Hope you will find the culture of the xmca a realization of community
without physical contact. At least this is what those of us (Peg Syverson,
=46rancoise Herrmann... who else?) who have researched this virtual place
argue -- as do I in my current xlist research.
The question is (and I'm doing my best to be able to shed some light on
this when I'm through) to what extent experiences from the culture of a
scholarly mailinglist can be carried over to a distance education context.
I have just been working on some quantitative measures showing the
considerable degree of continuity in xlist membership from year to year in
the ten years of archived mail -- well, better expressed there is a
fruitful balance between continuity and renewal. Anyway, this seems quite
drastically different from distance education, at least when dist ed is on
a course by course basis and mostly in a project//developmental stage as
the case is here in the Western region of Sweden at present. Even so there
may be things about the building of an online community of learners that
could be learned from the study of well-functioning scholarly CMClists.
Perhaps a clue to what an online ZPD would be like. I think that the paper
by Gordon Wells that is available at
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~gwells/zpd.discussion.txt might be a good
place to start, even if it does not address the CMC case: what it does is
open up the Zone to contemporary multidirectional readings, which seems
needed online perhaps more than anywhere.
Eva Ekeblad