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Table of Contents

Introduction 2

The Development of the Online Community 2

Facilitators Developing Strong Online Communities 4

Today’s Online Communities 6

Conclusion 7

Appendix 8

Introduction

The Summary of Knowledge from ED 7692 was written to recapitulate information presented in the course ED 7692. ED 7692 looked at the following: the development of the online community, how to develop an online community, and finally the current trends of today’s online communities.

This paper will use the course units of ED 7692 to help distinguish between the concepts and goals of this course. Therefore the paper will began with development of online communities, next a look at how facilitators develop strong online communities and finally the paper will cover what today’s online communities are doing and why.

The Development of the Online Community

The development of the online community was uniquely presented during the second unit of ED 7692. Instead of a pure history search of the beginnings of online communities, the facilitator asked students to discuss how online communities have developed over time, how online communities will look five years into the future and how do online communities affect teaching and the instructor. This set of discussion questions allowed students to not only look at how online communities were developed but also to conduct a comparison of past, present and future online communities with respect to teaching and the online instructor.

A search of the Internet produced several online learning services that provide educational services to adults and even high school students. One such service is the Virtual High School (VHS). VHS is the education industry's leader in providing online high school courses and in preparing classroom teachers to be effective online teachers (Virtual High, 2003). This online educational service community has been online for seven years and provides services around the world.

The existence of VHS shows how education has developed with the development of technology and the Internet. As technology and the Internet have grown, so have online communities and their services. Although two early theories which involves businesses and education, the Social Presence Theory by Short, Williams and Christie written in 1976 and the Media Richness Theory by Daft and Lengel written in 1986 said: “CMC (computer-mediated communication) systems support communication poorly, particularly socioemotional communication” (Preece, J, 2001). Both these theories have been proven to be wrong by the number of people that now use CMC successfully. One needs to only do an Internet search using “computer-mediated communication” as the search keywords and you will not only find research papers and sites based on CMC, but you will also find journals and magazines based on CMC. One such journal is Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, located at: http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/ and a magazine called CMC Magazine located at: http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/.

Facilitators Developing Strong Online Communities

During the third week the instructor of ED 7692 posed a number of great discussion questions on facilitators developing strong online communities. Here we will use the unit third discussion question: “What are the techniques used by facilitators to develop a strong electronic learning community?” Peer postings will be used to display the knowledge gained in this course section.

A technique used by facilitators to develop a strong e-community is one in which methods are employed to ensure that learners dialogue with each other. This may occur by making it a requirement to participate in-group activities or by requesting that a specific number of responses to colleagues are made within a certain timeframe (Ann, 2003).

Bob (another peer learner) wrote: “The techniques used by online facilitators to foster the learning community revolve around the existence of common needs and the concept that social acceptance of the learners will facilitate the formation and growth of the learning community through information exchange. Palloff & Pratt, (2003), suggest that the social needs of the learners must be satisfied by belonging in the group, before learning opportunities can be achieved”.

Although many of my peer’s postings were stated differently, they all seemed to contain the following statement: Facilitators generally use the following to develop strong educational learning communities: facilitating, managing, filtering/troubleshooting, answering questions, editing/formatting messages, generating discussion, helping people, to name a few (Preece, 2000).

The knowledge I gained from this unit was that a facilitator must make his learners first feel safe and comfortable. Facilitators can do this by the previous statement from Preece and by using icebreakers, group activities and becoming a real person with their learners. When I say a real person, I mean not just a instructor that answers course room questions only, but a human with feelings that is will to share their life experiences when they are relevant to the course and sometimes not!

Today’s Online Communities

“Define what you think an electronic learning community is. How do you see them impacting business and academic settings currently? Describe and contextualize what you feel is the ONE most important issue in online communities today.” (Unit 1, 2003). These are the three discussion questions in unit one that provided me with a greater understanding of today’s online communities.

The discussion of these questions produced many great peer responses and knowledge shared, but to the first two questions I found the posting from Ann to be extremely enlighten. “An electronic community is an educational and business environment that allows interested and vested party members to collaborate, exchange ideals, disseminate information locally, nationally and internationally via electronic means. The impact on global communication is vast, fast growing and is continually being refined in a manner that information can be transmitted through digital means with micro software and transferred in the scope of minutes or seconds. Electronic communities have opened venues that were once limited in sphere and allows nations to interact daily. In addition, it is a vital means of communication that enhances medical technology, academia and the business community” (Witherspoon, A., 2003).

The one most important issue in online communities today is people joining a community to do harm (like sending viruses or for getting some ones personal information). These two crimes can bring an online community to its end and cause harm to others using the Internet. A prime example is the WORM_MYDOOM.A, this is a “mass-mailing worm selects from a list of email subjects, message bodies, and attachment file names for its email messages. It spoofs the sender name of its messages so that they appear to have been sent by different users instead of the actual users on infected machines. It runs a backdoor component, which it drops as the file SHIMGAPI.DLL. The backdoor component opens port 3127 to 3198 to allow remote users to access and manipulate infected systems” (Trend Micro, 2004).

Conclusion

This brief synopsis entitled: Summary of the Knowledge from ED 7692 contained the following main concepts; the development of the online community, how to develop an online community and current trends of today’s online communities. This new knowledge I gained from this course came from peer interaction and from an excellent facilitator. I truly was lucky to have participated in such an exceptional educational experience.

References

Ann, 2003. U3-D1 Techniques used by Instructors, ED7692 Strategies for Building Online Learning Communities, Capella University. [Electronic version]: https://courses2.capella.edu/lspace/ED7692/10062003/1/schedule.nsfhttps://courses2.capella.edu/lspace/ED7692/10062003/1/schedule.nsf

Palloff, R. M. & Pratt, K. (2003). The virtual student, A profile and guide to working with online learners. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities. Designing usability, supporting sociability. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons.

Trend Micro, 2004. Overview, WORM_MYDOOM.A, Security Info, Trend Micro Inc. {Electronic version]: http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_MYDOOM.A

Unit 1, 2003. CourseRoom Assignment: Discussion 2, ED7692 Strategies for Building Online Learning Communities, Capella University. [Electronic version]: https://courses2.capella.edu/lspace/ED7692/10062003/1/schedule.nsf

Virtual High School, 2003. Welcome to Virtual High School, Maynard, MA. [Electronic version]: http://www.govhs.org/website.nsf

Witherspoon, A., 2003. U1-D2 - Electronic Communities and their Impact on Business and Academia, ED7692 Strategies for Building Online Learning Communities, Capella University. [Electronic version]: https://courses2.capella.edu/lspace/ED7692/10062003/1/schedule.nsf

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