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Life at the bottom of a soup bowl: the flavour of learning communities in the information age

By Virginia Little - posted Friday, 15 December 2000


The virtual community or online learning community is a phenomenon of the Internet, an increasingly commonplace product of the new age of communication and connectivity. Online learning communities can be based on personal interests or hobbies, or academic, business, or other intellectual pursuits. Within these groups there is generally a sense of purpose and connectivity. That purpose may be for fun and creativity, for accessing an immediate information source, for distraction from other daily work activities, for learning, networking or collaborating on work projects.

The learning community 21 BEAT St., an acronym for the intersection of Business, Education, Arts and Technology in the 21st century, was created in 1994 for high-school students studying creative writing, and educators interested in learning more about teaching, technology and facilitating learning online. This is perhaps the first time in all of human history where such a development has been possible, and it has fostered friendships and community growth among the students by erasing external pressures commonly prevalent in regular school environments. The educators, in turn, learned how to augment and/or deliver their teaching online by engaging with the younger students, much like a student-teaching experience in a traditional classroom.

Our program has attracted interest and participation from an impressive array of people — visiting authors and poets, groups of students, and individuals ranging in age from adolescent to 80, signing on from around the world. Participant numbers have ranged from 20 to 120 since the program’s inception. Clearly, on-line communications serve to enhance geographically proximal ones and eradicate distance barriers for learners in remote locations.

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The transactional nature of learning with students and teachers, youth and adults as co-learners, replaces former transmission models with the teacher as authority and imparter of knowledge. On-line learning focuses not only on course content, but on interpersonal relationships. The social, collaborative, and communicative aspects of constructing knowledge are central to on-line learning environments.

From the outset, the 21 BEAT St. creative writing program was envisioned as a learning community. In the first few months, students delineated a range of goals. One explicitly stated goal was "...to grow as a learning community". As facilitator, I chose to ask the students: "What is a learning community? How might we improve our community?"

Their responses were varied, frank, and highly interesting, for their insight and for the underlying values which they illustrated. I have listed those replies here:

1. Community is organic and group specific, growing and evolving as a whole while core characteristics remain constant in the flux.

By confining participants into pre-arranged groups and enforcing participation in a range of topics over which the students have no control, traditional schools quite literally force their students into forming their own sub-communities, unrelated to the process of learning. In the highly communicative, wholly voluntary online learning community, able to adapt to the needs of a wide range of participants, such tensions are almost irrelevant.

2. Trust of other members necessarily produces a sense of community.

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A degree of mutual trust may even be considered the defining characteristic of all communities, as it permits members to interact and rely upon one another, so that real avenues of communication and exploration can be opened. Without the usual adolescent hierarchies of class and appearance, an online community can offer a degree of trust which the conventional school paradigm can only look upon, and envy.

3. There is a balance and necessary dialectic between freedom and structure.

There is no question that the excessively rigorous rule-structure of conventional classes discourages many students, and alienates them from the learning process by destroying the simple joy of learning. The difficulty lies in finding a balance that will at once provide a motivational framework, set of practices to emulate, or goals to be achieved, and also leave them the greatest possible freedom to explore and express themselves.

4. For this group, interest in creative writing offered the core for community.

Readers and writers in regular school culture are often ostracized, sitting quietly with books and paper in the back of the room. Online interactions allow students to have an authentic audience for their expression, and students potentially receive dozens of responses to a single piece of writing.

5. The learning community is self-determining.

Within 21 BEAT St., participants expressed a sense of being co-learners. In developing such a community, it is apparent that at the outset, while the students are still uncertain about their new environment, facilitators guide and mentor the process of online communications. Then, as students take ownership, the line between teachers and students fades.

6. The online community fostered an exploration self and was highly social in nature in an environment that prompted risk taking.

There is no equivalent of the silent student at the back of the classroom, simply because such a student is completely non-existent within the framework of the online community. Where students are reluctant to participate, the facilitator must engage with them, and draw them out until they are equal co-learners within the community, and then begin to take over this role of the "official" facilitator as well. The low-risk environment online makes it easier for this natural progression to occur, resulting in a very relaxed, socially comfortable community capable of asking difficult questions of its participants without fear of exposure or derision.

The very act of bringing students to participate in discovering a viable definition of "community" stimulated the development of that community among them as an emergent property of shared, voluntary activity. Through an online process of questioning, dialoguing, responding and refining, the students collectively defined a 'learning community' over a period of several months:

"Communities bond through common interests and shared levels of participation. A learning community builds trust through respect for multiple perspectives in exploring diverse ideas, opinions and insights, which creates a sense of belonging. Dialogues are fueled by passionate inquiry and in-depth searching. This provides a comfort level where people feel encouraged to take risks as learners."

After the online discussion naturally slowed in participation, students stated they felt they had explored this to its full extent. By questioning their ideas further, we were able to develop a deeper understanding of our community and its possibilities. Besides deciding on goals for the year, the students also reflected on ways to challenge those goals. They went on to explore not just what made our class a "community," but how we were affected by one another through interrelationship online. Having a workable definition of "learning community" that satisfied all participants, I asked those questions that naturally followed:

  1. "What kind of community do we want to create?"
  2. "How do we get there?"

As a result of many exchanges between students and facilitators, we eventually outlined practices which we felt would enhance the quality of the 21 BEAT St. learning community overall. The suggestions agreed on by participants included:

1. More face to face meetings.

It is interesting to consider this response in contrast to statements regarding the degree of freedom, trust, and comfort offered by an online forum. There is still a need for face-to-face human interaction - hugs, eye contact, brainstorming sessions, audible laughter, physical presence. It seems extremely unlikely that a purely virtual community will ever fulfill the need for simple social contact and shared experience which is so strong in all human beings.

2. Alternating responses and establishing rotating peer partners seemed to be a key to strengthening community.

As in off-line communities, friendships and alliances form, which can lead to a degree of polarization within the online community. Recognizing this, the facilitators and students agreed to a few simple practices that extended the range of each participant’s regular contacts within the 21 BEAT St. community.

3. Humor adds levity and fun to the process and also provides insight.

By virtue of encouraging interaction as equals, and by promoting clear, 'natural’ communication on topics of direct interest and importance to the students, interactive online learning becomes naturally infused with play. Unlike the traditional classroom, this degree of play poses no threat whatsoever to the "authority" of facilitators, nor to the implementation of the curriculum.

4. Trust deepens with time and through voluntary personal disclosure.

We had several critical incidents in our community that helped to strengthen our bonds through conflict resolution and creative problem solving. More important than the source of these struggles is the way in which a community learns to navigate the challenges. As an experienced educator, I knew these adolescents were seeking attention, help, or a way to become something they did not believe themselves to be, and asked the students: "Have any of you ever pretended to be something you’re not? Have you ever wanted to be the center of attention?" This led the discussions from a place of anger to a place of compassion. Instead of throwing a student out of the program for breach of trust, we provided a place of safety for all to come to new understandings of human dynamics and acceptance of human fallibility.

5. We connect through our common interests and simultaneously learn to accept differences.

The student-organized Cafe of the Arts, resembling a village square where people gather to laugh, talk and debate, became the center for community formation. Students created wide-ranging dialogues on religion, writing in foreign languages, physics and music theory, sharing of favorite quotations and books, worldviews and philosophy, literature circles, and more, for which there is little time in the regular fifty minute classroom focused solely on mandated curricula.

6. We provide a caring support system for community members during difficult times, creating a bond between us.

As grandparents died, couples broke up, kids got in first car accidents, students expressed their fears, hopes and dreams. It is possible to disclose online without the fear-provoking real-world process of standing up in front of a group, of having to watch the instantaneous reactions of others. All members felt they belonged and were valued , which created a very powerful community-wide bond.

7. There is a sense of honesty and openness about our community.

We have weathered some difficult times and as a result have moved past being "polite," and a pseudo sense of community, to a true sense of community where each feels free to express their beliefs and feelings in respectful but honest ways. Knowing that the audience to whom one intends to communicate consists of supportive equals makes it far easier to achieve honest, open communication.

9. We have begun to move outside our own community towards interacting with and impacting the lives of others with our writing and sharing about our program.

During the second year of the 21 BEAT St program, students wrote a poetic drama based on the lives of people in the margins of the world called "We are the Poets", which they presented at the Pedagogy of the Oppressed conference, as well as for local venues. This drama is currently in publication in a book titled Language, Literacy and Social Justice. All students published in either online or through more conventional literary outlets. Several did internships in Washington D.C. at our server company, Caucus Systems, several more are now webmasters for universities or work for local and national technology companies. Connections between businesses, arts, education and community continue to expand.

So, how will learning communities be characterized in the Information Age? They will combine current learning environments, schools, organizations, real-time communities with virtual extensions. New ways of thinking about teaching are needed and a new global worldview is emerging as a result of the Internet collapsing former boundaries. This sets the stage for future collaborative learning communities that will encourage learners to relinquish tightly held cultural perspectives and learning approaches. Learning communities of the future necessitate new ways of thinking about how we learn, live, work and play, and with whom.

For the moment, anyway, some powerful factors limit the development of virtual communities. These must be overcome before we can begin to reap the true benefits of a transformation in educational paradigm. Of paramount concern are issues of equity of access. In the virtual world, affluence and computer literacy are the first and most important elements of community building. Unless this matter is quickly addressed, we run the risk of creating a new underclass of information-poor citizens, unable to take effective part in the direction of society.

As virtual communities are currently largely text-based, which is the ideal for literacy education, those who possess superior skills in written English find themselves in very real position of advantage and influence in the text-based online medium. Those with limited English proficiency, however, are currently at a severe disadvantage in the structures of online communications. This may be somewhat ameliorated in the future with the advance of multi-media technologies.

There is also the matter of facilitation. The step from traditional, transmission-model classroom pedagogy to the transformational model required for effective online learning, where the curriculum and even the very knowledge is a communally-owned emergent property of the many-to-many process of inquiry, is a step which, sadly, threatens rather than excites most teachers.

If we, the teachers and facilitators can learn to make the same cognitive leap made so easily by these perfectly ordinary high school students, there may yet be some hope for the educational system. If we can learn to let go of our "ownership" of some kind of "canon" of "truth", and instead become co-learners with those we once labeled "students" there is a chance that the process of learning in the 21st century may begin to return to our society some of that sense of community and connection which has been gradually destroyed by the very way of life we have sought to preserve.

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This is an edited extract of a draft paper presented to the International Telecommunications Union/Telecom99 conference, Geneva, Switzerland, October 8-16, 1999. The full paper can be downloaded here.



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About the Author

Dr Virginia S. Little is an e-learning specialist who consults to several U.S. universities. 21 Beat St is hosted on the College of Exploration Web site.

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