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.

This volume is unique in its focus on the learning and change that takes place in the building of communities in cyberspace. Knowledge and resources for knowledge building are central to both virtual and physical communities. Members, or participants, in any community are engaged in learning that is critical to the survival and reproduction of that community. This learning may be even more true for virtual communities than it is for physical communities. For those concerned with building virtual communities and those who are working to understand the impact of virtual communities on participants, clarity about the nature of learning and change that is enabled by the Internet is of particular importance.

At first glance, identifying the nature of learning and change that takes place as a virtual community builds out may seem a straightforwardenough proposition. A dearth of literature has supported the importance of community to learners of all ages (Barab & Duffy, 2000; Bellah et al., 1985; Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 1999; Brown & Campione, 1994; Lave, 1993; Wellman & Gulia, 1999; Wenger, 1999). Through community participation, learners find and acquire models and have the opportunity themselves to be models and apprentices. In community participation, activities such as asking questions and providing the person with whom one is talking with background information are both supported and socialized.

In this chapter, a virtual community is defined as a group of people whointeract with each other, learn from each others' work, and provide knowledge and information resources to the group related to certain agreed-upon topics of shared interest. A defining characteristic of a virtual community in this sense is that a person or institution must be a contributor to the evolving knowledge base of the group and not just a recipient or consumer of the group's services or knowledge base. Members and the community as a whole take advantage of information technologies and telecommunications for these purposes, in addition to face-to-face interactions they may have. The notion of learning as applied to a virtual community means that there is a mutual knowledge-building process taking place. Members learn both by teaching others and by applying to their own situations the information, tools, know-how, and experiences provided by others in the virtual community. In contrast, a local community is a group of people and organizations who have common interests, concerns, and mutual interdependence by virtue of their living and working in a geographic locality under a common government. In both of the case studies discussed in this chapter, efforts were made to strengthen local communities through applications of information technologies and telecommunications.

Learning and change in the virtual community is increasingly interdependent with learning and change in the participants' local institutions and local communities. This is a fundamental difference from earlier virtual communities.

If one were to read Building Virtual Communities for its references alone it would be a valuable book. We have accumulated a considerable body of literature that examines and theorizes online community, and this book does a marvelous job of pushing forward and extending the conversation about their manifestation and maintenance.

But the tensions they manifest and maintain can still be heard as a murmur beneath that conversation. Do we “build” virtual communities, or do they occur on their own, “organically”? Are they “imagined” or “real”? Is online community a new form of encounter with others, or is it a variation on the theme of a (siren) song? We know the virtual cannot (at least, not yet) be entirely disassociated from the “real” (Jones, 1998). And our research into online social phenomena is routinely escaping that trap of dissociation. Less and less of it may be critiqued in ways that Wellman and Gulia (1999) critiqued earlier Internet research that

But as our study of the online and off-line worlds we create continues to grow, let us also increase our sensitivity to the ways that we are creating the articulations between online and off-line.

In this chapter, we identify design considerations and strategies for creating online learning communities. Learning communities encourage integrated understanding and develop a common set of criteria for evaluating ideas. We report on four distinct learning communities focused on teacher professional development, curriculum authoring, scientific inquiry, and peer review of projects. The examples illustrate the design considerations and strategies that we use to facilitate the transformation and sharing of resources to support integrated understanding within learning communities.

Design considerations are general guidelines for creating effective communities. This chapter illustrates four design considerations for creating successful learning communities:

• Support the actual practices and daily tasks of the participants,

• Collect experiences and represent them in an accessible and equitable manner,

• Provide a framework to guide the learning process,

• Represent the identities of the community members.

We implement these design considerations in our communities using various design strategies. For example, a strategy for representing the identities of community members involves displaying photographs alongside comments in discussions. These design strategies, based on the underlying design considerations, encourage community members to share their ideas, build on each other's views, and refine their own understanding. Our instructional framework, called “scaffolded knowledge integration” (SKI; Linn & Hsi, 2000), inspired our design considerations and guided the learning process in the communities.

In this chapter, we describe how our design considerations and strategies scaffold four teacher and student communities as they exchange resources, develop coherent ideas, and support individual understanding.

This chapter addresses the way in which the Internet forms the core of an intentional, online community by promoting communication between interested parties. The Math Forum (mathforum.org) is a unique group of individuals who are committed to using computers and the Internet to enhance what they know about learning, teaching, and doing mathematics. The Math Forum includes programmers, project and service staff, Web persons, and an ever-expanding number of teachers, students, and other individuals (i.e., parents, software developers, mathematicians). Thus, community building for The Math Forum staff includes work with teachers, with partners (National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics, Mathematics Association of America, and so on), and with specific services developed by The Math Forum staff that enable teachers and students to come together to pose and seek solutions to problems.

The Math Forum uses the Internet to provide interactive services that foster mathematical thinking and discussion. These services include Ask Dr. Math and several Problems of the Week (PoWs); a teacher discussion format called Teacher to Teacher (T2T); an archive of problems, participant contributions (e.g., lesson plans), and past discussions; and an Internet newsletter. Within four years, with no explicit efforts to garner promotion or publicity, the site grew to include 1,600,000 Web pages and to attract 3.5 million accesses and over 800,000 visitors per month – a third of which constitutes sticky traffic ranging from world-famous mathematicians to elementary school children.

The computer mediated sharing of common interests, experiences, thoughts, and fellowship combined with an ability to access health and welfare information and/or challenge professional monopolies of expertise is becoming ubiquitous. This is especially true in the United States (Denzin, 1998; Ferguson, 1996) but is also increasing on a globalscale (Burrows et al., 2000). At the time of writing, the bulk of Internet traffic relating to online self-help, and social support occurs within the almost 20,000 different Usenet news groups. Also important are the 100,000 or so publicly accessible discussion lists. However, given the recent trend for different forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to coalesce with Web pages to form more integrated systems of information and online support (offering perhaps Web-based information services alongside integrated provision to join mailing lists, discussion groups, and/or to engage in real-time chat), the virtual geography of wired self-help and social support is in a state of some flux. This chapter asks what sociologists are to make of the emergence of these wired forms of self-help and social support?

We begin with an illustration of the sort of “virtual community care” and support with which we are concerned.