A MOO is a text-based, multi-participant, user-extensible, object-oriented virtual environment in which users can interact with each other via the Internet polysynchronously (in synchronous and asynchronous time) and build meaningful artifacts. MOO technology provides us a single, low-cost, highly supportive venue for online activities. However, it is one of, the forgotten, virtual community border technologies. This paper gives an introduction to MOOs, presents the advantages and disadvantages of MOOs, and discusses the future potentialities of the MOO platform. Will MOOs experience a rebirth, or will they continue to stagnate as a legacy technology?
Knowledge and learning exist as byproducts of social processes such as those that take place in communities of practice. We describe two frameworks for understanding and building online knowledge-building communities, or online communities of practice that enhance collective knowledge. First, the C4P framework is described as a way of understanding how knowledge is created and disseminated by participants in a community of practice. Second, we discuss ways in which technology provides added value for learning in these environments using the DDC (Design for Distributed Cognition) framework, and link this to the particular goals of a knowledge-building community. Examples from two large online communities are discussed.
In online learning communities, graduations are both joyous and sad events when students must "disengage" from their shared experience. Using technologies to interact during online learning means that technologies have an effect on any social process, including disengaging. Even the simplest technology hurdles can affect people's departures from online learning communities. These effects of technology on disengaging have implications for the design of systems that support online communities. This paper explores the technology problems that students encounter in disengaging from online learning communities, and develops design implications for such communities. To set the stage, it provides a discussion of how online learners build and maintain their learning communities.
Online pornography has largely been defined by its negative, by the social and regulatory restrictions it engendered. This has helped to obscure the everyday sexual discourse that represents a common and important part of many online communities. A better understanding of the every day sexual discourse, these "small pornographies," may provide the keys to comprehending larger social organization and the links between our virtual online identities and our corporeal existence.
The social and policy aspects of e-science are becoming more important as the social and technical infrastructure for it progresses. This essay presents the idea that we should pursue a reflexive perspective in its development, keeping in mind that e-science has the capacity to radically restructure current power relations in research institutions. However, it probably will not cause radical change, as much as exacerbate the already difficult situations that the virtual communities of researchers face in the entrepreneurial university.
This paper advocates an approach to the design, use and impact of new learning technologies that incorporates the view from multiple perspectives. This includes considering the questions and goals of students, faculty, administrators and co-workers, as well as social dimensions of learning, professional socialization, family dynamics, career, community formation, and institutional change.
In this paper we explore the technological, philosophical and political aspects of networks through a series of condensed, interrelated analyses.
In the past decade, there has been a trend toward using the Internet to support traditional classroom teaching and to substitute traditional teaching for online learning. In particular, online learning communities play an important role in distant education. This trend raises important questions about the nature of online learning, the types of learning promoted by online learning communities, the challenges inherent in online learning communities, and the ways in which online learning communities can be improved. Moreover, it is important to understand online learning communities in the context of people's everyday lives. This special issue brings together studies that examine how online learning communities have evolved, the types of online learning communities available, and what design features are useful for promoting vibrant online learning communities. These studies show online learning communities as a complex phenomenon and propose new frameworks and research methods. This introduction outlines the important questions asked in these papers about online learning communities as well as results from empirical studies. It concludes with a set of design considerations that emerge from the studies.
In this paper, we describe the techniques, methods and context for hacking humans using publicly available information found on the Internet.
An important aspect of online learning community development is to evaluate whether or not a particular online learning community is successful. This paper presents preliminary findings in developing and evaluating an online learning community using Preece's framework for designing and evaluating the success of online communities. The community consisted of CSIRO staff interested in what constitutes values in water use in Australia and how to account for such values. About 400 staff participated in the discussion, that was limited to two weeks. Daily observations of the content and participation were made, and participants were surveyed after the discussion had closed. A total of about 17,000 words of discussion data have been analyzed using purpose-built software. Initial findings using Preece's criteria indicate that the online learning community was successful from a sociability perspective. We found that the number of participants was higher than expected, the volume of emails was high, participants referred to each other quite regularly, the discussion stayed on topic most of the time, the participants saw value in the discussion (even the lurkers), and participants were satisfied with the social interaction within the community.
This paper provides a brief overview and introduction to the intersections between queer theory and online community in the UK and USA in the 1990s. Different communities and theoretical paradigms that relate to this are examined.
The following article aims at providing reflections on electronic interculturality and at investigating areas on action for conceptualizing and maintaining international communities. The main question investigated will be: What is specific about intercultural communication in a virtual community and where does this need to be considered? Relevant aspects and categories of virtual intercultural communication will be pointed out from both a software engineering and a communication perspective. The paper will look at opportunities and challenges of virtual communities for intercultural communication with the objective to enable barrier free communication, equal access opportunities and mutual exchange. Areas to be considered when designed the electronic media for the communities are identified.
Underground innovation communities, such as hackers and computer game modifiers have formed a unique type of information sharing community. As the nature of their communitions evolved to take advantage of new technologies like computer Bulletin Boards and the Internet, the social structure of these communities evolved as well. Understanding how these communities are internally socially divided into innovative "Elites" and follower "Kiddies" can shed important light on these influential, if sometimes destructive, underground electronic communities.
This paper discusses virtual communities' formation and skill development through the process of participation in collective practices in on-line role-playing game environments. The study that follows is mainly based on the participant observation of players acting in two popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Data have been collected through participation and observation of players and their unfolding practices in forming and maintaining such communities. The objective was to document these practices and to study virtual game environments in order to understand learning opportunities within and among these communities, and to identify design elements of the game that cultivate community building. The primary unit of analysis is the in-game communities known as 'guilds'. Research findings indicate that in such multicultural and anonymous environments, many learning processes are evolving that affect both players' understanding of the game's state, and their social interaction and communication skills.
As global online access grows, so does the prospect that online classes will contain students from various cultures and countries. Within this educational environment, cultural differences can affect how students share ideas, comprehend concepts, and access course-related materials. Effective instruction in international online classes therefore requires instructors to address those cultural differences that could most greatly affect learning in such environments. This essay provides an overview of some of the more problematic factors related to international online classes. In examining these factors, the essay also presents strategies for mitigating related problems. The essay then concludes with an annotated list of free online resources educators can use to learn more about cultural factors that could affect learning in online classrooms.
While many synchronous computer-mediated communication systems have failed to encourage users to make use of the expressive capabilities of their avatars, asynchronous systems may hold better chance. This paper reports on the design and user study of a message system that allows users to concatenate and annotate avatar animations and send them to peers. During three weeks, a group of 11 17-year-olds exchanged 222 animated messages in their everyday life environment. The interplay between text and animation allowed users to create significantly expressive messages. Many messages told micro-stories about fictitious and real events. Users identified with their avatars and were proud of their embodied representation. The content of messages deepened during the course of the study.
In their cooperative effort, architects depend critically on elaborate coordinative practices and artifacts. The paper presents, on the basis of an in-depth study of architectural work, an analysis of these practices and artifacts and shows that they are multilaterally interrelated and form complexes of interrelated practices and artifacts which we have dubbed 'ordering systems'. In doing so, the paper outlines a conceptual framework for investigating and conceiving of such practices.
The Eighth European Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference (ECSCW 2003) provided a venue to gather researchers interested in the study of scientific collaborations and their technology support. The organizers, Karen S. Baker, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Helena Karasti, started to work together in 2002 on a National Science Foundation funded BioDiversity and EcoInformatics (BDEI) project 'Designing an Infrastructure for Heterogeneity in Ecosystem Data, Collaborators and Organizations' (http://pal.Iternet.edu/projects/02dgo/). Having encountered a multitude of challenging issues in their study with the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER, http://Iternet.edu), the ECSCW workshop offered an opportunity for a community dialogue focusing on Computer Supported Scientific Collaboration (CSSC). The suite of selected position papers at the workshop by Debra Cash & Howard Cash, Jenny Fry, Timothy Koschmann, Flemming Meier, Erja Mustonen-Ollila, Giuseppe Psaila & Davide Brugali, and Sanna Talja ([16], http://pal.Iternet.edu/projects/ecscw03/) represented a wide range of work relating to scientific collaborations.
The term "community-based learning" can refer to a variety of forms of learning. One can, for instance, insist on an individualistic notion of learning and argue that individual learning can be enhanced by factors that may influence it from a supportive community environment. At the other theoretical extreme, one can propose a social conception of learning and claim that most important knowledge building takes place at the community level, while individual learning is a secondary matter of internalization, acculturation or increased participation in community. Here, we will stake out a middle ground: that community-based learning should be analyzed at the intermediate level of small groups of individuals within the community. We point out that small groups typically mediate the relationship of communities to their members and we propose a consideration of small group cognition as an alternative methodological focus to either cognition in the head of individuals or the cultural knowledge of a whole community. This approach has practical implications for CSCL and CSCW: collaboration is taken to be a potential emergent phenomenon of small group interaction, and the computer support of collaboration is analyzed as an enabling technology whose design and use forms and transforms the nature of the interactions.
Most current theories about collective cognitive activities in limited groups apply to structurally closed co-operative situations Here we propose to work in the framework of intellectual transactions and communities of action theory with a view to describing and designing CSCW systems which can be used in more structurally open situations. First we compare this approach with other theories of collective cognition (such as those focusing on situated cognition and communities of practice, distributed cognition and coordination mechanisms). We then present the core concepts involved in defining communities of action, the duality of goals and forms of knowledge and the operational, strategic, integrative and relational categories of collective activity on which the OSIR model is based. We conclude by presenting as an example the application of the model to a research project designed to assist the setting up of a health network.
