What is an online community?

This is the first question in the FOC08 course and Leigh introduces the topic with a warning and some advice.

Most people use the phrase “online community” very loosely …and it is important that we try and develop an understanding of what exactly we are looking for, and techniques for looking.

According to Wikipedia, in biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. From this perspective, an online community at its very basic would be people who share and interact in an online environment.

However, there is much more to it than meets the eye and it is important to question concepts and definitions we have grown used to and long taken for granted in our particular contexts.  In a period of change, when navigating uncharted territories and meeting new cultures, such general concepts must be questioned.

History changes, but so does the meaning of words. Depending on the situation, words like freedom and tyranny and faith have different applications and consequences. When does faith constrict freedom? When does freedom become a cover-up for tyranny? Most important, who has the power to define these words? (Source: NY TIMES  CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK : FREEDOM TWISTED BY CORRUPT REGIMES by Margo Jefferson January 13, 2004)

In the same way, the word “online community” has been used in so many situations by different people that the word does not stick to what it stands for. It is a loaded word, which may be used to manipulate people’s emotional needs for different purposes.

So again just observing and noting down the different layers of meaning I have noticed.

Differently from a traditional course during which the teacher and/or prescribed readings are the source of knowledge and impart it to others at a certain time and place, the starting point here are the participants themselves at their own places. They voice their points of view and perspectives arising from their own experience and check their assumptions against the readings suggested and what others have written.

Even though the initial required reading list and course framework/progression were not decided upon by the participants themselves and the interaction seems to be limited to the particular context of the course and the people who have enrolled, the platform used is a wiki, an open collaboration tool which allows others to add to it. It is a flexible structure which could be eventually modified. Participants are encouraged to post their own reflections on their own blogs and link to others not only through their blogroll but also when referring or quoting others. As posts are online and open, they may be “eventually”  commented upon and challenged by others who are not part of this specific context (provided their comment area is open and allows for this kind of interaction).

By posing the question “what is an online community?”, offering a number of articles from different professional fields (knowledge management, technology business, philosophy, sociology, education, research, politics) and by letting people show what they know, i.e., illustrate perceptions of community from their own context,  Leigh facilitates the explicit expression of knowledge.  By trying to define “an online community”,  the different individual answers reveal to others in turn what the initial common ground may be, where the intersections appear and where the differences (opinion, language, skills, netiquette or plain stubborness) may obstruct/impede communication and  make people remain silent, over-react, enter disputes, take diverging roads or quit.

The moderator´s role would be to perceive these moments, calm or encourage such behaviours so as to maintain the community´s harmony.

Therefore, the starting point is what each one of us already knows, how we represent it for ourselves and others, how this concept is used /understood and expressed by the different personae in their different fields of practice and interest.  

A second step, an observation of language, an awareness of worlds/behaviours different from our own (not only geographical but social, cultural, linguistic) are  paramount to examine recurring patterns, how these are transposed in different situations – which community avoids them,  which reinforces them and why.

“Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. . . . Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the “West and the Rest” and organizes everyday language into binaristic hiearchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our ‘nations,’ their ‘tribes’; our ‘religions,’ their ‘superstitions’; our ‘culture,’ their ‘folklore’; our ‘art,’ their ‘artifacts’; our ‘demonstrations,’ their ‘riots’; our ‘defense,’ their ‘terrorism.’ ” Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Routledge. London and New York, 1994. p.2 “

Individuals, communities, groups, networks…language and critical literacy are paramount.

As I had not first planned to participate and joined late, the beginning was chaotic. Fortunately the course allows for plenty of time for people to digest the concepts and react .  I was enjoying the freedom of my sabbatical year to go to conferences, museums, exhibitions and get together with people from different walks of life and professional areas. More and more, I have been trying to engage with non-homogeneous groups of people. After having spent 35 years enclosed inside a classroom, interacting with the same crowd and doing the same things, I have an imperious urge to know what is happening out there and learning from the world around me.

Acknowledging and interacting with this diversity of cultural, linguistic and professional personal backgrounds, assumptions and motivations is IMHO a key competency not only f2f  but even more so when one is online, where physical cues are almost nonexistent.

Leigh says:

facilitation is a rare and valuable skill to have. It is a service that is often used in conferences, debates, panels and tutorials, or simply where groups of people are meeting and need someone to help negotiate meaning and understanding, and to keep everyone engaged and on task.

* Good facilitation depends on good communication skills.

* Good online facilitation depends on good online communication skills.

* Facilitating online communities… what does that involve?

Courses like this one, however, rely mostly on written text, so the language used / the educational perspective and jargon may be an important barrier for expression of those from a non-Anglo-Saxon culture, non- academic background or different literacy practices.

Non-native speakers have the double trouble of negotiating meaning  and weaving their tacit knowledge of another background with the explicit learning of the technical knowledge and skills about the nature and practice of the particular skill or competency being acquired in a language different from their own – English (Beyond Communities of Practice – Language, Power and Social Context”, Cambridge University Press, 2005, page 151).

I am in ELT (secondary school) but, in spite of all my practice and exposure on the web, I am finding increasing difficulty in communicating my thoughts in different contexts where a particular language/jargon is used (same for the other languages I speak – French , Polish and Portuguese) if I am not constantly exposed to them and do not practice it. I am permanently chasing for the different meanings of words and collocations so as to negotiate their impact and try not sound inarticulate or inappropriate. Also, are the online facilitation skills that come from an Anglo-Saxon culture the same for the French, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish cultures or do we accept them as being so because they have not been developed in our online contexts?

I am a self-directed learner -most of what I know comes from observing, experiencing and putting myself in situations where the skills I wish to acquire are required. I also test my possibilities, watch for reactions and try to learn from my mistakes. So although I have already facilitated/moderated/taught online courses and belong to different online communities this time, I decided I would record the process from an intercultural angle.

Next topic: First Steps

I’ve had some busy weeks lately trying out, creating and deleting databases and scripts, surfing in circles to figure out which open source tools to use to design and best integrate my new separate domains – barbaradieu.com (personal page/bio/publications, etc), beespace.net (past and ongoing personal projects + blog + wiki) and creatingripples.org (to host different projects for professional/cultural development for teachers). Being, becoming and sharing experimentation spaces. A new system and a new language.  I hope I can find my focus and get something concrete online soon.

I am sure I would feel much freer without these possessions. It would be certainly much easier and practical to park them all on one or several of the Web 2.0 existing platforms online, not worry about the maintenance and link to them as I have done until now.  However, I am not only fond of architecture, design, building and tinkering but also have some time on my hands and invested in some lifetime space. I love a challenge, learn by doing and would like to understand/see more clearly which tool fits best for each function, how they interact (or not)  and what is necessary to bring them all together, make them work for communication and learning.

Now there is a lot of information online, forums and IRC channels -  all this is very time-consuming though and I would definitely advance more quickly if I had a (some) helping hand(s)  to guide me through some of the process. Rudolf Ammann, with whom I have been collaborating closely at dekita.org, initiated me in the use of many of these tools and has kept a sustained conversation for 3 years now, guiding me, giving me a number of tips, pointing to tutorials. There is a limit to what one can ask from one person though. Out of love, it’s time to set him free