The human touch

First, Well done Ida!..great presentation.

As Lin mentioned, true, you have made your point. In your VC, you felt like you belonged. You have been interacting with them regularly, getting information as well as support and in return they gave you the sense of belonging, but I wonder if you will go back to that VC after your pregnancy or after you go back to your family or after they are here to support you. will you still need them? If the answer is a YES, then I wonder for how long. If the answer is NO, I guess it is one of the failures of a VC again, not being able to sustain their audience or users.

Anyways, I believe it is possible to have real human feelings when in a V.community. For instance, my VC (which is on msn;)) is composed of people I know in a physical sense as well. Among them are my family, friends, colleagues and classmates from Curtin. I need not create a fakester to communicate with them. There is a pre-existing profile already created, which inturn help them to understand and know me at different levels. We could pick up a conversation couple of days later and still know what we are talking about. When we want a laugh, we use the LOLs, each of us knows what we are laughing about and understands the joke. And when someone is upset, all of us empathise with him/her knowing very well that we mean it.

The best part about belonging to a VC is that no matter where you are in the world, as long as internet access is available, we are in touch. We always keep coming back.

Communities of Interest - Case Studies

As the first two weeks of case studies are (mostly) published, I just though I'd share all the relevant links so you can have a look at the enormous variety of studies that are online and awaiting comments. I've taken the liberty if mixing internal and external Curtin students with those studying through Open learning Australia so you can all benefit from each others work and contributions. The following studies have been up all this previous week:

Chai Yen Lin
Taking the position that for some making friends is an interest, Lin examines Freindster, Fakester and trust issues within social software. Lin's blog is open for comments.

Cho Chun Neng
Does aggressive and abusive argument constitute Rhiengold's 'sufficient human feeling'? A closer look at a newsgroup discussing English football team, Manchester United. Chun Neng is calling for feedback at Team Ochre's blog

Samantha O Hare
Samantha examines the individuals perspective of community at the rec.arts.theatre.musicals newsgroup. She is taking comments on the site and conducting a survey of responses to be published on Team Ochre's Blog.

The following case studies are now up for this week and are all awaiting comments.

Danny Burke
Danny Burke undertakes a debate with himself about the merits of newsgroup communities focusing on the use of the Macromedia animation tool Flash. This is in the form of a blog, so you can comment directly.

Nurhidayaty (Ida)
Ida looks at a bulletin board community focused on babies and parenting. You can comment on her presentation on the Team Scarlet blog here

Lynne Harding
Find out about the 'Great Spelling Wars' which led to the emergence of a community on the Cybermind discussion list. Lynne is open for comments.

Marius Johannessen
A study of the web-based community deviantArt, "a central location for artists to display their creations for feedback and public exposure. " There's even a flash summary Comments here at the team Aqua blog.

Shan-Chun Bella Chou (Bella)
Bella looks at The Thing! Comments on the Team Aqua Blog.

Roshan Weddikkara
Roshan explains and analyses Metafilter - a fascinating example of community blogging. Comments on the site.

Nicola Wright
Nicola has taken the unique approach of building a discussion forum about discussion forums. You can contribute just about anywhere in her presentation!

Elizabeth Spiegel
A broader look at communities of practice with an invite to mail any comments to Elizabeth.

Mohammed Chowdhury (Arif)
Again with a broader approach, Arif looks at the elements which go to make up communities of interest. Comments can be submitted to the Team Blue blog


Whoah! With a few more to be posted, there are already a huge variety of studies in only the first two weeks. I have to say that so far I'm very impressed with the academic and technical effort that has gone into the presentations. Thanks folks, the variety has made this assignment a pleasure to be assessing. I'd encourage everyone to explore these varied links over the next week and contribute wherever you can.


Have fun,

Stew

An interesting read

Here is an interesting piece of article I found while surfing the web. It is about How Blogging Software Reshaped the Online Community. At the end of this article there are other references. One of you might be able to use the information or it could be a very interesting article to read. take a look.

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/blog_software.html

cheers
shabz

Thoughts following Lin's presentation

After I sat through Lin's presentation yesterday (first presentation of the sememster for this unit - Well DONE LIN!!), my thinking machine started whirring again..hehehe...

Well, I was thinking about what Lin said about trust, I have realised that it has been my biggest issue regarding online interactions(virtual communties) eversince we had started this semester. I know that we can still be friends with each other no matter how we look or where we are, but using mediums that allow fake presentations (fakester) it is so difficult to totally deal with it. I have never used friendster but i've certainly been on other software's like that and created my own share of fakesters (fake names and pictures) and met a fair amount of them as well.

When I hang around online i guess my main reason and my strongest committment is to the people I've known my entire life (family) or my friends whom I have/had physical contact (face to face interactions) with. It's not that I would trust just anybody I see or meet in the real world in a physical sense but seeing a person face to face will tell me alot more abt that person than a piece of software can

or I could always rely on my senses (assessing body language which I am pretty good at ;)

cheers
shabz

Communities of Interest

Well, why do people hang out online? The answer really depends on the individual. As the reading mentioned most of us hang around online for information and friendship/companionship.

As for me, the reason why I hang around online is that my family and most of my friends from the Maldives & the rest of the world are online as well, and that gives me a feeling of connectedness with no regard to geographical location.

I haven't participated in a community of interest with the intention of getting information but as part of last year's unit, i have been on a yahoo group as well as on a dancer's community. I lost interest in that community as soon as my assignment was done!...

However, last year I discovered the wonders of blogging! and i actually initiated and created a blog for my team mates (as part of another assignment for this year, not for this unit though) where we are doing a project for the semester. I found that the blog turn out to be a place where we all comeback to at the end of the day to read each others thoughts as well as bring ourselves up to date on the progress of our project.

This would also be like the previous communities, our team would be dismantled when the project is over and all of us would go our own ways and loose interest as soon as the deed is done.

Therefore, just like Ida, i am leveling with Baker & Ward’s (2002) conclusion that states “unless that interest affect our daily lives… there is no good reason to believe that we will long continue an active membership in the virtual community” (p.221).

E-Learning

I believe that the "IN"thing in the e-learning communities is the P2P technology : Peer-to-peer. When I first heard this word it reminded me of terms like "training of the trainers" so I thought peer to peer would be another educational tool used to train people. However, as I did further readings on this topic, the article by Jennifer Hofmann, Peer-to-Peer: The next hot trend in e-learning (http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/jan2002/hofmann.html) helped me understand that P2P is not just a tool for training. It is a a technology that would help in sharing resources through a network. This reminded me of a book I had read last semester about the history of the internet. According to that book, the concept of the World Wide Web was based on this theory and purpose of sharing information through a network. I believe that is the underlying concept in P2P as well.

Information share via P2P is becoming very apealing in today's world. First Napster which shared music information and then came a program called Scour which was able to support different kinds of file formats. Just like everything else, P2P has its pros and cons.
Pros
P2P can be used in the business sector as well as in academic sector. In the business sector P2P can be used to train staff or provide much needed online support to a very geographically distributed staff population(including those who work from home as well). In the academic area, P2P is being used to formulate study groups, for example, WebCT. WebCT has become our P2P and we use it as our primary communication and facilitation tool. We receive our lecture notes, post our queries/problems relating to the unit, upload our assignments/presentations and send emails or have conferences(chat). And now we use our team blogs to create the same environment as webct.

Cons
When extracting information which is available to us, we should ask questions about the validation of the information. Is our information encrypted and if so how much of it is encrypted. and so on. Also the issue of desktop security is a question, easy to answer this question but not everyone is informed and are comfortable allowing access to their own desktops.

Tackling blogs

Hello Team & Ida

I think Stew would still post the questions at the end of the notes on WebCt anyways. But according to what we discussed in class on Monday, we are not supposed to formulate an answer for each and everyone of them. They are just there for us to think about and maybe use them to generate our discussions. I think what Stew meant was that he wasn't going to post anymore questions on the blogs as not to interrupt our already ongoing conversations.

In the meantime, I think we should generate our own discussions on the topic of the week. I thought it will be nice for one of us to generate an interesting point or aspect (of the related topic) and we all attack it. I am sure we will have very interesting conversations going.

And yeah, we should stick to discussing relevant issues weekly and not keep them till it is the end of semester. :)