Online Community - Building Online Communities

Building Online Communities

Not everyone is drawn to participate and engage in online communities, and age and lifestyle often discourage people from getting involved in online communities. According to Dorine C. Andrews, author of Audience-Specific Online Community Design there are three parts to building an online community: starting the online community, encouraging early online interaction, and moving to a self-sustaining interactive environment. When starting an online community, it may be more effective to create webpages that appeal to specific interests. Online communities with clear topics and easy access tend to be more effective. In order to gain early interaction by audience members, privacy guarantees and interwoven content discussion are very important. Successful online communities tend to be able to function self-sufficiently. Private discussion groups and information sharing can often add to the complexity success of online communities

Community Participation

There are two major types of participation in online communities: public participation and non-public participation, also called lurking. Lurkers are participants who join a virtual community but do not publish their opinions. In contrast, public participants, or posters, are those who join virtual communities and openly express their beliefs and opinions. Both lurkers and posters frequently enter communities to find answers and to gather general information. For example, there are several online communities dedicated to technology. In these communities, posters are generally experts in the field who can offer technological insight as well as answer questions, while lurkers tend to be technological novices who use the community to ask questions as opposed to offer advice.

In general, virtual community participation is influenced by how participants' view themselves in society as well as norms, both of society and the online community. Participants also join online communities for friendship and support. In a sense, virtual communities fill the social voids in participants' offline lives.

Sociologist Barry Wellman presents the idea of “glocalization”- the ability for the Internet to extend participants’ social connections to people around the world while also aiding them in further engagement with their local community.

'Online Learning'

One impact of online communities that is relatively new, but quite revolutionary, is online learning. Online learning can simply refer to sites dedicated to learning (as opposed to sites for entertainment or social networking), or the way one can get an education online. You can now take classes online at your own pace through a university, and get a degree that way. But some question the credibility of this. Do online communities help promote online learning? According to and article published in Volume 21, Issue 5, of the European Management Journal titled Learning in Online Forums, they conducted a series of researches about online learning, and they found that while strong online learning is a bit more difficult to form, it is still quite conducive to educational learning. Online learning can bring together a diverse group of people, and although it is asynchronous learning, they believe that if an online forum is set up using all the best tools and strategies, it can be very effective. Another study was published in an article of Volume 55, Issue 1, of the Computers and Education Journal, called Computer-supported team-based learning: The impact of motivation, enjoyment, and team contributions on learning outcomes, supports the findings of the article mentioned above. They found that the online experience enhanced students learning, and that the students felt they learned well with it. A study published in the same journal of Volume 55, Issue 4, called Can learning be virtually boosted? An investigation of online social networking impacts, looks at how social networking can foster individual well-being and develop skills which can improve the learning experience. So it is encouraged to utilize social networking sites to build a strong, helpful, positive environment in order to improve their social learning. These articles look at a variety of different ways of online learning. They essentially point to a theory that online learning can be quite productive and educational if created and maintained properly, and hope to see further technological advances to improve upon it even more. One of the greatest features of online communities is that they are not constrained by time therefore giving member the ability to move through periods of high to low activity over however long a period of time. This dynamic nature maintains a freshness and variety that traditional methods of learning might not have been able to provide. Nowadays, it appears that online communities such as Wikipedia have become a source of professional learning. It is an active learning environment in which learners converse and inquire, posting more and more accurate knowledge. In a study exclusive to teachers in online communities, results showed that membership in online communities provided teachers with a rich source of professional learning that satisfied each member of the community. Henceforth, the conclusion can be met that online communities are a worthwhile form of professional learning and a great source of information.