Observations on Developing a Virtual Community 2001

With the support of a Connecticut State University Research Grant from July 2000 – June 2001, I had the opportunity to explore the development of virtual communities. We defined the project’s goal as developing

“a virtual community for K16 learning and teaching designed to provide support for educators to develop online learning resources and to discuss issues in educational technology and effective teaching practices.”

During Fall 2000, I researched opportunities for developing a virtual community at no cost. On another project on evaluating science and mathematics websites, I was introduced to intranets.com, a company that offered individuals the opportunity to develop their own websites on the Internet for communications – discussions, email, archiving and sharing documents, polling participants. intranets.com seemed to provide a good environment for developing online, virtual communities.

Minority Teacher Recruitment and Retention Community

In January 2001, Dr. Yuhang Rong, of the Minority Teacher Recruitment Office in the Connecticut State Department of Education, and I developed an intranets.com website for Minority Teacher Recruitment. The goals of this community was to develop

“a cyber-forum on ideas and initiatives designed to diversify the teaching force. Topics include outreach to K-12 students and teachers, such as future teachers' organizations, workshops and institutes for future teachers; school-university (K-16) collaboratives to recruit and retain quality teachers; scholarships and other support for teacher education candidates and current teachers; job fairs as well as other recruitment and retention efforts; and discussion on expanding partnerships for this vital goal among segments of the educational system, government agencies, private businesses, and local communities.”

Although 53 educational leaders joined this community, only 6 members visited more than once; 28 others visited but did not join. The range of members was impressive, but the community did not generate participation. Dr. Rong developed topics for discussion on Introductions, Minority Teacher Supply and Demand, Programs and Initiatives, and What Can A Rural School District Do? but unfortunately these discussions did not gather participants.

Community for Teacher Education in Liberal Arts Colleges –

Another website was developed to serve as forum for Teacher Educators in Liberal Arts Colleges to discuss the infusion of Educational Technology in the curriculum, as a precursor to a grant proposal to the U.S. Department of Education’s program in Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3). The directory description of this community was

“Teacher Education in Liberal Arts Colleges - Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3)- is a consortium of Teacher Education Program in Liberal Arts Colleges designed to develop, practice, and share effective strategies for nurturing technology-using teachers for the nation's schools. Founding institutions include Eastern Connecticut State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, Knox College, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and Ramapo College of New Jersey.”

Potential topics for discussion included Budget Matters, College/university descriptions, Consortium Building Discussions, Evaluating and assessing, Next Steps. This community was introduced during a telephone conference with a representative for each of these colleges to discuss opportunities for collaboration. Of the four members in the Teacher Educators in Liberal Arts Colleges community who joined online, only 2 members visited more than once. This community did not thrive for no one of the group was willing to take on the leadership of developing the grant proposal.

Virtual Community for K16 Learning and Teaching

A third community was developed with the support of the CSU Research Grant. Designed for K12 and postsecondary faculty members, I sent out a call for participation through the Connecticut Educators’ Computer Association (CECA). Participants were offered a stipend for actively initiating and joining such discussion topics as Conference presentations, Connecticut’s Digital Library, E-Books, Educational technology online opportunities in CT, K-12 Partnership Best Practices, NCTM’s announcements, PowerPoint Uses, Proposed MS in Ed. Tech. Program, Technology as an Agent of Change in Teacher Practice, Technology Standards for School Administrators, ThinkQuest, Your Technology Curriculum.

Sixteen educators joined in the discussions with 9 visiting less than 10 times, 3 between 10 and 15 times, 2 between 20 and 25 times, 1 visiting 38 times, and 1 visiting 44 times. The site documents note that I made 68 visits to the community.

“From: helpdesk@intranets.com [mailto:helpdesk@intranets.com]
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2001 12:50 PM
To: stoloffd@easternct.edu
Subject: RE: Product Feedback (David Stoloff at Virtual Community for
K16 Learning and Teaching) [T200105110007]

When we began offering our service, it appeared advertising would be a
successful means of supporting Web-based services. In the last 9
months, the advertising model has dramatically eroded, so it's simply
not possible to cover the costs of providing intranets for free through
advertising any longer.

Thank you for contacting the help desk at Intranets.com and have a
great day!

Intranets.com. Get Everyone on the Same Page”

My reaction was to begin to explore moving the virtual community. I found that Blackboard.com^smprovides the opportunity for one to

“Create a FREE course Web site to bring your learning materials, class discussions, and even tests online. Supplement an existing class or teach a course entirely on the Web.” [http://www.blackboard.com/ ]

I took up on the offer and developed a Virtual Community for K12 Learning and Teaching at http://www.blackboard.com/courses/EDU580/ . This site remains available. Participants from the intranets.com community were willing to migrate to this new home for our discussions. Appendix E represents the discussion board of this Blackboard community.

Three Lessons Learned from This Experience in Developing Virtual Communities

1) The Project Director does not have to initiate all of the discussions.

If there is the right mix of participants with the ability to generate their own discussion topics, community members will take leadership in initiating and responding. While using the intranets.com environment for the K16 Learning and Teaching Community, I initiated 4 discussion forums, while 10 were initiated by the participants from professional questions they had, from their observations of the media or of technology, or from each other. In the Blackboard.com environment, I initiated only 2 of the 26 discussion forums.

The Project Director should actively participate in the discussions and may subtly suggest the flow of the ideas, but it doesn’t seem necessary for the director to control all of the topics and manage the discussion at all times.

2) Discussion forums may follow a stage of development.

There seems to be an initial period in a discussion group when there is a lot of enthusiasm, interest, and participation. Unfortunately, this period seems to fade within a few weeks and the responses seem be cyclic with a rhythm of peaks and valleys with a frequency of two weeks.

After an initial response of 30 threads in the discussions during the last two weeks of January by members of the CECA listserv, I encouraged graduate students to also participate. The activity continued to decline. On March 6, I asked those who had enrolled in the community to respond to the following poll.

There was an increase in activity during the two weeks following this poll’s introduction. When there was a decline in April, I used email to remind the participants about the expectation of “at least 3 visits and interactions per week” and there seems to have been another spurt of activity.

On May 11, we began to migrate the community from intranets.com to the Blackboard.com^smenvironment. This move seems to coincide with another spurt of activity in the latter part of May.

Now that the school year is over, there is less activity while participants are enjoying some time off. Several of the participants have been interested by their experiences with threaded discussions and a virtual community and have enrolled in either oncampus on online Educational Technology courses.

3) Maintaining a discussion requires vigilance, nurturance, and novelty.

There should be a good reason to maintain the virtual community. Threaded discussions are effective as the core of an online course, but these discussions require logging-in and are not as convenient as maintaining an email discussion with an individual or small groups of individuals. The extra steps needed to join the community may outweigh the convenience of reading the history of the conversation outlined in a threaded discussion.

Participants in the virtual community rely on email to maintain the conversation, instead of the space available through BlackBoard. On October 21, 2001, one participant emailed the entire group to discuss setting up a virtual community in the classroom. A respondent suggested instead of setting up a community that –

“I have a better option -- completely filtered email.... Each school can set up a set of accounts at http://www.gaggle.net for FREE. The school master (or head teacher in your situation) can set the system to prevent all email from going to students without a set of school master eyes seeing it -- in bound and out bound. I use the system with my third graders.... and the middle school in my district likes it as well.... “

During this Spring 2002, building on these experiences with virtual communities, the author and Ms. Hannah Sellers, an Assistant Professor in Educational Technology at ECSU, 10 pre-service teachers, 10 middle school or high school teachers coordinating YES (Young Educator Society) Clubs or Future Teachers Clubs, and their students will explore setting up a system for sharing ideas about education and learning and teaching with educational technology. We will invite to participate middle school and high school students in Connecticut who would like to explore Education as a profession, as well as students associated with our ThinkQuest for Tomorrow’s Teachers project partners at Hampton University, Barry University, New Mexico State University, and others.

We are thinking of focusing on the following topics online in structured two-week discussion cycles:

With the support of a grant from the State Department of Education to the ECSU-CREC consortium, this exploration into developing virtual communities with middle school and high school students, their teachers, pre-service teachers, and university faculty will culminate with a late spring workshop on website applications in learning and teaching and a week-long summer institute at the end of June 2002. This project will also be partially supported by a US Department of Education-funded Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology grant to the ThinkQuest for Tomorrow’s Teachers consortium.

Connecting via email or by participating in a virtual community enables individuals to learn from each other across distance and time. The connections which were developed in the January – June 2001 exploration into virtual communities have evolved into a group of educators who make use of email to consult and share ideas. It is hoped that students will also find these tools useful in their learning and professional development.

Thanks to the Connecticut State University Research Grant funds for their support of this project. If you are interested in participating in the next phase of this project, developing communities for future teachers, please contact David Stoloff at stoloffd@easternct.edu .

A History of Three Virtual Communities

Minority Teacher Recruitment and Retention Community

Virtual Community for K16 Learning and Teaching