Expanding my mind - What is a community?

After a recent email discussion and a direct comment on my misunderstanding of the Facilitating Online Communities course (FOC08), I have retreated to the corner for some quiet reading and thinking time. As our facilitator had stated and challenged, teachers were hesitant to step outside their experience of education to contemplate community facilitation in a broader context.

So I've chased some reading and listening, and some thoughts, to expand my understanding of what Leigh Blackall is attempting to get us to consider. These thoughts below are not inter-related, but have stemmed from my thinking, reading and listening.

Firstly, I should consider the concept of community similar to what is my PLN. There are a range of connections I utilise to provide me inspiration and knowledge, but I do not manage them. The information they generate is independent of me, however they form a significant part of what is me. My facilitation of these is simply seek, sort and utilise. It was when I considered this that I began to understand (hopefully) what Leigh is talking about. So what roles exist in this community. Certainly I am the moderator, selecting to digest and utilise only the information I deem important or interesting. My moderation does not extend to influence over what information is published or posted within the PLN, simply what is attended to. In regards to facilitation, I believe this relates to the environment I establish for the PLN. For example, I use a netvibes account to aggregate the blogs I read and juice for podcasts. Times of aggregation and distribution from there is my facilitation. Do I have a teaching role in this community, I don't believe so.

Secondly, I reflected on my experience within my son's soccer team. As the coach I have a direct role for teaching, and this is obvious. I then thought of community as how the parents interact. We organise outings to the park, volunteering for reffing and washing jerseys, collecting match payments etc. No-one takes control of this, is just happens. This to me represented the community aspect. A group coming together under similar interests, and interacting within the environment. Each person offered to contribute, and the others supported the contribution. Again, within this community there is no teaching and I perceive we all facilitate to a degree. With this particular community I perceive moderation would be personal and internal.

To delve back into my world as a teacher, I can see how this developing understanding could produce interesting learning experiences and outcomes within my classes. It certainly ties in with my beliefs about connectivism and transformative learning.

I believe I am beginning to develop a true understanding of community and how their existence and function does not necessarily have to end in an educational goal.

What is an Online Community?

I have followed with interest the conversation that has occured within the google groups email, and followed links suggested from other networks I am associated with. This research has lead me to the following belief of what an online community is.

Firstly, I believe that as educated people we tend to get caught up in the expanding nature of the english language. New words and conjunctions of words are developed at a rapid rate, often without significant attempt to define the emergent terms. When we are fronted with a task of presenting what we believe the definition of a term is, like terms are suggested for contemplation and debate. I do not want to enter into the discussions over the differences between communities, networks or groups. I am not interested in exploring the range of community types that exist and whether they relate to researched models. Rather I want to as simply as I can express what a community is, and then offer thoughts on how online communities differ from face to face communities.

In any community there is a buy in, some action to become involved. This suggests that the individual member has some desire to be involved initially, with depth of involvement to be realised at a later date. This is true for my online communities also. I need to subscribe to the blogs, enrol in the course, follow people on twitter and befriend them on Facebook. I actively seek inclusion within the community. However I also choose the level of interaction.

To me the vast difference between online and face to face communities is the pressure for action. It is difficult to be a lurker in a face to face community. Community members would be suspicious of the person sitting and simply gathering all the information but not contributing. Yet this occurs readily in online communities. We will all see many more visits to our blogs than comments posted. Anonymity is an advantage to some in the online communities. In any community members will have individual goals. Anonymity in online communities allows the uninterrupted (and not embarrassing) gathering of information without contribution.

Another significant difference is the ability to "switch off" interaction with specific community members, or whole communities. If I decide someone's tweets are of no use to me, I can simply switch them off without needing to front the person and asking them to stop sending them. This unlimited ability to build of each community exactly what we desire is specific to online communities. This cannot occur face to face without much emotional strain. Similarly, someone can switch me off and I don't necessarily know about. This has the added effect of reduced feedback to me as the contributor, I don't know I am no longer of interest let alone why.

The benefits of online communities are expressed many times over by many people. To me, how else can I readily communicate with people in other parts of the world as easily (and at the same time) as people in my own neighbourhood.

So what is an online community? It is a unique experience where the individual member can build the environment they desire, contribute at a level they are comfortable with and have complete control over what interaction they experience. I guess this is why some online communities fail, as members with vastly different goals ultimately don't collaborate. Unless there is a motivated group that continue facilitating contributions, the commnity will stagnate.

Characteristics of an online community.

The question has been posed, what is a online community? At first reflection I wondered whether I was thinking deep enough on the issue. Was the concept of "online" and "community" as simple as they were obvious?

I am a member of twitter, delicious, facebook and diigo. Each of these services allows me to put something on display for others to see. I can achieve the same process in other ways. I could send SMS or email messages containing the exact same content and push them out to everyone in my contact list. I could spend the time to call people on the phone and advise them what I was thinking or doing. However this requires me to seek the connections and push the information.

To me, the key characteristic of an online community is we seek the connections and information we desire, it is not pushed to us. Any updates I receive through the services I use has required me to "buy in" and agree to updates. I have sought the information that others have posted in the space. If I find a particular person's updates irrelevant I can ignore them or even request no further updates from them. Each individual builds their own online community depending on the tools they use and the people they follow.

This then sparks the thought of tools as enablers for the community. As my repertoire of tools has expanded, my community has expanded. However with that I feel I have also lost regular contact with some people. There are then tools we can use to gather, sort and present the information from the services we subscribe to. I can use Twhirl to view and manage twitter posts. I can establish personal portals (eg. netvibes) and install a facebook widget. The possibilities are never ending.

So what is an online community. At its core it is a personal community constructed by the individual. It is often thought online communities cross boundaries, however boundaries as constructed by the individual still exist. The potential for them to grow beyond control is immense, therefore the ability to facilitate an online community and the skills I learn in this course will enable my personal community as well as any learning communities I endeavour to manage.