Online Communities

During my university studies to be a teacher we had it drilled into us how important the sense of community was to learning.

Community is an interesting term, which is rather broad. Wikipedia description of a community is:
“A community is an amalgamation of living things that share an
environment.“

Through my school I am apart of the school community (or community of learners), the educational community (A rough geographically determined community of fellow educators) the Edtalk community (discussing technical issues in school networks) & the IT teacher community (discussing the teaching & learning of information technologies within schools).

I teach in a small town called Penola so I am a member of the Penola community, I live in Mount Gambier so I am also a member of that community… I could keep going but I won’t.

Online communities have always existed, however due to a growth in social-networking tools they have grown exponentially recently.

For example I am now a member of the edBlogs community. Although I have been blogging for over six months my blog was disjointed and I was only influenced by a few others. Recently this has changed and now I feel like a member of this community.

The term web2.0 is interesting, focussing on using the web to promote interaction. I think community goes another step. Using the technology groups of people with similar interests can form new communities over vast geographic distances.

For example a person with an interest in the history of telegraph poles could meet like minded people online and form a community of people to discuss this.

People who join a community want to be recognised. They want to be considered a person of worth in the community. This links I believe to info-addiction as we try to keep up with what others are thinking and interact with others in the hope of being recognised for ones own work.

Most of my communities involve a face-to-face element. I find this element of the community a powerful one. I believe interactions progress more rapidly and take different paths in these environments.

The way people speak; physical gestures and other factors such as the amount of amber liquid consumed during these interactions really change the “environment” in which the communication is occurring.

The future of these online communities will be interesting what format will they take…