Renninger & Shumar, Chapters 11 & 12

In my continued reading of Renninger & Shumar's Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace, I've come to understand both the possibilities virtual communities offer and the rigorous investment needed by their founders to maintain a climate of success.

In Chapter 11: Learning in Cyberspace, the authors point out three types of learning that take place within virtual communities. They are as follows:

• Curriculum of Initiation and Governance – making the decision to create and maintain a virtual website
• Curriculum of Access – accessing and becoming socialized to a virtual community itself
• Curriculum of Membership –actual interaction within the community including the gains people expect from participation (both traditional learning and affective areas)

It is important to note attendance may be passive, as it is for lurkers. For these participants, learning may be an undetectable act. While these members of the community are not gaining full benefits because of their lack of active participation, they remain as passive learners. Lurkers will continue to learn through reading and processing, but they are not achieving the higher-order thinking and processing skills of Bloom's Taxonomy without active participation.

Chapter 12: Finding the Ties that Bind centers its discussion on building successful online collaborations. The authors follow the changes that occurred in the business world through the modern and post-modern periods, from a hierarchical, top down approach to collaboration to today's knowledge-building communities which share a mindset of individual learning and subsequent knowledge sharing. This gradual shift shows the progression society has witnessed as we grappled with the concept of collaboration. Society as a whole transformed from a centricist ideal toward goals of decentralization throughout this time period.

The authors suggest eight areas of inquiry that help meet the goals of virtual community designers:

• defining learning communities
• examining existing practice
• identifying potential changes to improve practice
• finding ways that technology might effect these changes
• designing and building the technology
• advocating the technology and cultivating a community of use
• understanding the consequences of the technology
• evaluating the community with respect to the original goal

I believe these eight pieces could be used in a linear fashion for my university to examine existing online courses and enact subsequent improvements as they provide a systematic way to assess and suggest proactive changes.

In addition, in this same chapter, I found a nugget of truth that may help support the use of virtual communities in my dissertation. Here is the excerpt, "When using SpeakEasy in a middle school science class, the inclusion of features such as an anonymity option erased the typical significant gender differences in student participation and learning." In my last blog entry, I posed a question about the validity of using a virtual environment to add anonymity to the qualitative data I'd like to collect about my students' experiences with ekphrasis. This nugget of information from the chapter will most likely lead me to look into this study as a piece of data to support my ideas for research.