Paul writes:
>
>You might have never known either of the Martins
My first encounter with Eva fully inllustrates the point.
We met on a sunny terrace in a samll faculty building surrounded by
ornage trees in a University on the Isle of Majorca ( for northern
Europeans sitting in the warm sun in February was a treat).
We ere embarking on a three year project involving 11 instituions in 8
countries. Gothenberg was there because my colleagues in Finland, who I
also had never met in the flesh, had put forward Gothenberg as a suitable
partner in the enterprise (and how Eva then became part of that network
will probabaly require a lot of telling). This was a community, which as
the other Martin suggests had a (not quite) common epistomological
framework and was brought together by the internet and what can only be
described as an act of faith ( and also a fat grant from the European
Commission).
However subsequent events on that project demonstrate tha fragility of
"internet" communities, the diffuclty one encounters in making these
virtual communities and why now I think distance based collaborative
learning is one of the hardest things I can ever imagine trying to do.
When an individual volunteers to live part of one's community life on line
it clearly compromises activities elsewhere. This proved all the more so
when they were compounded by what may appear realtively mundane and
soluble like timetabling, calendars, time zones, meal times and also many
many many other more detailed issues about, cultural expectations, value
and reward in the community of practice that I am drawing endless CHAT
triangles to try and explain.
The problems have been equally encountered (and perhaps moreso) when we
have tried electronic participatory democracy experiments.
The frustration I detected from Mike about degrees of participation in
XMCA at the turn of the year are but a distant echo of on-line organisers
around the world. What many of us find clearly compulsive is not
compulsive for many others. There are also clearly some topics that have
more compulsion than others. Equally there are many ( and I am ususally
one) who are happen to be very peripheral limited peripheral participants
in XMCA who ( according to work by Vanessa Di Mauro) who feel that they
are part of a community.
Meanwhile particiapnt observation of these issues do help us tweek the
mediation system to increase the affordances ( I think in the sense used
by Don Norman rather than the sense that CHAT thinkers might want to use
the term). Most of the systems that we currently used have arised from
technological happenstance rather than the application of socio-cultural
approaches that are reflected (say) the writings of Nardi and Kapetelinen.
Martin Owen
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