Online communities of learning do not work. This, at least, seems to be the message of many researchers who have studied online communities or computer-supported collaborative learning (Hewitt, 2005; Van der Meijden & Veenman, 2005, for example). However, online communities can, and do succeed in some situations. For example, sites such as Myspace.com, Friendster.com, Xanga.com, and Flickr.com rival or surpass Google in visitors. Reportedly, 54 million people use myspace.com to interact together, and similar sites are not too far behind (McPherson, 2006).
One research idea that I would like to investigate one day would be to study why social networking, interaction, and collaboration is so successful, particularly among young adults, with websites such as myspace.com, and yet not so popular in educational settings. My goal would be to better understand the aspects of these social sites that encourage so much participation, and define guidelines for developing educational social communities that employ the same principles, as much as possible. In short, can we engineer better educational online communities by copying ideas from informal and commercial communities? I know, I know, I have my doubts that learning and social connectedness can be engineered and “forced,” but isn’t that what we try to do as instructional designers? Design or engineer environments to allow for more effective learning?
I learned in Robert Alford’s Craft of Inquiry text about crafting theoretical questions (or general questions) and empirical questions (testable or researchable questions). If I were to do a project like this, I had thought that the following might be my questions:
Theoretical questions:
1. Can learning communities employ principles from popular social networking sites to improve educational collaboration and interaction?
2. Do the effectiveness of online learning communities aid in the development of expertise?
Empirical questions
1. How do relationships form in these online sites?
2. What draws people to associate and interact together through these online sites?
3. What are the affordances of these social environments that are lacking in educational communities?
4. What kinds of support or interaction do learning communities fail to provide to students?
How would I organize such a study? Which questions would be most important to research? What are your thoughts? I think it’d be a fun, and interesting project.
References
Hewitt, J. (2005). Toward an understanding of how threads die in asynchronous computer conferences. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(4), 567-589.
McPherson, K. (2006). Whose space is it, anyway? Mercury News. Accessed 13 Mar 2006 from http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/business/technology/13840568.htm.
Van der Meijden, H. & Veenman, S. (2005). Face-to-face versus computer-mediated communication in a primary school setting. Computers in Human Behavior, 21(5), 831-859.