by Hilarie Bryce Davis, Ed. D.
Where do you live? If home is where the heart is, where does the mind live? What makes a community of minds? When do you feel as if you belong?
The exponential growth of the lnternet as a home for the mind has opened up the possibility of virtual communities, complete with front porches and main streets of a sort. Wholly constructed by their inhabitants, these virtual communities offer socially constructed knowledge without face-to-face contact or physical constraints. They are as stable as the ideas generated and as safe as the reciprocal respect of the participants.
What kind of community is the lnternet? Where are its front porches and meeting places? What kinds of folks will you find there? If you think about the communities you find yourself in now, you can expect to find similar ones on line. Your town, school district, church, family, profession, hobby and region are all communities you may call your own. We join these communities by happenstance or by design, out of interest or commitment, and we find ourselves more or less at home in them. They become part of our identity and we shape them with our time and activities.
While the lnternet has the possibility of creating community, it is and will be no more (or less) that what we make it. For some, it will be a wider community because we will be able to talk to people and see their work even if they are halfway across the world. For some, it will be a larger community because they can find morelike-minded people to share interests and passions. For some, it will be a stronger community because they will be able to interact more frequently, respond more quickly to requests and needs, and be free from having to schedule time to communicate. For still others, it will be their first community because writing allows them to make connections not possible or comfortable in person.
Communities grow through feedback. When the members interact, patterns develop which lead to the norms which define the system. The interactions are the'stuff' that a community is made of. The cultural signposts allow people to enter the community and collaborate effectively. With this scaffolding, meaning making becomes explicitly and collectively built. A 'persistent' environment allows patterns to emerge which form the basis of growing collective wisdom.
These evolving structures can mean freedom to create, imagine and invent together. If there could be a recipe for community building, it might go something like this: take some people who have shared goals, get them mixing their ideas to build relationships with each other, add regular reflection to raise communication to metacognitive levels, and pour into a place which needs to be invented. Then get everyone visualizing (and salivating) for results. Each ingredient adds something unique to the community building process.
Above all, community building depends on participation. When we designed the Online Interest Institute, a professional development community for educators, we asked participants to come with a quest. Those who did were productive, satisfied with what they learned and ready to do projects with their students on the Net after the course was finished. Those who do not have a quest were busy, learned, but went away 'intending' to use the lnternet. They were not ready to use it with their students because they had not found something of particular interest to them and related it to their personal experience.
The greater the quest, the more involvement and learning. I like the cartoon of the artist with the caption, "I'm not a workaholic, I'm an artist. Artists are not workaholics, we're obsessed. It's different!" Somewhere in between workaholic and obsessed lies sufficient motivation to become involved enough in learning. lntent is at least as important as content because intent starts the spiral of finding out and wanting to know still more.
Project structures provide frames of reference for practicing new skills in the context of meaningful and curriculum-based content. In our work with adults, we have extended the project structures to define the goals, relationships and results of a community. Add systematic reflection and they provide enough structure to encourage communication while inviting creativity.
Each type of project involves people for different reasons and in different ways. People to People Projects connect participants holding common values (e.g., social action projects where people obtain resources, help individuals in need or improve the environment). Information Collection Projects focus on data collection, summary and exchange, where the benefit is developing knowledge from many different people across time and space. In Exploration and Evaluation projects, participants look for applications and connections, critiquing from multiple perspectives. Problem Solving Projects identify problems, generate solutions, test and present them
While many projects cut across this classification, it is useful in defining the community of participants and scaffolding interactions so they are more productive and satisfying. Like good fences make good neighbors, flexible but defined structures make good communities.
The late 1990s may eventually be seen in retrospect as a narrow window of historical opportunity, where people either acted or failed to act effectively over communications technology. Armed with knowledge, guided by a clear, human-centered vision, governed by a commitment to civil discourse, we the citizens hold the levers at a pivotal time. What happens next is largely up to us.
We have a chance to reinvent ourselves - to try out new ways of learning and caring and helping each other. Perhaps, the ultimate test of our virtual interface worlds will be how we meet face-to-face afterwards on the otherside. Perhaps this is where we choose the future.
Editor's Note:
Hilarie Bryce Davis is an educational consultant with the Technology for Learning Consortium in New Jersey. Her work focuses on planning for the best use of technology in learning and teaching. Hilarie's ideas on Building Virtual Learning Communities were first presented to delegates at the 1996 AACE Spring Conference in Jasper, Alberta. This exerpt is from a longer article that will be appearing in the 1996 AACE Journal.
