Virtual communities: An evolving sense of belonging

In their writing, The Mystery of the Death of MediaMOO, Bruckman and Jensen cast a wide net over the concept of community, defining it as “a group of people interacting with one another in some fashion.” This definition would encapsulate a traditional neighborhood block party, a college class gathering, an active MySpace website, or a blog ring. An online community uses technology to negate the physical boundaries that are in place when a face-to-face community gathers. Communities form when people share commonalities; work-at-home mothers, math teachers, gardeners, book lovers, and knitters can all find online communities to support their interests, scaffold their learning, and form online friendships without physical boundaries.

As a gardener, I joined Blotanical by creating a gardening blog and linking it to my own “plot” where other Blotanical bloggers can leave messages for me and I can keep a listing of my favorite Blotanical blogs. Members of the community benefit from reading other’s gardening successes and struggles, sharing information, and empathizing with challenges. In a sense, this community is similar to The Math Forum as it is described in Renninger and Shumar’s piece entitled Community Building with and for Teachers at The Math Forum. This piece describes The Math Forum as “a reference group with whom one shares information and interests that extend beyond the kind of physical connections one might hope for in a neighborhood.” (p. 62)

My Children’s Literature students are required to join Librarything.com and review a number of books within this community. Members can read one another’s reviews, find similar books, leave messages for one another, and join groups. Just last semester, I began exploring new ways to use the group function for our course. At this time, the community has all but died off, but I am eager to try new ways of encouraging an active, lively exchange of ideas within this forum.

In these communities, as well as other virtual communities, members share commonalities and benefit from the interactions of the community members. Virtual communities offer the option to set specifications for participants in advance, ensuring desired commonalities, such as a knitting group or an attachment parenting group. Members actively seek out groupings that fill a sought after personal need, ensuring some amount of intrinsic motivation and desire to form friendships, ask questions, seek answers, and construct knowledge. The internet has altered the notion of community by removing physical appearances as a factor in belonging and has removed a great deal of competition that is inherent in social relationships that might take place in many physical community groupings, such as those shared between colleagues. These changes create unique environments for seeking knowledge. In environments without constraints of physical appearances and competitive distractions, I wonder if educators can maximize Vygotsky’s ideal conditions of social interaction as a means to construction of knowledge.