Conceptualizing Technology-mediated Communities
Dana L. Grisham
California State University, East Bay
dana.grisham@csueastbay.edu
The Internet has become a vital tool in our society, bringing us closer than we ever thought possible to make learning - of all kinds, at all levels, any time, any place, any pace - a practical reality for every man, woman, and child (Hoctor, 2006, p. 1).
Looking Back
It is the year 1999, and I have been asked by a once-met colleague to be her co-editor of the International Reading Association’s peer reviewed electronic journal, Reading Online (http://www.readingonline.org). This is the second time I have been asked to contribute to ROL, but this time, as a newly tenured Associate Professor, I am delighted to accept. There are some intriguing aspects to this editorship. First, ROL has no paper analog—it is the first completely electronic journal published by IRA; subsequently, all of IRA’s print journals (Reading Research Quarterly, Reading Teacher, Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, and Read, Write, Think) were be placed online, but in 2000, when Bridget Dalton (CAST, Inc.) and I took over the editorship of ROL, it was the sole electronic publication at IRA. Bridget, at that time, was a professor at the University of Guam; I was at San Diego State University. All of our business was conducted by email except for meetings at conferences that we both attended. Our charge, as we saw it, was to extend the boundaries of literacy through the journal.
Evolving Conceptions of Literacy
Traditionally, literacy has been thought of as reading and writing. But literate individuals are now defined as individuals who are proficient in all forms of communication. Emerging technologies have created new opportunities for communication, and, as a result, mediated new types of communities.
Reading and writing are our most recognized symbol systems, but we also communicate through other signs and symbols, such as the visual arts, dance, music, and multimedia, to name a few. In the past, people used smoke signals, drum messages, trail signs, and hieroglyphics to communicate. Today we communicate using such disparate sign systems as art, body language, teenage slang, gang signs and colors, and many other less consciously considered ways. Sless (1986), refers to our use of signs and symbols as “our most important [human] capacity: creating and using messages” (preface, unpaginated).
Social semiotics tells us the ways in which people come to participate in “semiotic domains” (Gee, 2001). A semiotic domain recruits one or more “modalities” to communicate distinctive types of messages. An example is provided in the work that Golder and Donath (2004) have done on Usenet newsgroups.Communication takes place in highly specified ways and anyone who participates in the domain of special interest newsgroups knows that they must learn to participate in the domain according to a set of rules called a “design grammar.” A design grammar is a set of principles or patterns in terms of which material in domains are combined to communicate complex meaning. Golder and Donath (2004) explore social roles in newsgroups, saying that many of the roles people take on in everyday life are well defined and unambiguous. Although individuals act in an idiosyncratic manner, roles are useful because they comprise sets of expectations that allow us to categorize people in order to understand them (p.3).The individual who participates in a newsgroup such as motorcycle aficionados must also belong to an affinity group. Affinity groups are formed through shared practices and common endeavors. Each person’s knowledge is overlapping, embodied, and distributed. An “insider-outsider” relationship exists.
As Golder and Donath see it, a speech community is constituted by such a group of people, each one of which interacts with others in contextual roles. The term speech community assists in defining the contexts in which roles are enacted and the communicative competence needed to participate. Gee emphasizes that these are shared practices, not shared culture, gender or ethnicity. The way that one becomes part of an affinity group, learns the design grammar, and ultimately becomes adept and a part of a semiotic domain is, in a nutshell, what learning—and community—is all about. People may or may not find satisfaction in a community of speech—satisfaction may generate continued participation. From their research, Golder and Donath identify several roles in the newsgroups: celebrity, newbie, lurker, flamer, troll, and ranter. They point out that because of their high prestige, longer-term, more active members of a community have an inherent interest in protecting the community from outsiders and protecting its boundaries (p. 20). Yet, in a seeming paradox, these same members also have greater privilege to push and extend boundaries of acceptable conversation (p. 22). Of course, these roles can be transferred to any electronic speech community including academic communities. As a member of several listservs (such at CATENET and the National Reading Conference or NRC listserv) I can attest that flaming is common and lurking even commoner.
Electronic Communities
Humans are social beings who, over the ages, have created many kinds of affinity groups in various types of communities. Traditionally, geography has defined the boundaries of communities. Van Alstyne and Byrnjolfsson (1997) argue that he Internet can link geographically separated people and help them locate interesting or compatible resources, potentially bridging gaps and uniting communities; however, the Internet may also fragment human interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact. They further assert that just as separation in physical space, or basic “balkanization.” can divide geographic groups, … separation in virtual space, or "cyberbalkanization" can divide special interest groups (p. 3) and create “virtual homogeneity” (p. 4). They point out that:
Internet users can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values, and thus become less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own. This voluntary balkanization and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies as well as decentralized organizations. (p. 24)
At colleges and universities we have looked more towards the possibilities of the new communities of practice—we have (more or less) embraced the realities of technology in our professional lives. Although most of us are “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 2004) who will probably always look upon technology as something of a second language we have had to develop, we use technology in our courses through WebCT and Blackboard and freeware such as Nicenet (Grisham and Wolsey, 2006). Most of us could not accomplish our work without technology and many of our colleagues are virtual—we collaborate on projects electronically.
The “digital natives” are usually our students. In a recent literacy methods class, my teacher candidates were quite anxious to help me out of a technological “pickle” that threatened my ability to communicate with them via Blackboard. They are capable technology users who have an intuitive grasp of how to learn—to put it in terms of social semiotics; they are experts in this semiotic domain, having become part of the affinity group as youngsters.
These are the people who join specialized newsgroups, post to “My Space,” and use the Internet as a tool for whatever information they need. This came home to me recently with my grown children who visited the “’rents” and suggested we go to a restaurant for dinner. While I ran for the telephone book, my son hopped on the computer, found the website of the restaurant, and made the reservation. The Internet for my grown children is a “transparent” tool. As Seymour Papert (1996) put it:
Across the world there is a passionate love affair between children and computers . . . And more than wanting, they seem to know that in a deep way it already belongs to them. They know they can master it more easily and more naturally than their parents. They know they are the computer generation.
Reading Online ceased publication in 2005. Today it is a website where all the interesting and sometimes groundbreaking (for literacy educators, anyway) articles can still be accessed—for one excellent example, see John McEneany’s 2002 piece, “Ink to link: A hypertext history in 36 nodes.” But ROL’s legacy remains in the extensive web of products and services (and publications) at IRA (http://www.reading.org).
ROL also tried to create a community of users in its online listserv, with Gary Moorman (Appalachian State University) serving as the facilitator. Modeled after the wildly successful Reading Teacher listserv moderated by Don Leu (University of Connecticut). However, ROL’s listserv was always sporadic at best—perhaps because there was no time to build an affinity group. Even though the readership of ROL increased dramatically over the years of publication (1997-2005), it ceased publication before it could achieve the popularity that might have prevented its demise. However, educators around the world were able to access the content of ROL at amazing speeds. Bridget Dalton, in Guam, for example, could access the electronic journal at the same time as I did in San Diego, when it took almost 6 weeks for her paper journals to arrive. ROL was also free. Anyone could (and still can) access its contents without a password or a payment.
Today, electronic publications without paper presences are still rare, but they are on the increase. They are also more widely accepted—even in the conservative bastions of the medieval institution, the university.
Other academic examples of technology-mediated communities abound. I would like to share just one more with particular meaning for me. From 2004-2006, I co-directed the California State University’s Center for the Advancement of Reading (CAR), a community of literacy educators—a representative from each of the 23 campuses that make up the largest university system in the world and prepare almost 60% of the teachers in California. CAR also served as the clearinghouse for several system-wide task forces. In 2001, the CSU system became one of the first university systems to sponsor a self-evaluation of its teaching graduates and their immediate supervisors. Data from the surveys have been productively used to improve programs among the campuses.
One such effort was undertaken by the English Task Force. In 2003, these faculty were charged with improving the performance of seniors in high school English on the English Placement Test used for entry into the CSU undergraduate program. At length, the English Task Force produced a 12th Grade Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) with 14 modules centered around topically interesting non-fiction texts (for example, the module on “Fast Food” examines the link between obesity and super-sizing). The Task Force worked to create and field-test these modules, to provide professional development for English teachers across the state, and to gain approval for the course as a legitimate English course for high school seniors.
In early 2006, the Chancellor’s Office of the CSU created a website containing an electronic community for the all the teachers who participated in the professional development and may be using the materials in their English courses. The community (http://writing.csusuccess.org/site_help) is password protected but the discussion board is fairly active. When looking at the topics under discussion in early October 2006, the conversations on the discussion board centered around new ideas and strategies for using the modules and a lively discussion about the need to adapt materials and strategies for English Learners. John Edlund (Cal Poly Pomona) remains active on the website, acting as informal moderator.
Concluding Thoughts
The literacy education community tends to be conservative and to identify themselves with print technologies. It has proved difficult to make the case that multiple literacies need to be considered when establishing classroom communities of learning. I am not alone in suggesting that the standards and accountability movement has provided a drag on such integration of literacy and technology (Hoctor, 2006). In addition, the rapid pace at which our technologies have been evolving have put them beyond the reach of many (if not most) of our school systems, where it is not unusual to find computer hardware and software that is out of date and thus out of use. How can school entities on fairly fixed budgets keep up the pace? Teachers, who find themselves alone in classrooms with students for six hours per day, may find trying to use technology more frustrating than productive. These teachers may belong to electronic communities of speech for personal and professional needs, but they tend to use technology sparingly in their classrooms.
Ultimately, I believe technology-mediated communities will continue to grow in influence. There are studies that show that a sense of community can be as strong, if not stronger, in such communities (Many, Wallace, Stevenson, & Eickholdt, 2004). The fact is, we all participate in many roles in many affinity groups and an increasing number of them are technology-mediated communities. As today’s children reach adulthood, such technology-mediated groups will be the norm. I close with a quote from Gee (2003), who notes,
Since reading and thinking are social achievements connected to social groups, we can all read and think in different ways when we read and think as members (or as if we were members) of different groups. (p.3)
References:
Gee, J. P. (2001, May). Readingas situated language: A socio-cognitive perspective. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44, (8), 714-725.
Golder, S. A. & Donath, J. (2004). Social roles in electronic communities. Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference Internet Research 5.0 September 19-22, 2004, Brighton, England. Retrieved online September 29, 2006at web.media.mit.edu/~golder/projects/roles/golder2004.pdf
Hoctor, M. (2006). Investigating professional development in technology for literacy teachers. Unpublished Dissertation. San DiegoStateUniversityand Universityof San Diego: San Diego, CA.
Grisham, D. L. & Wolsey, T.D. (2006). Recentering the middle school classroom as a vibrant learning community: Students, literacy, and technology intersect. Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, 49, (8), 648-660.
Many, J., Wallace, F.H., Stephenson, J., & Eickholdt, L. (2004, September/October). “I know them better than students in my on-campus courses”: Exploring a personalized approach to online instruction. Reading Online, 8(2). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=many/index.html
McEneaney, J.E. (2000, November). Ink to link: A hypertext history in 36 nodes. Reading Online, 4(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/mceneaney2/index.html
Papert, S. (1996). The connected family: Bridging the digital generation gap. Atlanta, GA: Longstreet Press.
Prensky, M. (2004). The wisdom (and worth) of "generation techs." Strategy+Business, Fall, 2004. Retrieved October 3, 2006, from http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/04314?pg=0.
Sless, D. (1986). In search of semiotics. London, England: Croom Helm.
Van Alstyne, M. & Brynjolfsson, E. (1997) Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans? 17th International Conference on Information Systems, Cleveland, OH (Dec. 1996) Retrieved online September 29, 2006 at web.mit.edu/marshall/www/papers/CyberBalkans.pdf
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