Webucation

What constitutes a community? Are online communities real communities? Are online communities important for education?

Users of YouTube think they are a community........





Research about communities is extensive - do a search on Google Scholar and you get 9 million hits, try Learning Community and you get 1.8 million with the top hits leading to some of the leading thinkers in this area. From my reading around this I was attracted to the definitions of 'community' presented by Kowch and Schwier (1997) where they describe four different types of community, each with distinguishing features and which meet the needs of different groups of participant. Reil and Polin (2004) explore the notion of online communities and identify three different types. Task based communities tend to be where groups of people are working on a common task or problem. Practice based communities often share goals or expertise and knowledge based communities are often people who come together with diverse expertise and can establish new areas of knowledge.

This all sounds grand but I wonder just how the notion of community sits within our education system. We don't assess group contribution or how well students share expertise or work together to create new knowledge - at least that is the case in many school I visit. We only seem interested in assessing the individual or what contribution they make to the 'community' (usually through social good works). Seems to me that we have much to do to explore online educational communities and harness them for learning.

The question remains - is the YouTube Community a real community?