Formation Of Online Communities Research Articles

Introduction: Communicating time and place on digital media—Multi-layered temporalities & (Re)localizations

The Introduction to this Special Issue identifies a gap of empirical insights into how the digital media-enabled drastic redefinitions of time and space/place experience impact on communication choices. This is despite extensive theorizing of time and space/place in media & cultural studies on the one hand and, on the other hand, despite a thriving line of (socio)linguistic inquiry into how physical time and space/place are made socio-culturally meaningful in specific communication acts. In the light of this, I outline the main aims and motivations for bringing together emerging discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives on communicating time and space/place in digital media, with this collection of papers. In discussing the seven contributions and their methodological and analytical commonalities but also diversity, I show how they attend to the linguistic and multi-modal choices with which digital media users and producers orient to, negotiate, foreground or challenge aspects of the here & now as well as of any other places and times invoked in their communication. In addition to this, all contributions interrogate the ways in which semiotic choices related to time and place shape and are informed by individuals’ identities, audience assumptions & the (re)formation of online communities. The main themes in this respect include:–Communicating time and place of private experiences in (semi)-public forums with a potential for unknown and multiple audiences to tune in and become part of the communication;–Creating co-presence and reaffirming relationships and communities through discourse activities of marking or evoking time and place;–The often competing inter-relations between online and offline time and place;–The interdependence between the spatial architecture of digital media environments and any communication acts in them, which often involves a process of turning online spaces into inhabited places.I claim that all contributions demonstrate the need for conceptual and analytical tools and methods that are well-suited to capturing multi-layered arrangements of communicating time and place in digital environments.

Blogs as an E Learning Strategy in Supporting Economics Education Students during Teaching Practice

Advances in technology, changing funding regimes and student profiles, and developments in learning theories, among other things, result in more and more higher education institutions embracing blended approaches to teaching and learning. In this changing landscape, many traditional assumptions and beliefs regarding teaching and learning are being questioned. Conducting and sharing research assists in redefining and re-imagining open distance learning (ODL) teaching and learning in the 21 st century. Over the past few years, greater attention has been paid to the new generation of social media, especially Web 2.0 technologies. Recently, blogs have facilitated the formation of online communities and have thus come to fulfil more extensive functions in education. This paper explores the use of blogs as a Web 2.0 e-learning strategy in supporting postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) students who were learning to teach economics and management science education in ODL teaching practice ecologies. Data was collected through student teachers' (n=474) completion of five surveys on ODL teaching practice experiences. The findings revealed that blogs assisted students with reflective practice and reasoning, and added value to their learning experiences. Strategies were formulated for strengthening ODL teaching practice education.

The Evidence of Things Unseen: Authenticity and Fraud in the Christian Mommy Blogosphere

This article analyzes allegations of fraud and deception in two popular evangelical Christian “mommy blogs” in order to demonstrate how the rhetoric of authenticity in social media plays a central role in the formation of online communities. I argue that a personal religious blogger together with her readers constitutes an ongoing public conversation and community, one that is held together by a kind of belief or trust in the truthful representation of the blogger and her story. When a blog claims to be a story about the power of faith, hope, and miracles, it can be read and understood by its devoted readers as “evidence of things unseen,” that is, as a representation of the evidence of authentic religious faith and practice shared by the community. On the other hand, if credibility is doubted, the blog may become the focus of allegations of deception, leading to the creation of new forms of online community. These cases highlight the importance of attending to claims of credibility and authenticity as constitutive of religious practice and community formation in social media and in the academic study of religion more broadly.

In Moderation

Journalism has a vital role in fostering communities by providing a forum for public criticism and compromise. The internet has markedly changed news organizations' abilities to fulfill this role. Through two surveys—one of more than 100 online newspaper editors and one nationwide survey of more than 1000 internet users—this study extends community journalism online by examining what role, if any, journalists have in online community formation. Specifically, the study focuses on comments at the end of news stories and suggests that the more comments a newspaper receives on a daily basis negatively affects how journalists see their audiences and could discourage their participation in online community formation. On the other hand, the second study suggests that encouragement from journalists might be a key factor in whether people will comment. Whether participants noticed moderation in comments was a significant predictor in how frequently they posted. The key predictor of participation, however, was whether participants felt a virtual sense of community with the news organization. The study suggests that journalists need to be involved in online comment forums to build virtual communities and achieve the ideals of community journalism.

Design of Smart Grid Prosumer Communities via Online Social Networking Communities

Smart Grid (SG) achieves bidirectional energy and information flow between the energy user and the utility grid, allowing energy users not only to consume energy, but also to generate the energy and share it with the utility grid or with other energy consumers. This type of energy user who both consumes and generates energy is called the “prosumer”. The sustainability of the SG energy sharing process heavily depends on its participating prosumers, making prosumer participation and management schemes crucial in the energy sharing approaches. However, the existing literature on SG energy sharing has given very little attention to managing prosumers. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, we provide a comprehensive stateof-the-art review of managing prosumers in the context of SG and introduce the concept of goal oriented prosumer-communities through learning the aspects from social network communities. Second, we present a conceptual framework for forming a prosumer-community, based on online community formation. The significance of the prosumer community concept is that this will allow prosumers to collectively bargain for the energy with utility companies, thus offering the small players (prosumers) the negotiation power to be on par with big players (providers) and eliminate the dividing gap between them.

Knowledge Building: Reinventing Education for the Knowledge Age

This paper examines the Knowledge Age and how economic factors are causing educators to rethink and reinvent education. Two key factors in education in the Knowledge Age will be education for an economy of innovation, and the increasing virtualization of education.We present knowledge building pedagogy as a model for education in the Knowledge Age and discuss Knowledge Forum, online knowledge building environment designed to facilitate and support the knowledge building process.Built into Knowledge Forum is a suit of online tools that track the interactions that students have with Knowledge Forum. We focus on the social network tool that allows us to examine communication patterns among the students when working online.Using the data obtained, we examine the growth and development of online community formation during the first week of class for a group of naïve users in a third-year university class. Examining the note reading and response networks, we see that the note reading network develops more rapidly than the responding network, and that it is more symmetric than the responding network. However, by mid-term, a highly connected network has developed for both note-reading and responding.

The Creation of Internet Communities: A Brief History of On-Line Distribution of Working Papers Through NEP, 1998-2010

This paper adds to the growing literature on the formation of online communities from an historical perspective by telling of the emergence and development of a service for speedy, online distribution of recent additions to the broad literatures on economics and related areas called NEP: New Economics Papers as well as the online community that grew around it. We provide details of the social and technological challenges for its construction as well as the evolution of its governance. The development of NEP provides an illustrative example for the kind of new business models that have emerged as the Internet has been used by creative minds to provide existing services in a new way.

Pedagogy, Purpose, and the Second Language Learner in On-Line Communities

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are often portrayed as offering a collaborative community space in which native and non-native language speakers reciprocally scaffold linguistic, cultural and content knowledge, a space which assists students in overcoming well-documented challenges encountered in traditional classrooms (Leki, 2001; Morita, 2000, 2004). However, recent studies point to the communicative disjunctures arising from variances in cultural capital and socio-technological histories in on-line dialogic encounters between student groups (see Belz, 2003; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Thorne, 2003, 2000). This article examines online community formation among participants in a graduate seminar on modern language education and the pedagogical design that facilitated the development of norms of joint construction of knowledge, reciprocity, and sharing. Drawing upon survey and interview data as well as on a descriptive statistical analysis of the bulletin board interaction, the study explores how design provided non-native speakers with opportunities to capitalize on their existing experiential and intellectual capital.

Pedagogy, Purpose, and the Second Language Learner in On-Line Communities

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are often portrayed as offering a collaborative community space in which native and non-native language speakers reciprocally scaffold linguistic, cultural and content knowledge, a space which assists students in overcoming well-documented challenges encountered in traditional classrooms (Leki, 2001; Morita, 2000, 2004). However, recent studies point to the communicative disjunctures arising from variances in cultural capital and socio-technological histories in on-line dialogic encounters between student groups (see Belz, 2003; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Thorne, 2003, 2000). This article examines online community formation among participants in a graduate seminar on modern language education and the pedagogical design that facilitated the development of norms of joint construction of knowledge, reciprocity, and sharing. Drawing upon survey and interview data as well as on a descriptive statistical analysis of the bulletin board interaction, the study explores how design provided non-native speakers with opportunities to capitalize on their existing experiential and intellectual capital.

Imagined electronic community: Representations of virtual community in contemporary business discourse

In contemporary business texts corporate sponsored online communities are described as central to the commercial development of the Internet. This paper presents a history of how online community has been represented in models of Internet commerce. It critically examines the arguments, narratives and rhetorical strategies drawn on within business texts to represent online community. The paper discusses why academics have an interest in involving themselves in helping organize alternative models of online community formation in the context of moves to corporatize and commodify higher education.