Community –> Interaction –> Permanence

Community Blog Analysis

Surely, one would think that taking an online class would automatically create a sense of community with one’s peers?  However, as we discovered in class discussion earlier this week, defining “community” can be a very elusive task.  Community is often defined as having a sense of belonging or belonging to a collective that includes others (Koh & Kim, 2004). As Koh & Kim (2004) explain, there are geographical communities and relational communities; the latter of which are virtual communities where members are not bound together by geographical location.  For example, I will always feel a connection to the universities where I earned my degrees; however, I seem to have a greater sense of belonging with my graduate school alma mater than my undergraduate school, and surprisingly enough, I actually completed my master’s degree at a distance. I suppose that I subconsciously connect graduate school to a more definitive time in my life – I had a greater vision of my future self than I did as a wide-eyed undergrad student. So, it felt like a more permanent connection and still does to this day.  Such an emotional connection also plays a large part in virtual community (Koh & Kim, 2004), which could easily explain my sense of belonging to my online master’s degree program (which I still visit online periodically).

In our ENG 795/895 course, a bulk of our interactions occur in the online realm which does qualify as a virtual community (Koh & Kim, 2004), but our classroom communications resemble that of a synchronous classroom environment because of the real-time audio, video, and chat features.  It is important to keep this in mind when considering if our individual blogs helped to create a sense of community.  Blogging, or e-journals, provide students with the opportunity to share their opinion about a topic while considering a larger, mostly invisible, audience.  Beach & Doerr-Stevens (2009) refer to this opportunity as online role playing because it is a literacy practice that encourages effective argumentation strategies “to convince others of the validity of one’s opinion,” which might ultimately lead to changes in the status quo. For example, Tesha posted an equal number of reading responses on teaching online public relations students (“Preparing Public Relations Students for the Blogosphere” and “Internet and Public Relations Curriculum”) as she did on the foundational principles of teaching writing online (“New Writing Pedagogy,” “Teaching Writing in Asynchronous Environment,” and “Online Training Spiral”).  And when looking for articles about community and educational uses of new media or Web 2.0, I didn’t need to travel very far.  Diane, Tesha, Nathan, and Nancy each have at least one posting on either blogs or wikis. And there was a good amount of discussion on online community as well (see Christy and Susan).  So, we did blog about the topics that interested us most, but the commenting feature, one of the affordance of blogs, was not used to its fullest potential.  From what I could find, there were not more than two dozen comments generated over the course of five weeks.  This number could be low because of the short time frame of the course, but it could also be because we were taking our basic synchronous course structure and attempting to blend it with an asynchronous component known as virtual peer review.

In our course, it was only suggested that we comment on other’s blogs, but it was not required.  This could be another reason for the low participation but it is more likely the fact that blog comments, akin to virtual peer review, moved our classroom discussion to an asynchronous environment.  And, as Breuch (2005) argues, peer reviews have always been discussed and defined as a speech act – a synchronous activity.  In my own experiences teaching writing online, I have found it especially difficult to get my online students to not only participate in virtual peer review but to do so in a constructive and useful manner; this same issue rears its ugly head in my online hybrid classes as well which poses serious implications for the teaching of writing online.  There are advantages to virtual peer review such as a longer time to read and respond to classmates but forcing participation will likely not make the peer review process more effective. I believe this is the idea that Kevin had with our assignments because I don’t believe that requiring blog comments would have created a greater sense of community.  I feel like our “community” already exists inside of our classroom. In other words, the blogs were an extension of classroom community and was not the primary means of interaction, so comments or suggestions could be easily saved until the next class.  This could be why virtual peer review has not work very well in my hybrid writing classes – there is not a great need to depend on other’s comments when we still have “class” to go to.

I suppose that community can be thought of as a sense of belonging as it is typically defined, but I also like to think of it as having varying degrees of permanence.  Our class has community because we meet twice a week at the same time and for the same purpose.  Such a definition can be easily applied to a weekly church meeting or a monthly HOA meeting. Think, for a moment, about the degree of permanence that exists within these two communities – you can maybe run away from church for a short while but if you are truly religious or spiritual, your escape will be short-lived. And for an HOA, well, it is our best and worst friend as a homeowner right? So, for our purposes, I think about permanence in interaction since it is at the heart of virtual or online communities. Our interactions are interconnected, blending our private and public selves, which have a direct correlation to my personal understanding of “power, status, and worth” (Anderson, “Writing Power Into Online Discussion,” 2006).  As a class, our sense of community existed a priori. Let me explain: I am working on a PhD; these are my colleagues; we share the same discipline; and now, as I have discovered, we share the same research interests as well.  In the end, I am bound to “see” them again one day at a conference or in a research publication, so if that’s not permanence or community, I don’t know what is.

References
Anderson, B. (2006). Writing Power Into Online Discussion. Computers and Composition , 23, 108-124.

Beach, R., & Doerr-Stevens, C. (2009). Learning Argument Practices through Online Role-Play:Toward a Rhetoric of Significance and Transformation. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy , 52 (6), 460-468.

Breuch, L. (2005). Enhancing Online Collaboration: Virtual Peer Review in the Writing Classrom. In K. Cook, & K. Grant-Davie, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (pp. 141-156). Amityville: Baywood Publishing Co.

Koh, J., & Kim, Y. (2004). Sense of Virtual Community: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Validation. International Journal of Electronic Commerce , 8 (2), 75-93.