On Community and Connection

After Tom and I completed our presentation a couple of weeks ago, I began to think about the idea of online communication/education vs. face-to-face. A few questions came to mind:

- Is online education better than face-to-face education in some circumstances?

- In an age where there are entire universities online (or offer most of their programs online), does face-to-face even matter anymore?

- Are there situations in which face-to-face learning will become irrelevant, or can computer-mediated learning replace anything?

I don't know the answer to these questions, though I suspect that computers will enhance, not replace, in-person learning. But it's not without its concerns. When I look at the picture above, it reminds me of the experience of our presentation, where we had everyone together in a room, but they were all working individually. It wasn't until the discussion afterwards that we came back together as a group. I think there really is a risk of alienating ourselves if we focus too much of our attention on what we do online. So there need to be ways to incorporate human interaction with what we do directly with computers.

But surely this is possible, and don't people seek out human interaction in most situations? This also brings us to the concept of community, which we've been discussing for the last couple of weeks in class. One of the things that we hear all the time is talk of online communities. At my work, we even use the portal for students to have community around their interests and needs. These communities we've developed are basically opportunities for us to communicate with students and have them participate in the things that interest them. It hasn't really worked out that way. Another example of this community concept, which is based on in-person experience, is U of T's First-Year Learning Communities. It's a very successful project, but it's not so much a community as it is a shared-interest group.

Community is not easy to create. It's possible, I guess, but I wonder if the idea of pushing this idea of "community" on students is perhaps a little naive. Perhaps even a little romantic. I find myself in agreement with Fernback (2007) from the February 11 readings. It may be time for us to move beyond the idea of community.

I went to good old Wikipedia to look up what they were saying about the concept, and even they argue that, "Since the advent of the internet, the concept of community no longer has geographical limitations, as people can now virtually gather in an online community and share common interests regardless of physical location."

We can argue that Facebook, discussion forums and listservs provide and support community. But when we think about community, we think of tight networks with some kind of permanence. Does this apply online?

Fernback argues that what we call communities are actually better referred to as networks that might have differing levels of commitment. If we can look at it this way, and move beyond the idea of community - which gives us warm feelings, but really has little meaning - we can stop worrying about creating something that is too hard to define and get to understanding the nature of the relationship between our face-to-face commitments and our online ones.