Finding a professional connection with a colleague seems like a simple task but can devour hours of time. An anecdote illustrates why this is hard. A researcher whom we will call David got a call with a question about research on interactive toys. David had some experience in that area and immediately recalled several people who did similar work, but who didn't quite fit the bill of this request. He vaguely remembered someone he had heard about who did do that sort of work – the researcher was a Canadian woman who had recently won an award for women in computer science. He thought but wasn't sure that the woman was from western Canada. With these recollections in mind, he set about trying to find her.

First, he tried searching based on the topic. He began with a Web search on the topic area but found far too many results. He tried narrowing his search but had no luck. He tried a number of refinements, including searching on words related to the award, and so on. After spending nearly half an hour, he decided to try a different strategy.

This time, David tried to find the researcher through his social network. He began by asking a co-worker down the hall. A short conversation didn't yield any leads. Continuing down the hall, he asked another colleague. Again, the colleague didn't know the person he was seeking, but this person did suggest another related researcher who might know the mystery woman's identity.

This series for Cambridge University Press is becoming widely known as an international forum for studies of situated learning and cognition.

Innovative contributions are being made by anthropology; by cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology; by computer science; by education; and by social theory. These contributions are providing the basis for new ways of understanding the social, historical, and contextual nature of learning, thinking, and practice that emerges from human activity. The empirical settings of these research inquiries range from the classroom to the workplace, to the high-technology office and to learning in the streets and in other communities of practice.

The situated nature of learning and remembering through activity is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations and extend their sphere of activity and communicative competencies. But cognitive theories of knowledge representation and learning alone have not provided sufficient insight into these relationships. This series was born of the conviction that new and exciting interdisciplinary syntheses are underway as scholars and practitioners from diverse fields seek to develop theory and empirical investigations adequate for characterizing the complex relations of social and mental life and for understanding successful learning wherever it occurs. The series invites contributions that advance our understanding of these seminal issues.

The issue of identity features prominently in discourses about information technology (IT). One conspicuous narrative presented in IT commentary is that the use of the Internet radically changes our perception of who and what we are. Apparently, in anonymous online chat groups you can play charades, wear a mask, and pretend to be of a different age, gender, or appearance (Turkle, 1995; Murray, 1999). It seems that we can accomplish this transformation of identity with great fluidity now. As the Internet and its successors become more pervasive and the technologies become more sophisticated and convincing, then presumably the issue of identity itself comes under review, as do related concepts: that against which we assert our identity (community) and the means by which one's identity is promoted and transformed (education).

We survey the debt owed by contemporary IT narratives and practices to certain intellectual positions as they pertain to identity. This analysis inevitably involves a consideration of change, community, and education. Identity implies continuity in a sense of the self, a constancy behind the ever-changing mask of appearances. In the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which dominate in the western tradition, the changing nature of the sensible realm is contrasted with the invariance of the realm of the forms, the place of identity. Whereas we and other things change, through the forces of generation, destruction, locomotion, growth, and diminution (our hair turns grey and disappears, we gather wrinkles, stoop a little, and change our occupation), that which remains constant is our identity – the immutable part of our human being that participates in the realm of the forms.

More than half of the classrooms in the United States are wired to the Internet, and the number of classrooms connected is rapidly increasing (NCES, 1999). As this network infrastructure is put in place, teachers and learners can form and participate in network-based learning communities. But for these communities to function in productive ways, we need to better understand how these communities are formed, grow, function in some mature steady state, and decline and terminate. A better understanding of this “life cycle” allows teachers and learners to better function in these network-based learning communities and permits the development of institutional structures that more appropriately support learning and teaching in these new media.

In this chapter, we review studies of network-based learning communities, especially those communities formed around collaborative projects, and present evidence for systematic patterns of change in these communities over time. Such communities are born, undergo growth, reach a level of mature functioning, and then undergo decline and cease to function. Like biological organisms, this life cycle can be truncated when the community is not properly supported or when external factors intervene in some traumatic way. We describe the life cycle of network-based communities by examining in depth an extended case study of a network-based learning activity. We conclude with a discussion of the kinds of support needed to encourage the growth and mature functioning of productive network-based learning communities.

Review

There have been a number of pioneering efforts to explicate the nature of network-based learning communities.

The reader is in for a treat in the highly knowledgeable and varied chapters that follow. The volume includes authors from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, all of whom have experience working directly with computer-mediated communication and community building. Each chapter provides a different perspective on the many ways that human interactions are being mediated in some fashion by the Internet. Each chapter also makes suggestions about the implications of this new set of technological capacities for the social organization of learning and development in contemporary society. This vast territory is unusually well explored in this volume.

As the comments of several of the authors indicate, memories of becoming involved in computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a medium of intellectual communication have something of a “flashbulb” character to them. Not unlike my memory of where I was when John Kennedy was shot, I remember the conditions that led to my use of CMC and my discovery that it could be a resource for community building.

The year was 1978. I had just moved to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) with a joint appointment in Psychology and Communication. These two academic units were located on different parts of the campus. To complicate matters, my major research project was the study of classroom lessons in a school located approximately 20 miles from the campus, but my research laboratory was part of an organized research unit located near the psychology department.

The ideal and widely held belief about communities is that they are composed of people who live close to each other, who freely share companionship, goods, services, and support of all kinds to other members of the community. Although this view still holds our hearts, it is often lamented as an ideal “lost” with the advent of urban life (Burbules, 2000; Fischer, 1982; Wellman, 1999a). However, we still find ourselves as members of communities, tied to others by kinship, friendship, work, and neighborhood. What has changed is our ability to maintain relationships with more far-flung intimates and associates, using the telephone, cars, airplanes, and electronic communication to keep in contact. Communities exist “liberated” from geography and neighborhood (Wellman, 1979). We can define community based on what we do with others, rather than where we live with others in terms of the social networks we maintain (Fischer, 1982; Wellman, 1988, 1999a; Wellman & Gulia, 1999a).

Viewing community as resting on an underlying social network provides us with a way of examining and understanding the basis of computer-networked communities (Wellman et al., 1996) – communities where geographical colocation and face-to-face meetings have been removed as prerequisites for communal ties, where people do not need to meet face to face and yet sustain personal relationships with others within a community context. A social network perspective lets us explore some of the ambiguities of online communities, such as how “community” can be used to refer to both “networks of virtual strangers exchanging ideas and information” and “virtual friends debating the finer points of gender-bending their online personae” (McLaughlin, Osborn & Smith, 1995, p. 93).

Popular media, prominent politicians, and technology enthusiasts convey rich imagery about the transformative educational potential of the Internet. Compelling visions are epitomized in a speech given by U.S. President Clinton:

Indeed, there is little argument about the fact that universal Internet connections would provide many students with access to a vast array of information as well as to potentially enriching opportunities to interact with distant others who would not otherwise be available.

However, it is less certain that Internet access in and of itself will end up making available the same learning for all school age children; strong evidence indicates that existing attitudes toward, interest in, and use of technology are clearly related to variables such as gender and race. For example, gender and race have been shown to predict Internet use even when financial barriers to access are removed, with young, European American males dominating (Kraut et al., 1996). Boys are more likely than girls to use computers during discretionary time (Durndell & Lightbody, 1993; Hess & Miura, 1985; Hoyles, 1988; Schofield, 1995) to enroll in computer science courses, particularly as the required level of expertise increases, and to earn computer science degrees (Hoyles, 1988; National Center for Education Statistics, 1997; Schofield, 1995).

At the very moment that there is talk about the loss of “real” community, many theorists, researchers, and practitioners – groups who don't typically “speak” to one another – all appear to share a common interest in the community enabled by the Internet (Jones, 1995, 1998; Kiesler, 1997; Loader, 1997; Mitchell, 1995; Rheingold, 1993; Shields, 1996; Smith & Kollack, 1999). These discussions range from the need to redefine community, based on the dynamic and seemingly elusive qualities of virtual community; to concern for appropriate indices and measures for describing a community in the process of rapid change; to efforts to identify the nature of users, how they are interacting, and their needs.

Several features of the virtual world contribute to the recent proliferation of references to, and the self-referencing of particular sites as, virtual communities. These features include: (a) an image of a community to which a core of users/participants returns over time, with whom a community might be built out (providing feedback, lending a volunteer hand, contributing to discussions and activity, etc.); (b) distinctions between physical and virtual communities in terms of temporal and spatial possibilities; and (c) the multilayered quality of communicative space that allows for the mingling of different conversations, the linking of conversations across Web sites, and the archiving of discussions, information, and the like, that permits social exchange around site resources at a future time.

In this chapter, we explore the ways individuals and groups are using the Internet to build communities.

The generic conventions of an afterword to a printed collection provide an author of the afterword with substantial freedom but also considerable responsibility. Not having been involved in the conception of the project or selection of the contributors, the author has relatively little stake in the outcome. Constrained only by those general rules of scholarly etiquette, the author can more or less say anything. By the same token, however, readers can presume that what the author says is indeed what he or she thinks!

In the light of these considerations, please permit me a few words of situating. I started thinking seriously about education, automated information technology (AIT), and change in general social dynamics like community a long time ago. In the early 1970s, I was a staff person for a new left U.S. organization, New University Conference (NUC). As described in my book, Cyborgs@Cyberspace? (Hakken, 1999), NUC's interest in this topic was political, prompted by concern for the de-skilling impact of computerized teaching machines on teachers' work and whether this might lead to greater militancy. I have continued to think about these intersections, as an educational anthropologist (who did a dissertation on workers' education in Sheffield, England); an ethnographer of technology and social change at levels from the local to the global; a consultant on numerous social programs, including the evaluation of several educational initiatives; and a college professor teaching about community more consistently than anything else for twenty-three years, using a variety of technical tools to do so.

What Happened to MediaMOO?

A typical Tuesday evening, 1993–1996: In the online cafe, writing teachers begin to arrive. Twenty-five teachers will spend an hour discussing how to handle inappropriate student behavior in electronic environments. Afterwards, a few will stay for a game of ScrabbleT and good conversation. Some will also attend the poetry reading on Wednesday. In a virtual hallway, an anthropologist stops to chat with a computer programmer about some recently released software. A communications professor in Seattle, Washington, meets with a graduate student in Queensland, Australia, to discuss a survey of online behavior they are developing together. More than one thousand people from thirty-four countries are active members.

A typical Tuesday evening, 1999: The space is empty. The writing teachers found another place to meet years ago. The communications professor drops by, finds no one else connected, and immediately leaves.

The “place” is MediaMOO, a text-based virtual reality environment (multiuser domain or MUD) designed to be a professional community for media researchers (Bruckman & Resnick, 1995). MediaMOO was founded in 1992 by Amy Bruckman as a place where people doing research on new media could share ideas, collaborate, and network. MediaMOO's environment was designed to recreate the informal atmosphere and social interaction of a conference reception. Members came from a wide variety of disciplines, creating a diverse environment that fostered interdisciplinary research and learning.

MediaMOO reached its peak of activity in the mid-1990s but had fallen into disuse by 1998. What caused MediaMOO's decline?

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). It is also important not to confuse learning exclusively with school knowledge, for knowledge comes in many forms and for different purposes (Barnes, 1988; 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 onward. They move from setting to setting such as the home, playground, school, service groups, and church, and over the years add work settings and other leisure activities. Our interests center around creating and conducting inquiry on such learning environments. This particular focus includes both formal school settings, nonschool settings (museums, science centers, public spaces, and the Internet), and the points of intersection between these environments. These interests combine work in both real and virtual, online and off-line spaces. Understanding the nexus of learning and community relies upon an analysis of each context, so as 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 online 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.