This semester I am going to learn all that I can about Virtual Communities as a part of my EIPT 6433 course. This week we had readings from a textbook readings and reading articles in Time Magazine. The textbook we are using is Building Virtual Communities Learning and Change in Cyberspace edited by K. Ann Renninger and Wesley Shumar. In this first post I am going to talk about the textbook readings.
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Friday, January 29, 2010
Community Building with and for Teachers at the Math Forum
The 3rd article is titled Community Building with and for Teachers at the Math Forum by the authors of the text. This one is interesting as this site exists and seems to be thriving today. I have reviewed the site and can see why it is thriving as a virtual community. It has purpose. It would appeal to teachers, students, parents. The user interface is easy to navigate, the site is inviting to new members and assumes users will stop using the site when they stop teaching or stop taking math classes. It has a large number of individuals listed in the staff section and is affiliated with a major university. A weekly newsletter is available. The problem of the week keeps teachers coming back as they find value in the information and can easily use the problem with students. Up until this point I had thought of virtual communities as a social activity. This site is more of a problem based, professional development community. It seems to be worthwhile and may be a good choice for a case study as it content and interaction that I can see has value.
Female Voices in Virtual Reality - Drawing Young Girls into an Online World.
The 2nd article in the text is titled Female Voices in Virtual Reality - Drawing Young Girls into an Online World. This article featured a project that was conducted on technology that would be considered old by today’s standards. The article implied that girls avoided online communication and technical challenges. To me 10 years of evolvement has changed the overall picture. In today’s world females are well represented in virtual communities. The difference that I see is today’s virtual communities are application based and are so easy to use that I am not sure if females have gotten better at taking on technical challenges or if the user interfaces are now so easy that females are well represented in virtual communities but still lag behind in computer sciences.
The Mystery and Death of MediaMOO
The first chapter in the text is titled The Mystery and Death of MediaMOO by Amy Bruckman and Carol Jensen. This article is about a virtual community that thrived between the years 1993 and 1996 but was essentially extinct by 1998. The first thing I wanted to know about is what a MOO is. In the text a MOO is defined as a Multi Object Oriented environment which is a type of MUD. This did not clarify my conception of what a MOO is so I looked online for more information. The definition in the text was confirmed by Wikipedia where it was written that a ” A MOO is a type of MUD. Which is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time.” Although I am not sure I have a good functional knowledge I can tell it uses old technology and interaction is conducted through the Internet through text exchanges. The interesting things about this article was the fact that someone had studied a group that had come and gone and analyzed what makes people return or leave a virtual community. The findings show that
· People leave groups to form new groups with a more specific focus.
· People leave virtual groups when technology becomes outdated
· To have a thriving group you have to have a plan to recruit new members when existing members leave. It is normal for people to move through life stages and outgrow the need to be a part of a virtual community that has a specific focus.
· The leadership of the group must be rotated or the leaders lose enthusiasm over time and the group suffers.
All of these lessons learned through MediaMoo can probably be applied to any virtual or non-virtual group in my opinion.
· People leave groups to form new groups with a more specific focus.
· People leave virtual groups when technology becomes outdated
· To have a thriving group you have to have a plan to recruit new members when existing members leave. It is normal for people to move through life stages and outgrow the need to be a part of a virtual community that has a specific focus.
· The leadership of the group must be rotated or the leaders lose enthusiasm over time and the group suffers.
All of these lessons learned through MediaMoo can probably be applied to any virtual or non-virtual group in my opinion.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Time Magazine Dec 25th 2006
I enjoyed the article's in Time Magazine.
After we read that we were the person of the year in the article titled "Enough About You," we were advised that maybe we weren't so interesting after all and that we need to stop being so self absorbed and that need to pay attention to what is going on around us. Power to the People was particularly enjoyable as it summarized an everyday person's experience with one of the web 2.0 technologies that people have today. I will be emailing myself these articles to reference.
After we read that we were the person of the year in the article titled "Enough About You," we were advised that maybe we weren't so interesting after all and that we need to stop being so self absorbed and that need to pay attention to what is going on around us. Power to the People was particularly enjoyable as it summarized an everyday person's experience with one of the web 2.0 technologies that people have today. I will be emailing myself these articles to reference.
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