Connection and Community
Brenda Laurel identifies in the Web possibilities for personal agency, critical thinking, relevance, popular culture, web literacy, self publishing, story-telling, collaboration, connection, communities, and citizenship. These strengthen democracy, individually and collectively, and are of particular relevance to the educational community. Drawing upon her experiences in developing the virtual reality performance piece Placeholder, she examines critical components for the furtherance of community that can provide new ways of understanding both the self and others. She underscores the value that the Internet affords learners of all ages in the development of communal spaces and its innovative and appealing methodologies to encourage a critical literacy. One example can be found in the development of oral history projects where inter-generational stories can be gathered and expanded through dialog on discussion boards and chat rooms. Another is the creation of accessible and uncensored writing projects similar to those created in her web-based project for girls known as Purple Moon.
Links to Brenda Laurel’s writing on connection and community
1. PlaceHolder
3. People, Communities, and Service: Shaping the Future of the Internet
4. How communities and economies can be built around content
Chip Bertram has been directly involved in the development of The Inquiry Page, a project designed to make available a free website providing resources for learners across a variety of disciplines and interests to facilitate their understanding about inquiry-based learning. This project also seeks to encourage the development of a large, diverse and dynamic community incorporating these resources to interact in an inquiry-based setting using many of these resources to effect change. His research extends to understanding the methodologies that individuals utilize to organize themselves as communities, the impact of technology and social systems, how change is addressed and resisted within a society- particularly within the educational community- to provide insight about the strategies required to sustain collaborative learning communities.
Links to Chip Bertram’s writing on connection and community
2. How can we understand knowledge-making in communities of inquiry?
3. New Technologies and Social Change: Learning in the Global Cyberage
4. Theory and Research on Teaching as Dialogue
Nicholas Burbules has recently begun to explore how videoconferencing and its attendant technologies could be both useful and destructive in connecting learners from diverse and traditionally inaccessible communities and cultures to information and institutions throughout the world. He identifies the acknowledgement by many governments of the way the Internet creates opportunities for access to information. At the same time, he questions the hegemonic influences and subsequent effects the imposition of this information can have upon communities that perceive and have constructed their worlds quite differently. In attempting to address communities’ desires to educate increased numbers of citizens using less financial capital and the individual’s right to acquire knowledge useful to them and to their communities, he argues for the necessity to address the moral tensions these local-global binaries impose on societies within the larger contexts of equity and democracy.
Links to Nicholas Burbules’ writing on connection and community
1. Theory and Research on Teaching as Dialogue
2. Who Lives Here? Access to and Credibility Within Cyberspace
3. Globalization and Education: An Introduction
4. Does the Internet Constitute a Global Educational Community?
5. The Web as a Rhetorical Place
6. New Possibilities of On-line Pedagogy
