The Virtual Community As a book written in 1993, The Virtual Community, expresses Rheingold’s vision for the potential impact of “a community of accessible only via computer screen” on various issues such as education, science, and intellectual life. Among these issues, I like to focus on education because there has been numerous papers focus on the impact of a computer based community on learning. In this context, my main question is what makes learning effective?  Does simply adding a wiki, blog, or a discussion forum to a class mean that it will be used effectively to enable learning? What are the roles to do students and faculty need to take in order to overcome the “coldness” in the electronic media. Perhaps we can talk more about these issues in the class. One excellent source in this context is a paper written by Hiltz on Building Learning Communities in Online Courses. In this paper, Hiltz compares an effective online instructor to a less effective online instructor.  

Source: Hiltz, S. R. Building Learning Communities in Online Courses, IADIS International Conference, Web Based Communities 2005, Algarve, Portugal

  The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier 

This essay talks about the author’s Latino identity and how it influenced his understanding of the technology. From my perspective, this is the most fun article that we have read this semester even though there were deep implications behind it. I like to point two things that I found interesting in this article. The first one is the author’s following point of view regarding to digital technology:” I don’t quite understand them, yet I am seduced by them” This sentence I think pretty much explains teenagers’ attitude towards MYSPACE. If they fully understand all implications of the MYSPACE perhaps they will be less likely to use it. Along in this line, a recent paper I read ( I can’t remember the author) focused on the relationship among mental model, trust, and security. This paper basically said that an incomplete mental model regarding to security could lead to trust on a social networking site.

 

My second point is on “politically neutral/raceless/genderless territory”. We have discussed this issue a little bit in our earlier classes. Would this really provide an equal access and unlimited possibilities of participation interaction and belonging to an individual?

 A Disappearance of Community 

This is a difficult read and it made me question what virtual reality is and what is its influence on virtual community. A reason for this besides “where are we?”, is that the author never did actually defined the term. At a high level, I think this essay makes an analysis of the first gulf war while considering AIDS, national budget, feminism etc. My main criticism is “how does the title fit to the essay? When I fist saw the title, I thought the essay would be on elements that make forming a community difficult in the online world. Also, I did not understand the author’s position in the essay. What is the author’s point in this article?

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SecondLife on BBC