1) introduction

2) general online experience

3) a theory

4) online learning tools

5) survey of online communities

6) literature review

7) self interview

Appendix & site map

1) introduction

This report follows on from report1 overlapping the period of term1 and revisiting some of the same activities, but focussing more on the tools and use of online community. Two main elements are the Flash animation at the top of the report, which takes the viewer through my early experiences of jellyOS, and the activity I planned earlier which involved sending out a questionnaire to volunteers from a variety of different types of online community with which I happen to be familiar.
A strong theme is my theory that face-to-face meetings are an important factor in the development of online communities. This theory is introduced and then evaluated against the survey findings and against others' writings on the subject of online communities.

2) general online experience

Online learning communities are a specific type of online community. I have experienced online communities for many years, but ultraversity is probably my first encounter with a learning community, so this report deals mainly with the general type, leaving a more detailed study of the specific until more experience has been gained.

ancient history

In 1976 I worked as a computer operator for a County Council. We had a large ICL mainframe which occupied three rooms and required three operators per shift covering 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. Each of the seven district councils covered by the county then had a mini computer in their own town halls, which only occupied one room and was connected to the mainframe via a direct leased line from British Telecom. When one of the district operators wanted to upload some data onto the mainframe, they would load a batch of punched cards into the card reader at their end, and then notify us to get ready for receiving. It was soon discovered that the best way to organise this was to switch the leased data lines over to permanent voice communication for most of the time. So there was a voicephone in our main computer room, through which the seven district operators in places like St Austell, Penzance and Camborne could all talk to us whenever they felt like it.

synchronicity

For some reason the voice system was simplex, not duplex - so only one person could talk at a time, but messages could be passed on from one district to another by relaying through us. Sometimes on the "Day Shift", the workload was light and we would while away extended tea breaks and other times trying to hold meaningful conversations in this stilted way, but even when we were busy we could come back to a conversation after an hour or so's interruption by work, and just carry on where we left off.

internet history

I think it was in 1996 that I first pushed a free AOL floppy diskette into my inherited 80486 desktop computer ( 4Mb) and connected it to a 14K dial-up modem. The internet experience seen through AOL can be a bit like watching cable TV, with lots of adverts, a huge choice of channels and nothing much on. But in order to try and get you hooked, amongst the first things they presented you with are email, groups and buddy lists. In no time I found myself subscribed to a couple of special interest groups and was chatting away with my new found friends. But there was a problem; it was costing me too much money. In those days, not only did you have to pay for dialling into a national call access number on the phone line but you also paid the Internet Service Provider a few pence per minute to use their services. The answer was to abandon the online chat rooms, ( not much loss there), and set up the computer so that it would dial up, retrieve any emails and newsgroup messages from the groups I was subscribed to, and then disconnect. I could then spend an hour or so reading through my mails and messages, and composing my replies. When I came to the end of all new messages, I could invest in another 2 minute session, which would send off my pearls of wisdom and return another batch of replies, and so on.

communities

I found the idea that it was possible to find and communicate regularly with like-minded people interested in almost any chosen minority field regardless of geographical location quite staggering. In theory, this was an enormous step forward in human civilisation equivalent to the invention of the printing press, the telephone or speech itself. And yet so much of the textual traffic winging its way around the world was being taken up with the banal, with mutual backslapping and recreating prejudices from the world of appearances. Nonetheless, a few early experiences of genuine meeting of minds is enough to hook the participant into sticking with the community they happened upon, defending it, and devoting a fair amount of time and effort into keeping up relationships and nurturing development. Within a couple of months of enjoying exchanging banter in the one newsgroup dedicated to an avant garde rock/jazz/blues combo I found myself in the leadership of a campaign to create a new forum for the defunct bonzo-dog-doodah-band.

newsgroups about newsgroups

My systematising personality just had to find out how it all worked, and so I began taking part in newsgroups where people talked about newsgroups - this is known as the metadiscussion. Two years later I was to dedicate a lot of time and effort into building an online action group dedicated to bringing about fundamental change in the way one very popular set of groups is controlled. It failed spectacularly in the middle of the annual elections, and I learned some hard lessons. In another group I casually joined, I soon read about a forthcoming annual BBQ event to which all participants and even the lurkers are invited.

face to face

I went along with my family and we discovered the harmless pleasure of meeting up face to face with people you already know through online communities. I attended numerous pre-concert meets, pub meets, visits to workplaces and social events with food, drink, quizzes, raffles and entertainment. There are nearly always a few community members present who have made astonishing international journeys and complicated stay-over arrangements in order to be there just for the day or evening. From one group I joined up with a singer/composer who sought other musicians, and I helped make a demo recording of his songs. With the advent of the euro currency and other issues crossing national boundaries I saw the need for discussion forums which don't insist on the use of the english language so I had to initiate and guide the process to put that into effect. I met up with a doctor in Paris to be interviewed by a technology journalist. I flew to the Atlantic coast of France to meet a special friend I knew only from a few months email conversations. I performed at a private party the night before a concert at which the members of an online community for fans of one particular singer entertained each other with self compositions and covers. My friend and closest online collaborator stopped posting to his usual community for over 2 weeks and people started to get concerned. One week later we were informed that he had been found dead in his flat where he lived alone, and all the fun and frivolity evaporated, almost irretrievably. I unsubscribed and eventually moved on.

glossary

* metadiscussion
Discussing the mechanics, social science and technology of the creation and development of discussion groups themselves rather than getting on with the real purpose of discussing useful topics.

* lurkers
People who read the messages in groups but never post. They can make up about 90% of the subscribers, depending on the nature of the group.

ICL
International Computers Limited

AOL
America Online

reflection

Online communities are seemingly a very powerful phenomenon. They bring people together who have a common interest or speciality, and wouldn't otherwise be able to. But more than that, the act of engaging in exchanges of text based (composed) communication, on a continuing basis, seems to generate a strong sense of community almost regardless of the topic or initial reason for creating a forum. This can be a refreshing discovery, reaffirming a positive co-operative side to human nature by comparison with the increasingly harsh experience of an urban existence. There are also dangers and pitfalls which one needs to be aware of.
Experience of enough online communities to compare and contrast leads me to the conclusion that there are certain processes and characteristics which they nearly all display, such that one can study them as a whole and uncover general themes and rules. An accurate and truthful analysis of the abstracted understanding should then be able to guide the way in which communities are created and nurtured, such that fewer failures occur, and higher quality experiences, ideas and values are produced.
I don't see why online learning communities should be any different, apart from people's perceptions and motivation for being there may be even stronger, or perhaps not. We shall see.

4) account of online learning tools

I first heard about the Ultraversity online degree course in an email from my son Frankie. I registered an interest and cleared up a few questions via email also, and then received an application form in the post (snail mail).

Ultraversity Website

I checked the ultraversity website from time to time but there were long periods with nothing added or changed. Eventually, a "to do" list appeared which told us how to prepare for the course. "To do" lists were to become an important tool for ultraversity communication, and it works well but I think it would be an improvement if an email was also sent out to tell us whenever the site has been updated. This would give a prompt notification to put the majority of students immediately onto the new tasks, and would save us from wasting time checking the website in case it has changed when it hasn't.

Stickies

The initial ice-breaking activities in the summer involved using the stickies tool. Whilst I tried to take this seriously, it was a simple exercise which didn't appear to be leading anywhere. From the instructions given it seemed there was an expectation that conversations might begin using the stickies tool but it was obvious that this was never going to happen. Indirectly, it's worth reporting, that for "send a postcard", I returned a couple of days later and sent another one including a website address for my account of a holiday in China. http://www.yangtsegorges.ukgateway.net/ As a result of this another student Maureen Slack, managed to find my email address and wrote to me. We discussed our initial impressions of the course and how it would be nice to keep in contact with other students. It was at this point that I realised ultraversity was not going to be a passive learning experience, that we as students, would need to take our own initiatives and organise ourselves.

Personal Profiling Tool

This is a password protected individual area on the ultraversity website. One of the first items on the "to do list " was to update my personal profile. This took me to some kind of javascript webpage with data entry boxes into which you can enter paragraphs of text. I have no idea whether anyone has ever read it, so that feels a bit pointless. I entered some details about myself answering the question prompts but when I read it back it doesn't make proper sense because some of the questions are included in the 'view' and some are not.
So the answers to "Why have you chosen to pursue this course?"
and "Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years time? "

both appear rather meaninglessly all by themselves without the question. I feel this is an area that needs to be improved, or rather properly finished off if it is needed at all.

CClist

A screenshot of Forté Agent, my email and newsgroup reading software.

One of the earliest emails from my assigned Learning facilitator to her small group of students was sent out using a CC ( Carbon Copy ) list of email addresses. This meant that I could respond by clicking "reply to all" and all the recipients of the group email would get my message too. In my message I explained how to do this so that other students could reply back to the group. This is the simplest form of many-to-many
communication, and it resulted in several students introducing themselves and saying a bit about their work and aspirations for the course.
The disadvantage of using a CClist is the feeling that you may be annoying some people by sending them unsolicited mail, since many-to-many communication can sometimes escalate into extended multiple messages from only a few participants ricocheting back and fore several times a day. Once you are included in a chain of CC's like this it can be very difficult to get off it again, since the list only exists as document headers in the emails inside many people's inboxes.

• due to an accident I don't have records of early emails and CClist correspondence but I believe Maureen Slack may have them.

ultrastudents yahoogroup

The next step is to provide a way in which people can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe as they wish. This liberates the writer from feeling they are impinging on the others, and makes it possible for new people to join in. So I transferred the CClist into an email group using the facilities provided by yahoogroups.com. People who had responded to the CC list I added directly in and the remainder were invited to subscribe themselves.
There were 4 messages in August, 8 in September, 21 in October and 203 in November, including many saying how much they had appreciated getting messages from fellow students while working away at the reports sometimes late at night. The group has a sense of identity already, and is used for sharing information encouragement and compassion as well as a technical and course help line.

screenshot from 7/12/2003

Problems of too much traffic for some people to cope with are beginning to emerge, and the group is trying to solve this through requesting people to 'tag' messages with "INFO", "CHAT" "HELP" in the subject. My prediction based on experience, is that this will only partially work, as some people will tend to respond to each others' posts in a new vein without changing the subject header. There could also be technical problems with some mailservers rejecting certain emails that have gone through yahoo, resulting in 'bounces' and missed or late messages.

I have set myself the target of finding out about somewhere which will host a major-domo listserver for me so that if things deteriorate I won't have to rely on yahoogroups for these services.

http://www.ultrastudents.co.uk

ILP

The Independent Learning Plan tool is connected to the Ultraversity Online database for profiling and tracking Ultraversity students. A webpage with text input boxes allows the student to edit a template of suggested learning activities to produce a custom plan. I felt unconfident about what I was supposed to be doing here, especially since there were several misleading clues left lying about.

• The term 'negotiate' led me to believe that some bargaining process would take place, so I felt my initial plan would only be a starting point.
• There's a section for "Communication: View All" which remains blank.
• The tick boxes seemed to imply that another process would begin, or open up once they were ticked. I came back and looked many times waiting for a tick which never arrived! Silly me?

  

   

In my report 1 I wrote : "I think the method of using an Individual Learning Plan is an excellent one, and it suits me particularly well since I like to have tasks clearly laid out for me to do, and know how I am going to be able to do them. In future I would take more time to carefully consider the ILP and make sure that I understand it fully and that it will meet the required objectives before starting the activities."

weblog

An online weblog tool has been used for my Learning Journal, and I review its use in

Activity 4

Plan and develop a learning journal so that I can write down or record
my thoughts from each learning activity.

findings

Findings are included as a part of this assessed report here in activity 4 ( 800 words) leading to the journal itself at

http://andyroberts.blogspot.com/

jellyOS

Since JellyOS, the community software used by ultraversity has already been discussed far too much on jellyOS itself and elsewhere, and is the subject of my Flash Movie introduction, I shall restrict myself in this section to including work already done.

My 'home' page on jellyOS as at 28/10/03

My initial impressions of jellyOS from my blog -

 

and revisited later

For a description of my participation in some community conversations and screenshots as evidence please visit activity 1.4

What does an expert say about technology for communities of practice ?

Etienne Wenger seems to be held in some respect by the academics and writes..

Furthermore, a technological platform for communities of practice should ideally be *Easy to learn and use because communities of practice are usually not people's main job. *Easily integrated with other software that members of the community are using for their regular work so that participation in the community requires as few steps as possible *Not too expensive. If it requires a lot of investment up front, potentially useful communities will not be able to take advantage of the platform. Indeed, many communities start with only a partial understanding of the value they will provide eventually. (Wenger 2001, p8)

 

I feel this quote fully supports my above "problems of the fundamental" criticism of jellyOS

 

Dreamweaver - FTP

I decided to use HTML as the main vehicle for publishing my ultraversity work and Dreanweaver as the package for managing the uploading of files and maintenance of the growing website.

Blog entry Sunday, October 26, 2003

MSN instant messenger

MSN messenger is one of a number of online synchronous realtime chat programs, probably the most popular right now, which enable instant conversations between two or more contacts, and the exchange of files. What does it look like? See below

Early on in the CClist, yahoogroup days some people gave out their MSN messenger contact names and I added them to my list. I don't get around to launching MSN messenger all that often and when I do there is quite often nobody else available to discuss with. It can be a very flexible and useful tool for holding discussions, helping people and sharing the internet exploring experience, through the passing of URLs. At first, people feel they have to make conversation all the time, a bit like being on the phone, but experienced users understand that other people may be busy doing different things on their computer at the same time and will leave conversations running but silent for extended periods, then popping the occasional question or comment as the need arises. Students with a report to write for a deadline will probably want to switch it off altogether to avoid being distracted by pleasant but unproductive chit chat.

To contact me with MSN Messenger please add magpiecrow@hotmail.com to your contact list

 

reflection

A tool is just a tool. What matters is that it does the job intended efficiently, safely and enjoyably. Some tools can be used for more than one purpose and some purposes can be filled by more than one type of tool. People tend to like the one they first learned to use the best, unless it's really bad. Remember the old saying "A bad workman blames his tools"? That's dangerously misleading rubbish. Any workman will tell you that you can't do a good job with bad tools, in fact in software engineering it's usually smarter to spend a lengthy period at the beginning of a job creating the tools for it before getting on with the job itself. And we don't waste time creating new parts for tools when there are good ones lying around which can be freely employed. The modern object-orientated approach is wholly based on the idea that flexible and reusable modules are the key, and need to be created so that specific solutions can be built out of pre-existing parts wherever possible.

5) investigation ( survey)

method

I sent out email questionnaires to volunteers from several groups where I am an occasional participant, saved the results.

findings

see learning activity 5

Analysis of the survey data will continue after the deadline for this report but here are some early impressions

• Most of the self-selected people who returned the questionnaire considered their group to be a community and had already met other members.
  
• Many didn't understand my questions about the technology.
  
• They valued their forum mostly because of the other people there.
• They don't see any need for change and like it the way it is.
  
• one volunteered useful information about communities and questionnaires.

For the purposes of this report and investigating my theory, let's look at the minority, people who haven't experienced face-to-face meetings yet. That's 10/39 , slightly over 25%

question 6. Have you ever met people from your community, do you intend to?

1) No, Maybe - ( membership 18 months)
2) No I haven't - I wouldn't rule it out but it's not something that I have a strong need or wish to do. There don't seem to be many local members - would maybe be open to meeting others at a gig - though in fact I most probably would prioritise trying to encourage my own 'real life' friends to share the loudo experience. I probably don't really experience - or need - it as a 'community'
3) No, although if I went to a Loudon gig where other members were present I might do.
4) no - membership 2 years
5) Haven't, but intend to next time I get up to Sydney
6) Not knowingly; unlikely - membership 6 years
7) No, and I probably wouldn't. - membership 1 year
8) No, if I was older and lived nearer I might consider going to a meet up but
no I haven't, I'm 15 and with all the negative publicity about child
grooming I don't think my parents would be to happy for me to either
9)No, and no not really! - lurking for a couple of months
10) Saw one in a cinema, but didn't say Hi - a decision I've since
regretted. Did arrange to meet someone who was travelling to NZ but it
didn't happen.

Apart from one who doesn't see it as a 'community', they experience the online group as a place where real life meetings may originate, but either haven't done so or don't wish to.

reflection

I learned a lot through this activity already, mainly about research, about questionnaires, questions, different email formats, collating results and more. I'd never done anything like it before and it was interesting devising the method. Another time I would think even more carefully about the questions, and pilot the questionnaire with a small group of people in order to test the way other people understand my questions.

Some of the replies are really quite insightful and will provide good material for thought and further investigation long after this report is handed in.

6) literature review

method

I tried doing Google searches to find out what the available literature had to say about 'real life' meetings of online community members. I looked at items from the course supplied Guidance for literature on Online Learning , with reference to my theory.

findings

To my surprise I found very little that was immediately forthcoming from either source.

One paper turned up in my searches which contained a reference to another, and a hypothesis similar to my own.

In the Ultralab papers, reports of successful online communities - Talking Heads ( Ramondt L,2002) and Bursers Count, (Gee, A 2002) I found no mention of whether or not the most active participants arranged real life meetings. My theory is that they most probably did, but that the significance of these self-organisation events was either overlooked or brushed aside for some reason. It should be possible for me to make contact through ultraversity with some of the facilitators who worked on those projects and ask them.

The Full Circle Website, http://www.fullcirc.com/index.htm provides professional advice to builders of online communities and in one section 'Getting and Retaining Members' Heather Duggan describes The stages of membership -

She then goes on to offer various tips for facilitating the various stages but nowhere mentions the possibility of the regulars being consolidated through real life meetings.

Howard Rheingold, on the other hand, has had a similar experience myself only more so. In his speech to BBC ONLINE , section "How I Fell Into Cyberspace and What I Found There" he recounts -

7) conclusions - self interview

I asked myself

"What have I learned about Online Learning and Technology?"

I don't know really. The technology is just a means to communicate, learning is something else. The only new ideas or concepts I've been exposed to have been about action research, reflection and that some people regard online communities as potentially lucrative for business. I am quite disappointed with the number and quality of conversations that I have managed to have within the ultraversity environment.

"What worked well and why?"

The tools and methods that I chose for the various tasks and activities all seemed to work out well enough for me. I'm pleased with the Flash movie, I found the graphical narrative to be a good way of explaining ideas which would be more difficult in words. Because of the limited time available I had to learn how to accept lower standards of aesthetics and elegance of coding from myself, and just press on with the job as long as it tells the story and works. Normally I would have spend ages rationalising the symbols and reducing the output file size so that it loads more quickly over the internet but with broadband and deadlines I didn't bother.

"What didn't work so well and why?"

Linking up with other ICT teachers and technicians so that we can help each other in our jobs. There just aren't enough of us with enough time and efficient discussion forums to make it work yet.

The patchwork text method of writing this report. It helps to produce a wide report bringing in material from different sources and timezones but it lack something of a coherent whole, or maybe that is just the nature of the rather vague question that was set. Anyway, I think I'd feel happier if I had a single big question to answer

"What would I recommend to improve the tools and the processes?'

I've already made some comments about the tools and process when discussing each one. Overall, I think more interaction with a variety of tutors and visiting experts in specialist fields would give the course more substance. An efficient and flexible text-based asynchronous many-to-many messaging system would be the biggest improvement. One that can be accessed online or off-line, not web browser based, and which makes it easy to dip in and out of different topics and create new ones as necessary. There should be a search facility, and posts could be linked to people's identity pages through signatures. Then we could all get on with building professional relationships, exchanging knowledge and experiencing learning together without getting hung up about the technology.

References

Getting and Retaining Members

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/retainmembers.htm

Community Development In The Cybersociety of the Future

viewed online at http://www.partnerships.org.uk/bol/howard.htm

Supporting communities of practice - a survey of community-oriented technologies.

viewed electronically (shareware) at http://www.ewenger.com/tech/ on 4/12/2003

appendix

site map

Other resources of my own work

external links

OPENOFFICE.ORG Mission Statement:

To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.

ultraversity degree

Denise Binks' website

Howard Rheingold - on online communities
http://www.rheingold.com/index.html

9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning
http://www.aahe.org/assessment/principl.htm

Self Assessment Methods
http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/assess/selfmth.html

Self-Assessment Opportunities
http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/assess/opport.html

Full Circle Associates(tm)
http://www.fullcirc.com/index.htm

A Framework for Pedagogical Evaluation of Virtual Learning Environments
http://www.jisc.ac.uk:8080/jtap/htm/jtap-041.html

what's not on the web
http://www.classroom.com/community/connection/connectednewsletter/whatsnot.jhtml

reports on online communities by ultralab
www.ultralab.ac.uk/papers

BECTA
http://www.becta.org.uk/leaders/display.cfm?section=9_1

http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?section=ap&cat=006&rid=1

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_02.htm

http://www.jeanmcniff.com/

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/

http://ianw-research.blogdrive.com/

http://www.saward.info/ultraversity/blog

http://www.go-london.gov.uk/neighbourhood_renewal/ndc.asp

http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eaz/find_a_zone/search_re

http://www.lewisham-eic.org.uk/eic/

http://www.schoolzone.co.uk/evaluations/evaluationspage.htm

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/curriculumonline/

http://www.nc.uk.net/index.html

http://www.lewisham.gov.uk/

http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/homepage/home/

http://www.ngfl.gov.uk/

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/cgi-bin/performancetables/dfepx1_02

http://www.millwallfc.premiumtv.co.uk/page/Home/

http://www.nof.org.uk/default.aspx?tc=9&tct=18

http://www.toucancomputing.co.uk/

http://www.apple.com/

http://www.viking-direct.co.uk

http://www.bettshow.co.uk/