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Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning

Posted on: Friday, 5 August 2005, 09:00 CDT

Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray, eds. 2004. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [ISBN 0-521-81755-2. 452 pages, including index. $75.00 USD.]

One of the editors of this book, Rob Kling, a preeminent scholar on the social aspects of information technology, died in 2003. Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning stands with his other many scholarly articles and book chapters as a testimony to his exploration of computerization not merely as a technological process but rather as a social process. The book begins by examining the concept of community and, specifically, learning communities.

"A community has a significant histoiy, a shared cosmology, a common cultural and historical heritage, social interdependence, and a reproduction cycle" (p. 4). While anthropologists traditionally studied pre-industrial societies, sociologists have turned their attention to multicultural urban areas and, most recently, to communities that are not place-based, for example, virtual communities. Although members of the latter are not co-present, they do participate in the community and share an understanding about their place in the community and what the community means in their lives.

A central focus of this book is learning communities, which can be divided into three types: task-based, practice-based, and knowledge-based. "Task-based learning communities are groups of people organized around a task who work intently together for a specified period of time to produce a product" (p.20). A practice- based community is the well-known "community of practice" model proposed by Lave and Wenger. A practice-based community is an ongoing, complex social interaction in which members are mutually engaged in a shared and constantly evolving community that responds to internal and external tensions. In the process, the community develops "discourse, tools, and artifacts of work, action routines, anecdotes about practice, and other cultural mechanisms" (p. 27). Lastly, a knowledge-based community "seeks to advance the collective knowledge in a subject or field of inquiry" (p. 32), such as a scholarly discipline.

Part II of this book discusses the development of an online community of practice for elementary mathematics and science teachers called The Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF). The authors discuss the tension between the Web designers' desire to create a robust learning platform and their desire to let an online community emerge in response to real users' needs, which might simply be to log on and download lesson plans. An initially too complex interface for the ILF caused some teachers to logoff without using the site. The authors conclude that the real design challenge is to understand the multiple agendas and the emergent needs of all community members, including both designers and teachers.

Part III discusses online communities such as The Math Forum, an online interactive library for mathematics educators. The Math Forum demonstrates how a successful site offers both rich interactivity and a simple path forward for new users. As members become more familiar with the site and because they are operating within a community that encourages taking on progressively more responsibility, they use more of the site's functionality. Both the technology and the learning community support increasing member involvement.

The authors present in Part IV methodologies for the study of computer-mediated communication in virtual communities. These include social network analysis, which examines, for example, members in terms of their centrality to the community and the extent to which they form communication paths between nonadjacent members. Members with a high "degree centrality" serve as major communication channels for others in the group.

As organizations such as STC grapple with understanding the interplay between technology and community, research such as that described in this book can provide valuable insights. Much has been written about what constitutes usability in online environments, but far less has been written about how Web site design supports people's interactions. We who participate in online communities, whether as teacher, student, or engaged professional, can clearly benefit from books such as these.

Victoria Maki

VICTORIA MAKI is president of Bitzone LLC and a senior member of the Silicon Valley STC chapter. She has an MBA and over a decade of experience as trainer and technical writer. She has developed software manuals, marketing and training materials, help systems, and Web sites, and is coauthoring a book on APIs and SDKs.

Copyright Society for Technical Communication Aug 2005

Source: Technical Communication

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