September 2002

K. Ann Renninger and Wesley Shumar (Editors)

This is a late draft of the final published document. Please Do Not Quote without permission.

Our interests centre around creating and conducting inquiry on learning environments. This focus includes both formal school settings, non-school settings (museums, science centres, public spaces, and the Internet), and the points of intersection between these environments. These interests combine work in both real and virtual, on-line and off-line spaces. For us, an understanding of the nexus of learning and community relies upon analysis of each context to ascertain the expectations of participants and the task demands of the environment. We accordingly recognize the diversity of virtual environments, and also the interconnections that exist between on-line and off-line communities. What connects communities, virtual or otherwise, are the possibilities offered for learning; it is not just "school-based" or specifically an educational institution’s private preserve. Learning is the creation of knowledge through the transformation of experience, and transcends the particular institutional context that society has reserved for that purpose. (Cayley, 1992; Illich, 1970; Kolb, 1984). And it is also important not to confuse learning exclusively with school knowledge, for knowledge comes in many forms and for different purposes. (Barnes, 1981; Dewey, 1938) Using Kolb’s view on learning, if we substitute a particular type of change for transformation then change becomes a condition for learning. People participate in learning settings from birth onwards, and move from setting to setting such as the home, the playground, school, service groups such as scouts, church, and over the years add work settings and other leisure activities. It is no stretch of the imagination for us to include the internet as a learning site.

The term "virtual community" has become so widespread in its use that there is a tendency to conflate all social activity into a single concept and not consider the diversity of virtual contexts. Another challenge is characterized by the debate about whether on-line groups can be termed "communities" at all. This debate focuses on the relationship between on-line and off-line communities. Baym (1998) believes there are two issues that should be considered in such a debate: "does on-line community really serve as a substitute for off-line community in any meaningful way?", and "what occurs on-line that leads some people to experience them as communities in the first place?" (37-38) There is also the challenge concerning the possible interconnections of "learning" and "change", an issue which will become more obvious throughout the chapter. In considering learning in virtual communities, there are several issues or aspects to be considered (e.g. a learner’s background in such a setting), role within the community, participating style (e.g. active participant or lurker), structure of pedagogy associated with the space, resources for structuring the community, and of course, what is to be learned.

This suggests dimensions that Rheingold could not have anticipated when he suggested a definition of virtual community that predates the explosion of public involvement that came with the World Wide Web in 1994; "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on... public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace."(italics in original) (Rheingold, 1993, 5). But, where do these virtual communities begin? Does virtual community begin at the point where the first on-line birthday party is celebrated, or the first funeral? (Rheingold, 1993; Fowler, 1996) Does virtual community issue fully-formed at a specific point in time from the collective efforts of a group? Or are the roots found at a deeper level? Perhaps community finds its genesis in the intentionality and dedication of pioneering individuals who forge the first elements into shape that we later see as a community. Understanding the location of change and learning found in virtual communities requires an exploration of what it means to learn and effect change in these spaces. It requires an understanding of the curriculum of virtual communities themselves.

Learning and perhaps community itself is a process that goes on, or is formed at, the intersection of the social organization of an environment and the activities expected and conducted by participants in a particular setting. In considering virtual learning community, we have been influenced by the views of others, Moore’s (1981) notions of the pedagogy of experience, Baym’s (1998) criteria on the events or experiences that lead to a sense of community, and more generally, Ostrom’s views on community public spaces (Ostrom, 1990). We use some of their ideas to inquire into the various curricula found in a virtual community.

Baym (1998) has studied task-oriented uses for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and suggests that it is difficult to predict CMC patterns because of complexities of interactions among five factors: external contexts, temporal structure of the group, system infrastructure, group purposes, and participant characteristics. (39-40) She does suggest that an understanding of a virtual style can be achieved by describing these interactions:

She could easily be describing the ingredients for a learning setting.

A community, in reality or as a concept, is a form of a common pool resource (CPR) (Ostrom, 1990). A CPR is traditionally thought of as a natural commons, such as public land used for grazing, as described by Garret Hardin (1968) in his famous essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," or as any other natural resource that is held in common beyond individual ownership, such as forests, fisheries, water, or other natural resources used by humans. And there is support for the notion that concepts such as democracy, knowledge, language, spiritualism and even ‘cyberspace’ are examples of CPRs. A socially constructed community also falls under this label of being a CPR as it is a collectively controlled space whose success or failure is based on the individual members’ willingness to participate and subsume individual gain for collective well-being and the well-being of the resource that is the community. There are numerous models Ostrom describes for the management of CPRs, but she asserts that no single model can be used to cover the variety of CPR contexts. This extends to the variety of communities that can exist in real life and online. She, however, does describe a number of key factors important in the success of a community, which Kollock (1998) believes are relevant to online, as well as real world communities. Among these criteria are: that group boundaries are clearly defined; the implementation of rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions; the fact that most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules; the right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities; a system for monitoring members' behavior exists, undertaken by the community members themselves; a graduated system of sanctions is used; and that community members have access to easily accessible ways to resolve conflict. Of course, we are using resource in the broadest sense, including human resources with all that implies in the creative sense.

Embedded in this description are various perspectives of the educational ingredients of community. There is a real sense of mutually constructing a sense of space, that Morgan suggests as a "range of practices which produce the site as vehicle for the performance of life" (Morgan, 1998, 5). How do we connect these ideas on community with learning? Communities are socially constructed entities, i.e. social organizations. According to Moore (1982), learning is the process that goes on at the intersection of the social organization of an environment (setting, context) and the mental works performed by its participants. His ideas were developed within the example of student interns in work/study communities and was especially focused upon cognitive tasks required of the work setting. Working within a framework of situated cognition (Rogoff and Lave, 1984), Moore raises the issue of how a neophyte comes to participate in the social stocks of knowledge in the community. The broader question is how do members of a community encounter, engage, master, use and transform the knowledge-in-use in the community. Knowledge distribution in a community helps to identify different roles, in virtual community, this translates to creator, member, keeper of the infrastructure, etc. A community has certain purposes for its existence, and Moore translates these purposes as the tasks expected within the setting. Each community is organized in specific ways for establishing, accomplishing and processing the expectations or tasks. To understand the ways in which learning might occur in virtual community, it seems necessary to depict the kinds of tasks, expectations, indeed learning required to accomplish the tasks. We also need to understand the dynamics of the social means employed to create, accomplish and process what is required to maintain community.

It is our view that the study of virtual community has not been inclusive enough to address the issue of what it takes to be a learning community. We take on the task of clarifying this view by offering an exploration of some of the curriculum issues involved in identifying community in cyberspace. We use the concept of curriculum, ordinarily considered within school community, to locate these learning possibilities. Although the term ‘curriculum’ connotes for some a static conception of school programs, we agree with Schwab (1969, 1971), that curriculum represents a dynamic interplay of those features necessary for learning in any setting. At a minimum, a learning moment requires that learners interact with forms of pedagogy in a particular milieu to bring about change. Learning can be purposeful or unplanned; it can be transparent or opaque to those involved in the context. And identifying educational aspects of community in cyberspace needs to account for the features of learning and change.

But curriculum is more than an abstract term: it suggests structure for locating learning moments. We suggest that there are several locations for learning in virtual communities. There is the location associated with first initiating and then maintaining the locus of interaction, what we consider to be the Curriculum of Initiation and Governance. This requires that an individual or individuals make the decision to create and then maintain a virtual site or location (Collins & Berge, 1997). For some individuals, it may be the first time that they have undertaken the responsibility for such a location by adopting the role as a list moderator, web master, IRC chat facilitator, or MOO wizard. Even with prior experiences as a participant in such a space, there is the necessity to collect information about and make decisions on such actions as choosing and implementing software, determining the purpose and governmentality (Foucault, 1991) of the accepted and anticipated interactions, netiquette, and inviting others to participate in the environment that has been created.

The second location, the Curriculum of Access, is associated with accessing and becoming socialized to virtual community itself. The kinds of learning that take place include what is required to become a member: learning about the site, how to access it, and the rules that govern membership. Finally, there is the Curriculum of Membership, that relates the actual engagements in the community, the purposes for which the site was constructed and the gains people expect from it. Such purposes may be expressly for learning in the conventional sense, as found in computer supported cooperative work environments, where a range of cognitive knowledge, skills and processes are the usual purposes for such groups, although there may be affective learnings as well. Groups more associated with social purposes are nevertheless sites for acquiring information, feeling a sense of community, as well as potential learnings associated with participating in a virtual place. Part of membership in a community is a recognition of when it is appropriate to opt out of the group or decide against further participation. An individual might decide, for a variety of reasons, to join other sites or to drop out for a time from involvement in a community. We also recognize that in any curricular moment, that learners may play a variety of roles and may participate in various ways, from active to passive. One of the features of virtual communities in which attendance is voluntary is the presence of lurkers. Learning, for lurkers, may be a covert act, and the only observable manifestation that a lurker may value the experience is continued affiliation.

This chapter explores virtual community in a manner rooted in the Canadian cultural experience. We use descriptions of four diverse examples from our studies on virtual communities to orient the frameworks of this discussion. Our examples include school-based on-line communities such as Project Achieve, a project-based virtual learning environment funded by Canada’s Schoolnet (http://moo.schoolnet.ca) whose intention is project-based collaborative learning for students and educators to create virtual learning settings, and MOOkti (http://noisey.oise.utoronto.ca:9696), a five year-old polysynchronous[1]virtual environment for relocalizing teacher’s pedagogy within virtual learning environments. We contrast these Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) with research into two out-of-school communities: the Kind_Spirits email discussion group constructed around the author Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables (Nolan, Lawrence & Kajihara, 1998), and a group of communities prominently involved on the world stage of late that we collectively describe as Serbia.web.

The four examples we include allow us to understand the sense of location and expectations that each group creates for itself as a way of expressing community. We have ordered the cases so that the two deliberately developed for social purposes, KS and Serbia.web form one grouping, while those more specifically focussed on knowledge acquisition (MOOkti and Achieve) follow. We distinguish these examples by what we consider to be original purposes for framing community, either social or educational. While the original purposes may differ, each of these examples represent groups that are social in origin, and represent learning contexts. [2]

The Kindred Spirits (KS) email discussion list (Kind_Spirits@upei.ca) is an example of a virtual community. KS members are looking for a particular cultural situation with which they identify, one that is embodied in the works and life of Lucy Maud Montgomery (LMM), author of more than 22 books including Anne of Green Gables. This list has a definite genesis and development predicated on the desire of individuals to join together as a group for a social and cultural purpose. (Nolan, Lawrence & Kajihara, 1998) KS came into existence when list co-founder Jeff Lawrence discovered a letter by Louise Bruck in the magazine Kindred Spirits while travelling in Prince Edward Island, Canada in the fall of 1994:

This was the genesis of the Curriculum of Initiation. Both Bruck and Lawrence were looking to create or construct a space, which later became a community according to its members. They were looking to participate in a social environment that reflects the world LMM wrote about. This community seemed to develop following real life community patterns described by a founder as pioneer, village and town phases, reflecting Van Gennep's three phases (separation, transition and incorporation) of "the rites of passage" important in the development of on-line communities as in real ones. (Tomas, 1991; Nolan, Lawrence & Kajihara, 1998)

Of particular importance in the development of the KS community was its cultural and social focus on a particular writer’s life and works. LMM lived much of her life in and wrote about community experience in rural Prince Edward Island. KS list members identify with LMM and her characters and seek to capture in their lives and online interaction the spirit they read about in her works, as well as the mood and essence of the real world locations they visit in PEI. LMM characters such as the famous Anne Shirley were also striving to be part of and understand their own community, and list members often refer to LMM’s characters for support. As Laura Robinson (1999) notes, "Montgomery shows individuals who successfully manage to achieve a level of community acceptance and individual freedom; however, she clearly suggests that clan and community are constructs". It is the feeling of community that LMM constructed in her novels based on her life and recollections of life in PEI that energizes this group of kindred spirits. Like the orphan Anne who moves from the mainland to construct her new life on the island of PEI, what they want is a home of their own full of like-minded kindred spirits, and they often echo Anne’s words, "I love Green Gables already, and I never loved any place before. No place ever seemed like home" (Montgomery, 1908). KS members are looking for people who are kindred spirits in their love for the works, life and culture of LMM, and then construct a community based on this love online. This represents the major purpose for the Curriculum of Membership.

And like LMM’s fictional and real worlds, the KS list is a public space. Anyone can join the KS list, and participate in the manner they see fit. There are few boundaries or limits to the focus of discussion except that they relate to the important themes of KS members.[3] These include LMM and her works, life in PEI, and elements of KS members’ lives that reflect the themes and interests found in LMM. Discussion of ‘Island’ politics, kindred events, and any modern issue that might have interested someone like LMM herself are found in the postings to the list. Events involving cats, particularly loved by LMM, are perennial favourites, as are Kindred Teas held across North America, and face to face meetings of various list members.

Sometimes list members complain about the boundaries and limitations that the list imposes on itself. Some members want to remain wedded to the original purpose of the list to focus on LMM’s life and works, while others are more engaged in the tangential discussions that take up events in their own personal lives in relation to LMM. However, it is the fact that whatever goes on in the list hovers in a constellation or halo around LMM and her life in a loose yet discernable narrative of communal discourse that is particular to this list and likely only repeated in lists focussing on similarly compelling authors who describe and have lived in a world their fans wish to embrace.

These three phases of pioneer-frontier, village and town metaphorically reflect not only the number of participants, but also the formal and organizational structure of the community, and the variety of interests and topics taken up by its members. The pioneers were wedded to specific needs and goals just to survive as a group. The discourse was a combination of negotiation of how to administer the list and discussion of specific literary topics. The village formed at a point when the community was already coming into conflict over the direction the list would take, with the inclusion of personal and tangential topics, and some of the founders had already been bypassed in the administration of the community. Those involved in the Curriculum of Initiation including Governance were supplanted by others who controlled governance issues. The final movement to the town phase represented a formal external administration of the list. LMMI hosts the list, but does not take a central role in the discourse of the community. The LMMI list moderator dealt mainly with issues of protocol and governance, particular when issues arose with respect to the use of copyright material and trademarks that would put the list administrators in conflict with the corporation that controlled the LMM estate. By this time, the original members had lost all control over the direction the list took, and most of them had left the group, retiring to a newly formed moderated email discussion for LMM scholarship (LMM-l@listserv.utoronto.ca) founded by most of the original list members and academics who were not interested in the vibrant, diverse community’s cyclical topics.

KS is an example of a virtual community that was formed by, for and with people captivated by a literary author’s work and life. The initiator was knowledgeable about the technology of cyberspace, though the increased sophistication in the expansion of the site came about through affiliation with a university institute. The example illustrates how a community that began with a generally agreed-upon purpose expanded to a complex group of special interests which ultimately led to a splintering-off of the original members into other forums in order to maintain focus on original purposes. The initial Curriculum of Membership changed over time and then split in order to accommodate the diverse agendas.

Our next example was initiated by individuals because of personal interest in enabling expatriates to have access to both informational and personal resources related to ethnic identity. Through IRL (In Real Life) circumstances, the site expanded into a more complex network of communication sources which allowed for expanded and diverse access. Unlike KS, which splintered somewhat because of a change in direction or focus, Serbia.web expanded because of increased membership, increased need to both receive information and vent emotional concerns.

The various online media that make up the collective discussion on Serbia and issues important to diasporic Serbs represent an example of a particular kind of online community. And there has been a great deal of attention given to diasporic community involvement in CMC environments centering on the "Wars of the Yugoslav Succession" which locates the on-line experiences of various diaspora from the region in a growing post-national cultural experience (Stubbs, 1998; Stubbs, 1999). It is both ethnic and cultural, and most importantly is an online manifestation of a community that transcends the boundaries of both real life and virtual manifestations. Serbia.web represents an example of a virtual community that manifests itself across various online technologies such as web pages, Java-chat, IRC and email discussion lists. Like the KS group, it is founded on an external cultural experience. As well, this community has grown in ways unanticipated by its founders as a result of external events and influences.

One instance of this Serbian-speaking virtual grouping started in late 1995 around a Toronto-based web-site dedicated to Serbian-related issues. The original web-site included multiple tools for communication–a Java-chat room (averaging 15 participants) and a bulletin board, covering various topics (music, film, politics, travel). An important factor is the selective sample that this group represented. Participants are usually recent immigrants, mostly since 1991, living all throughout the world, particularly in Canada, USA, West Europe and Australia. There is a high degree of computer literacy among members, perhaps because of the educational requirements necessary to immigrate to the West. Therefore, the Curriculum of Access less of a problem then might occur with other groups.

Observation of this group began in June 1997 at which time there were about thirty regular members in the Java chat-room, which by the fall of 1997 moved to an IRC channel because of an increase in participation. The Serbian-speaking IRC channel was hosted on a large primarily English speaking server. The number of Serbian-speaking participants communicating online grew rapidly, such that by early 1998 several new channels opened. Observations that formed this paper started in the one of the sub-channels from its beginning.

The participants of the Serbian virtual community developed several stable sub-groups, but the members of almost every sub-group are also regular participants in the community gathered around the prime channel. The possibilities of IRC-software allow the simultaneous participation on the several channels located on the same server. This type of multi-membership gives an opportunity for a participant to communicate with a large group of members of the various sub-groups, and to get an idea of a sense of identity of each particular sub-group.

After April (1999), all Serbian-speaking channels were transferred to a new server primarily intended for Serbian-speaking participants.[5] During the conflict, IRC was used as a tool for information exchange between the participants living in Yugoslavia and those living in the diaspora caring about what was happening in their homeland, representing a shift in the Curriculum of Membership. Usually, the validity of information about Yugoslavia from IRC-communication tended to be checked and verified on other web-sites dealing with the conflict-issues, so misinformation appeared to be less a problem than anticipated. There was a strong sense that the network of available tools (web-sites, conferencing board and IRC) were firmly interconnected and in some sense inseparable, an important sense necessary to get a clear picture of how the virtual community functioned during the conflict.

What was discovered from conversations with owners of different sub-channels is that the most important thing for keeping a channel alive is recruitment of participants, especially those with stable membership in the community. There is a form of trade between users, as channel-operator status is a reward for those populating newly-opened channels regularly which enables the channel to get permanent status. This is an example of how characteristics of membership of the community are used as criteria for ensuring continuity of governance. This important step allows the channel owner to gain protection for the channel against being taken over by someone else while she is otherwise occupied and not online. An example of the ingredients for Curriculum of Governance can be found on the computer conferencing board where a discussion group was opened which was dedicated to IRC-chat channel (channel prime), where the participants are trying to negotiate the rules of maintenance usually asking for the explanation from the channel operators about their actions and regulations.

There are different ways for potential members to find out about the site. Usually it is web-surfing where a person could find the web-site with detailed explanations about how to use IRC, and find the particular IRC-server with the Serbian-speaking chat-channel (channel prime). After a while, when that web-surfer gets more knowledgeable about how to use IRC software, it is easy to choose the different Serbian-speaking sub-groups connected on the same IRC server. So, the Curriculum of Access requires the ability to find a site, translate the information, and to gain experience in order to select appropriate communities. This starts with the learning of the basic software. The process of learning specific IRC software depends upon the user’s previous knowledge with such software and experiences with computers. Some users could choose to read help files, ask somebody, IRL or virtually, who is more knowledgeable, or work through a trial and error process.

It could almost be said that the experience of Serbia.web is somewhat mundane, concerned with the same collective and individual matters that all online communities are faced with. That is, if it were not for the Kosovo crisis. The quantum leap in activity in and around the online community reflected the chaotic and kinetic nature of the real world events playing themselves out. Real life and death consequences were being taken up in a manner that just is not seen in communities such as KS. The real need not only for information, or even sharing information, but to be able to verify information from a variety of sources, and bring together the variety of experiences and information from the members of the community was necessary for so many in order to develop the most coherent picture possible of what was actually going on half a world away. From one informal conversation we found out that a particular individual started to come on IRC channel prime at the time of conflict. He said that, "chatting with those abroad, despite being ephemeral, helped me to feel a kind of hope" (translated from Serbian). Once the bombing ceased, the activity level decreased somewhat, but has since maintained itself at a level much higher than before the conflict, a recognition of how communities coalesce around times of threat or stress to its members, and that the threads of a community may often go farther and deeper than is easily discernible on the surface.

The second set of virtual communities were formed with explicit educational purposes in mind. These communities often have an institutional base for the various curriculum locations. They often have particular groups in mind as potential community members and may have specific purposes that compromise the Curriculum of Membership. The first example, MOOkti was initiated with a specific learning agenda for a graduate student group, but the orientation and community membership changed almost immediately. The other environment, Achieve, represents a shift in orientation to finding a community of learners who are dedicated to creating their own small virtual communities to initiate and carry out specific problem-tasks. What might distinguish communities formed for educational, as opposed to social, purposes is the element of control by educators as to whether their students have a choice in participating. That is if the interaction is educator-based or learner-initiated.

MOOkti MOO[6] (http://noisey.oise.utoronto.ca:9996) is a social and educational space similar to other CVEs in that it has an intended purpose and theme but no limitations or conditions for participation or interaction. When MOOkti started in the spring of 1995, by one individual, it was envisioned as a place where educators and education students at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) could learn about virtual environments. However, rather than make this space an isolated ‘classroom’ or research space, it was opened to anyone on the Internet to join or visit, and as many diverse activities as possible were included. The intention was to create a public space that would provide the OISE/UT real life community with the opportunity to experience a selection of the diverse possibilities found elsewhere on the Internet.

As it turned out, the most active members were not OISE/UT members, but the external participants who used MOOkti as one of their virtual homes. At various times, MOOkti hosted Icelandic educators who wished to learn about MOOs in education, members of the Jewish community who created a small resource centre, undergraduate environmental studies classes, and ad hoc groups of young people on the net who just liked to hang out, and a small group of MOO programmers who experimented and developed the MOO server and software.

These external groups were originally intended almost as window dressing to provide the intended audience with diverse experiences. The MOO founder intended this external group to fulfill the role of ‘populating the space with interesting people’ in order to make the environment appear enticing. One study underway into the intended audience of MOOkti found that the nature of the educational professional community itself inhibited sustained and active participation in the MOOkti community. The intended learning activities of the space did occur through various classes conducted in MOOkti, but the community that did finally develop through the participation of the external members was more predicated on the external members’ own needs, interests and criteria. The community that developed successfully subverted the intended purpose of MOOkti to their own needs and uses. And MOOkti only survives through their interests and efforts. This experience represents a fulfillment of Ostrom’s view of a community being able to modify the rules of a space to match their own needs and experiences, a redefinition of the space according to their own rules respected by external authorities. This represents an unintended outcome of the Curriculum of Initiation and Governance.

Almost immediately it became evident that governing the environment required more skill and experience than he was capable of, and a search began for volunteers able to co-administer MOOkti. Nolan searched the Internet for documentation, FAQs and help files on how to run his MOO, and communicated with others who ran MOOs around the world through an email discussion list called MOO-COWS (moo-cows@the-b.org), gaining important information on how to select a group of administrators able to help out. After the first request, a number of applicants offered to join the project, and after a few conflicts and false starts a small MOOkti administration committee was in place consisting of members with experience on a variety of MOOs around the world (BayMOO, Weyrmount, Eden, Sprawl, EnviroMOO, MooWP).

Nolan learned that there was a specific sequence of learning steps already in place for the administration of these types of virtual environments that could be adopted and quickly put into place, and that most experienced MOO programmers had already undergone extensive apprenticeships elsewhere (elseMOO in MOO-speak). The MOO community had its own software, discourse, and extensive document archives, a complete learning environment in itself, which an individual needs to be aware of in order to successfully develop a MOO. It was only after the required learnings necessary to develop and maintain the MOO infrastructure were learned, understood and put into practice that MOOkti was ready and able to invite and respond to participants. But even before MOOkti had formally opened, a small community of the administrators had already developed, and this social core became a template for interaction that new members could learn from, or ignore, but this primary level of community clearly influenced the way in which new members manifested their own experiences in the environment. Community that developed on the larger scale was dependant on and reflected this original community. This development addresses important events in learning the Curriculum of Initiation and Governance. The founder put himself through the phases of initiation, pushing the process of constructing the site as far as he could alone in order to understand better how the technology worked by itself, before stepping out and looking for help and co-developers from the greater MOO community.

In contrast to the informal and primarily social space of the KS list, or the diverse technical, educational and casual communities of MOOkti, Project Achieve (http://moo.schoolnet.ca) intends a form of community that is located solely in an educational culture. The external context is not necessarily communal, in the usual sense, but various and diverse. Achieve is a more artificial and intentional construction than the other environments discussed in this chapter. It finds its genesis in discussions between Canada’s Schoolnet/Industry Canada, a branch of the Canadian government, and educators with the specific goal of creating an environment for Canadian youth and educators aimed at project-based learning intended to promote intentionality and task dedication as a vehicle for learning. The system infrastructure is not so much constructed by the users but is rather built by them upon a structure provided by the project developers in concert with a government organization. The virtual space is not a casual public space where people can just hang out, but a space where projects are planned, developed and implemented with the support of project staff. As such it is a private space that is open to public participation. Though it is open to guests, it is intended to generate a series of small group projects that are not explicitly interrelated. Participants need not interact with others who are pursuing different projects, and only individuals who are part of specific projects are permitted to be members. So that if Achieve is successful, it will be a meta-community constructed from a set of very small sub-communities.

The various purposes of the projects and the various participant characteristics are also not synchronous, but based upon differing goals and interests of the specific projects. There are specific boundaries to participation in Achieve, but unlike other virtual environments there is not a specific social or cultural theme of the space beyond that of the project-based nature of the space. Any project that can be developed by prospective members is acceptable. It is about the culture of learning. Current projects and projects under development include various writer’s workshops, environmental education simulations, cross-cultural projects linking Canadian and Macedonian students, Icelandic and Canadian students, and a project for students who wish to learn to program and to manage virtual reality environments. There is even a proposal to create a virtual Green Gables simulation. The limitation of the Achieve virtual space comes in the requirement for participants to be actively involved in a specific project, so there is a question as to whether a sense of community for the Achieve space as a whole will develop at all. However, it is hoped that community will develop between members of specific projects through the communal learning about how to program and construct virtual spaces, and the sharing of the products of their projects with each other. This is already occurring, even at this early stage of the project, four months old at the time of writing this chapter.

The genesis of Achieve is particular, and unlike other MOOs or CVEs that the authors have experienced. The project was initiated by Schoolnet administrators who were attempting to find an alternative environment for Schoolnet users. Schoolnet had it’s own CVE, SchoolNetMoo, that was successful as a social space but did not take up the learning purposes that SchoolNet envisioned. They were looking for an environment with more specific pedagogical aims and structure, and they looked to MOOkti as a successful model of a learning environment. But rather than merely try to recreate what had been done, interested MOOkti members wanted to start over and use what they had learned in the creation of a new model of CVE that was more focussed on learning. They realized that many CVEs ended up as casual social spaces and that only a few members of CVEs actually engaged in any systematic attempts to construct environments that were useful learning tools. Primarily, issues of intentionality and task dedication were perceived as characteristics found in the best users of CVEs, and they hoped that the construction of an environment specifically dedicated to project-based learning might provide a guided opportunity for developing these skills and attitudes in learners.

The way in which the Curriculum of Access manifests itself in Achieve is particular. Whereas most CVEs, especially MOOs, attempt to attract users and get them online by mere invitation, and then often provide minimal support in actually accomplishing anything, Achieve planners chose to actively solicit participants directly through posting descriptions of the project to specific learning and education sites; targeting the audience of learners who they think will find the project interesting. As well, the project is designed such that a large percentage of the resources are being spent to have a full time presence of staff online whose primary purpose is facilitating interactions; holding your hand, as it were, while you take your first steps through a virtual landscape. When you visit Achieve, the odds are that you will find someone there who will communicate with you about your project. This is a somewhat novel situation; intentionally populating cyberspace with people, rather than merely setting up a space and expecting visitors to work it out among themselves. Most online environments do not have active paid facilitators who are trained in education and experienced users of the environment. The goal is to shift the somewhat vertical learning curve of CVEs into something more easily encountered.

In order to provide this personalized facilitation, Achieve restricts participation or access. This is done by putting a requirement on the user. As mentioned previously, all members must be actively involved in a project, and members are responsible for planning and implementing the projects. This requirement of intentionality and task dedication placed on the participant means that that the restriction can be seen as a function of what the participant brings with her in terms of personal willingness to undertake and complete projects, or the situational interest generated by the site itself being able to motivate the participant.

It remains to be seen how successful Achieve will be at motivating participants and creating the kind of situational interest considered necessary for project based learning to succeed (Hidi & Berndorff, 1998). But by front-end loading of Achieve with project design heuristics and models, and examples of projects, it is hoped that participants will form their own learning environments according to their own interests and needs. If the project is successful, participants other than the founders of Achieve will form a sufficiently cohesive sense of community and that they will be able to take control over the environment at the end of the three years of the funded project.

These examples represent just a few of the myriad of virtual communities that are in existence at any particular point in time. While each is different in some ways from others, we believe that there are similarities across all. First, they are all, more or less, learning communities. Whether purposeful or not, these are contexts in which different degrees and types of learning are necessary. They may vary as to what their purposes are, from social to political to educational, even for comfort and emotional support. There are limits to membership in certain communities stemming from personal understanding of language, as an example, neither of us could become members of Serbia.web because we are not familiar with the language.

What learnings are required in each community? There are different tasks in each and there is a need to understand something of the nature of the tasks themselves, how they get established and accomplished and processed to see how the community is successful or not successful. All of the communities have shifting purposes, before the war Serbia.web was a global community tool which necessarily framed a real community in order to maintain community. During the war, there was intensive interaction leading to a different sense of community than before. But how different is the community now than before the war? Ongoing research will provide answers to these questions in the Serbia.web community.

Nolan, Lawrence and Kajihara (1998) describe the shifting purposes and goals of the KS community along the linear development of the community from pioneer to mature community, followed by a the repetition of cycles of issues as new members join and take an active part in the community. New groups of members continually revisit questions and issues relating to the direction of the list coming to their own conclusions that often reflect new orientations or values for the list. The most dynamic shift was from the original intention of the list to focus directly on the life and works of LMM. Very quickly, new members embarked on a series of TANs, or tangential discussions of personal issues that only vaguely reflected on LMM such as personal events with pets, real life meetings and social conflicts among list members.

Because of the polysynchronous nature of Achieve and MOOkti, there is very little collective discussion of issues that involve all, or even a majority of members. Like a real community, too much is going on for any one issue to involve all members, and only those involved with administering the site are engaged in the meta-discussion of the direction the environment will take. Rather individual members and sub-communities carry on among themselves, and only seek recourse to the site administration team on a case-by-case basis. Individuals wishing to take a more active role in the administration regularly move up the hierarchy and take on administration roles, but this is not mandatory, and the administration team can be largely ignored by individual members if they wish.

All of these types of community do not require a long term commitment in order to function, but they require continuity among membership, and a mechanism to pass control on to new members. This is one of the features that differentiates them from the real. It is more difficult in IRL communities. If you shift your role in an IRL community, you may have to move out to stop interacting with it. In these virtual communities it is easier to move out, or reposition yourself in relation to the community. It is much easier to move from the status of passive lurker to active participant to a position of power and control in the site. This is a consistent feature of all of the environments we have described.

However, individual mobility in relation to a community is slightly different with Achieve and MOOkti. These virtual environments are polysynchronous and constructivist, based on MOO technology. With MOOs, anything that can be described can be created, and they are best described as places in which participants create virtual representations of people, places and things and share them with others (Nolan, 1998). In MOOs, such as Achieve and MOOkti you create and leave behind artifacts or objects in the space when you are not present, or if you have left the community. With email discussion lists such as KS, you may leave records behind that are searchable, but these archives are somewhat external spaces to the community itself; records of the community rather than active elements within it. The multi-technology dependent Serbia.web community keeps no records of interaction or archives, due to the primarily synchronous nature of the IRC and Java-chat environments, and the limited archival resources of their email discussion lists. The only way to participate in a community and not leave any artifacts is to have never posted, that is as a lurker. The act of delurking is the act of participating directly in the community. On a MOO there is a record of joining and leaving, but not on a list or IRC.

In the KS email list the primary locus of learning may appear to focus around sharing knowledge and information about the author and her works, but the tacit learning is learning about each other. Achieve, on the other hand is more focussed on how to learn with others in virtual spaces. MOOkti’s intended focus, about how to extend teaching and learning into online and virtual environments was subverted by members into a casual social community where the primary social focus entailed learning about the virtual environment itself and how polysynchronous learning and community takes place. But with Serbia.web, the important learning was directed to learning about what was going on in the outside world. While all communities we describe required participants to learn how to interact and communicate within the community, only MOOkti had this kind of learning as its initial primary goal.

In each of our examples, certain criteria are needed to define and describe community learning in terms of who is involved, technical aspects, and the front-end loading of the site with interesting people or topics. Baym’s notions of external context, temporal structure, getting in, and formal membership manifest differences in control, structure, forms of learning that can and do take place. Where does the learning take place and how do we justify our claims? The various mechanisms of interaction: joining, leaving, participating, lurking, researching, are all locations of learning that reflect on issues of participation in and control of the community. These issues are ones that we are considering in our exploration of the curricula of virtual community.

Virtual communities tend to have a definable moment of initiation, unlike some IRL communities in which genesis may be open to historical interpretation. Somebody or somebodies must locate a space for starting the community. There is the curriculum of initiation which requires learning about the type of communication, location, and software necessary to allow others to participate. Initiators of any on-line environment need technical information that varies according to the complexity of the envisioned community. It would be necessary to find a server and software necessary for initiation as well as developing the site or sites (web pages, etc.) that would be publicly accessible. Who is responsible for running the software and making it available in the form that potential community members can access? A common problem faced by educators, or those responsible for creating a learning setting is how to provide information and activities that accommodate a range of learner’s backgrounds. If the procedure for joining the community requires sophisticated technical knowledge, then this may set limits as to who may join the community.

Once a community site is launched, there are curricular issues associated with ensuring that there is continuity associated with the community. This would include monitoring the discourse for netiquette and context, depending on purpose of the community. There is a netiquette that has evolved, and that has spawned its own vocabulary of terms (‘net, spam, ROTFL, LOL, IRL, ping of death, bot, etc.) that is unique to particular communities and the Internet community as a whole. Over time, the maintenance of the community site may transfer from initiators to others, or a shared sense of control may develop. The individuals who become a part of the maintenance of an environment may graduate from membership to control through a variety of criteria. For example, in MOOkti, there was a structured hierarchical curriculum of governance that allowed individuals to assume more responsibility as their proficiency in working with the environment increased, with a number of members gaining administration status over time. And in Serbia.web, community members were chosen to be channel operators because of their track record for stability, good netiquette, etc. The channel operators communicate with each other about problems encountered, not just netiquette, but what topics are appropriate for a channel.

Individuals come to cyberspace with a variety of experiences, from notice to expert. A certain level of sophistication is required to find virtual communities. Some arrive at locations through surfing and may encounter an ‘unintended experience’ while others have a preordained sense of expectation and deliberately look for a specific location. Once at a site, generally a web page, individuals need information to gain admittance to a community, and that information as to appropriate software and mechanisms of access form a context for learning. Some bring past experience with technical know-how and/or exposure to a similar situation while others require more elaborate communication for accessing and successfully using the software.

Virtual communities exist for specific purposes, and require members as the raison d’etre of their existence. Potential members have to know or have to learn how to find sites, to access software, and how to be a member in good standing. Learning the netiquette for a community is an experiential process, for a novice it probably requires a certain amount of lurking to get a feel for acceptable behaviour and even for more experienced individuals, a certain amount of ‘watching and listening’ is probably preferable. Individuals, and those in the group, quickly learn what is acceptable or not; the extreme penalty for noncompliance being dropped from the list or site (booted, banned, newted, toaded, etc.). Individuals make decisions to join a community to suit their needs, whether it be for specific information, to participate in certain activities, or for other reasons, including curiosity. The community setting has to be seen by a member as being worthwhile for them.

We have suggested that an analysis of the curriculum components of a virtual community might allow us to understand how learning is an integral feature. We have labelled the different locations for learning as the Curriculum of Initiation and Governance, the Curriculum of Access and the Curriculum of Membership. Some questions that might form a research agenda for analyzing learning in these locations might include:

• Who initiates?
• Why does initiation occur?
• What knowledge and skills are necessary to start?
• How is this knowledge obtained?
• Who is able to obtain it?
• What are the processes involved?
• How is continuity determined?
• How are protocols of netiquette constructed and instituted?
• How are social norms regulated?
• How do members change roles?

• How do potential community members locate a site?
• What software is necessary for access?
• How is information made available?
• What knowledge and skills are necessary for access?
• How are these represented?
• How are they obtained?

• What are the requirements of membership?
• How do community members interact on-line?
• Do community members interact IRL?
• Are these two types of interaction different?
• How do members enable their own purposes to be served within a community?
• What are the indicators of success, failure or stagnation?

These questions are a thin representation of the complexities of understanding learning in such curricula. How to chronicle the past backgrounds and achievements of those responsible for creating the learning settings and the kinds of pedagogies necessary for different possibilities for learners is a challenge. Accordingly, the various ways of representation have to reflect the diverse potential of learners.

To truly understand how each virtual community is a learning community, we have suggested that knowing the history and the descriptive features allows us to determine the varying learnings that are necessary for initiation, maintenance, and indeed success. Our examples demonstrate quite disparate learning settings but all require certain tasks and knowledge and skills necessary and sufficient for success. Of course there is the knowledge and skills associated with technology of cyberspace, but there also has to be an agenda, or purposes, that will interest others to form a community.

KS and Serbia.web both offer examples of communities formed through intentionality of either creating a culture (KS) or maintaining one (Serbia.web). Each required interest on the part of one or several individuals making a decision about initiating, and finding the appropriate technical features for it to happen. The same could be said for MOOkti and Achieve, since each required intentionality to create a community for the culture of learning. Each community has mechanisms for governing the community site, and creating ways for both attracting and maintaining community membership. It would appear that there is a culture of learning and learning in culture.

One of the key difficulties people have in considering or accepting the existence of virtual communities comes from their location in cyberspace, a term coined by William Gibson in his 1984 virtual dystopia Neuromancer. Part of this problem is created by the lack of a clear notion of what the location, or space, is, both real and virtual. We talk about spaces, social space, mental space, cultural space, public and private spaces as if there were a clear communal understanding of what these spaces are and what they mean to us. This lack of a canonical sense of what space is off-line makes it even more difficult to understand or accept how community can exist on-line when there is no physical location to which to attach itself. There may have been a collective notion of what a space was in the past, but this notion is not part of the modern fragmented world. Consider French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notions from The Production of Space, where he observes, "Yet did there not at one time, between the sixteenth century (the Renaissance – and the Renaissance city) and the nineteenth century, exist a code at once architectural, urbanistic and political, constituting a language common to country people and towns people, to the authorities and artists – a code which allowed space not only to be ‘read’ but also to be constructed?" (Lefebvre, 1991, 7) This notion of there existing at some definite point in time a consistent notion of location and space, one that has been disrupted in the development of modern culture, suggests that only a multifaceted notion of community can exist in the modern world, online or off. And more particularly the notion that the space in which a community exists is a construction regardless of whether it is a real or virtual location involved.

The construction of these new virtual spaces may be a technological utopian act, what Lefebvre calls a "science of space" which is in part "a technological utopia... within the framework of the real– the framework of the existing mode of production." (Lefebvre, 1991, 8-9) This may be a description of what virtual reality may represent, however, Lefebvre was not in a position to include observations of the rich explosion of online communities that have cropped up in the past five years or so since the World Wide Web invaded popular consciousness, and access to the Web became less a luxury for academics and corporations, and more accessible from the home, library, and in some cases laundromat and cafe. But it is through thinkers like Lefebvre that we can gain support for the notion that our question of whether virtual community exists is part of our modern, and post-modern, struggle to understand what community and community space itself is. (Cicognani, 1998)

The fact that we no longer have an agreed upon communal understanding of the real world around us, it is very difficult to develop a communal understanding of what virtual spaces represent. And we feel that this results in a suspicion in some, and an unquestioning acceptance of the notion of virtual community in others. In some ways, the whole of cyberspace is a community, much the same way as envisioning the whole of our planet is one community. The difference between the two is obvious, people make conscious decisions to inhabit cyberspace.

Notes

1)Polysynchronous is a term coined to describe the nature of MOOs where communication is an embedded combination of both synchronous and asynchronous communication (Nolan, 1998; Davie & Nolan, 1999). An IRC chat group is completely synchronous. Users communicate in real time, and there is usually no record kept of the communication unless one member personally creates a transcript of the interaction as a log. Asynchronous communication refers to the what happens on bulletin boards and via email where a message is composed and transmitted to another individual or group. In a MOO, communication can be synchronous or asynchronous, but is can also be a combination of both. A conversation can be encoded into an object for others to read. MOO objects can be programmed to listen to conversations between members and generate responses that become part of the MOO-space itself for other participants to listen to later. As well, a conversational interaction may take the form of direct synchronous speech and the co-manipulation of MOO objects. It is possible to talk with another person, hand her virtual objects for her to look at, co-program MOO objects, and record the conversation for a third party to read later. This type of polysynchrony is particular to MOO-type environments, but reflects the direction that collaborative virtual environments are anticipated to follow in the future.