Wednesday, 17 September 2008

Some thoughts on building online communities


As a newbie to elearning I found the paper done by Hill etal (2000) raised a couple of key points for me:
  • Firstly - an atmosphere of "adventure spirit" needs to be created with the spin off of a feeling of community coming from the notion that "we are all in this togther" when participating in online connectedness - (ie the proverbial we are all in the same boat!)

                • Secondly - creating "teams" or "buddies" to help beginers stay connected

                • Thirdly - to realise that there will always be some particpants who are not interested in establishing a community (ie another fact of life)

                Although this research focused on a 'constructed' online educational community (ie varsity students doing a grad couse online) it certainly revealed to me the need for distinct strategies to foster the building of an online community (ie it is not just necessarily going to just happen in a vaccuum). Source: http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper46/paper46.htm

                Did some browsing for non-educational online communities and came up with these links:

                These sites looked like sites were the community had commonality which was not to do with education.
                Signing off for today.



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