for a period and then remove it once we (the educators) are satisfied that we've collected enough data. In so doing, I believe that we are missing out on opportunities in utilizing the technlogies to induct students into a community of professionals. It also goes against the notion of creating lifelong learners. Furthermore, virtual communities are communities but they are different, else there would be no need to call them virtual or online communities. As such we need to understand what outcomes to expect from them, what there is to gain from them as to better employ them in our teaching and learning environments.