The AstroLrner E-Community: A 10 Year Retrospective

Abstract

Abstract The article briefly describes and documents the development and evolution of the AstroLrner pronounceda-stroh-LEARN-er online Yahoo! community, created by Tim Slater on August 29, 1999, on its 10 yearanniversary. The goal forAstroLrner was to leverage the then emerging social networking technology to build andnurture the nascent community of scholars engaged in improving the quantity and quality of astronomyteaching and learning through education research. Today, known as AstroLrner@CAE, this vibrant e-communityhas nearly 800 subscribers and averages nearly 300 posts per year.In today’s online social networking world of Web 2.0, there exist countless pathways and unlimited opportunitiesfor people to connect, share ideas, and collaborate. It is rare indeed to find individuals without e-mails, cellphone messaging capabilities, and among collegians, there are probably few individuals without a Facebook ora Twitter account. For those individuals self-identifying themselves as members of the scholarship of teachingand learning astronomy community, there exists a large and vibrant Internet-based online network, ore-community, known as AstroLrner pronounced a-stroh-LEARN-er AstroLrner 1999 . Based in the Yahoo!Groups system, today’s AstroLrner e-community, known as AstroLrner@CAE, has nearly 800 subscribers.As of its 10 year anniversary, there have been 2771 messages posted over the past 10 years, varying considerablyin length and nature, but almost always constructed as a threaded sequence of a sincere plea for assistanceand a series of considerate responses. Unquestionably, AstroLrner@CAE is the current epicenter of socialnetworking for the teaching and learning of astronomy.Upon its 10 year anniversary, it seems appropriate to pause and consider some of the history of the AstroLrnere-community. More than a decade ago, there existed a small group of disconnected and nascent scholarsblindly staggering around a new discipline of astronomy education research, AER. The group was very looselyheld together by small topical gatherings at conferences such as the American Astronomical Society, whosupported a Working Group on Astronomy Education coordinated by Steve Shawl, among others; theAstronomical Society of the Pacific, nourished at that time by Andrew Fraknoi and Mike Bennett; theInternational Astronomical Union Education Commissions, coordinated at one time by Jay Pasachoff; theAssociation of Astronomy Educators, corralled by Russ Harding, Vivian Hoette, and Edna Devore; theInternational Planetarium Society, presided over by Jim Manning and Martin Ratcliffe, among others; and theAmerican Association of Physics Teachers Committee on Astronomy Education, chaired in those days byJohn Safko, Tim Slater, and Janelle Bailey. This is most certainly not an exhaustive list, but demonstrates howwidely scattered this young community was.The AstroLrner e-community was born out of an effort to build and connect a community of AERer’s. As wehad no journal nor our own special topical meeting at that time, it became clear that this widely dispersedgroup of un-networked individuals needed a way to communicate and collaborate.At each of the aforementionedface-to-face meetings at professional conferences, we kept a crude, handwritten list of attendees names ande-mail addresses, but did not really know what to do with it. By coincidence, many of us also self-identifiedourselves with the physics education research community, PER. In a moment of brilliant forward thinking,