A lurker responds:
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.
[Helen Beetham] I have contributed to XMCA only once or twice before. The reason is
not that I find the content anything but compulsive - on the contrary, I make time each evening,
after finishing my full-time job, to read and reflect on postings from this and a couple of other lists.
Occasionally I respond off-line and, even more occasionally, on-line. But there is a clear class
division within higher education between those for whom 'research', reading, reflection and self-
development are understood as an intrinsic part of professional practice - and included in the
pay-packet - and the rest of us for whom these are leisure-time pursuits. And again, the vocabulary
used on XMCA requires a considerable investment of time to use with any fluency. (This is not
an attack on specialised registers at all - merely an observation that their use requires more than
a simple gesture of commitment.)
It's clear from the amount of time and energy that regular contributors devote to the lists, that
they have re-defined their professional lives and their communities of practice over the past few
years (this perhaps also helps to explain some of Eva's figures). CHATting with colleagues online
is no longer a peripheral activity but a central forum for the exchange of ideas. This is a wonderful
and liberating model but it did require a certain degree of autonomy over one's own working time
and practices to achieve, and it is worth remembering that not all of us have this privilege.
I don't know whether regular contributors consider that people like me are 'part' of the community,
but for what it's worth I spend every day looking forward to the moment I can log on to my XMCA
messages. Hey, I might only be an onlooker but from the sidelines I see a community with
values I share and that's enough thing to keep me hooked. Sometimes I might even bounce
back the odd ball.
[Helen Beetham] Helen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:31 PST