I got interested in online communities in 1997 when I joined several groups on usenet, and quickly became embroiled in the processes of new group and hierarchy creation.
In 2003 I started an honours degree course, 100% online and based on workplace study. That's where I began to learn theory about Communities of Practice ( CoP) and Action Research, but the kind of Action Research expected seemed to be mainly about working alongside people in schools or other physical workplaces, whilst my workplace turned out to be anywhere I'm sitting down at a computer - the internet.
For one project, I wanted to work with my community of craft cider makers and see if I could introduce the benefits of a wiki to that established COP. One year later I can say that it is working very sucessfully, but in order to write about what I'd done I had to describe the methodology. Looking at the literature about Action Research, there didn't seem to be a convenient category into which this kind of working with entirely online groups would fit. It's a bit like First Person research in some ways, researching my own practice as facilitator, but also entails collaboration ( participation) and feedback in a way which seems to me to work quite differently in an online, asynchronous, many-to-many community. So I added a category of my own and called it "Distributed Action Research"
This concept of distributed action research, ( DAR ) then became the focus for my final year project and that is what this exhibition is all about.
