Dr. Diane Howard's Publications, Presentations  

Facilitation and Enhancement in Online Community
 

Copyright © 2005
Diane Howard, Ph.D.


Department of Communication and Dramatic Arts
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

Monograph for Ethnic Studies Conference
(Joint National Conference-
National Association of African American Studies,
National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies,
National Association of Native American Studies,
International Association of Asian Studies)
Feb.  2005

By Diane Howard, Ph.D.
Collaborator- Dee Hughes

Online communities today are vibrant throughout the world. The Internet facilitates and nurtures distance relationships, as well as local, face-to-face communities. The online world is a rich social one, in which Internet users participate within e-communities in serious, meaningful, and productive dialogues. Tens of millions around the globe have joined online communities, which include professional, academic, and lay interest groups.

            The research of the Pew Center challenges common concerns that Internet users may, in general, withdraw from social, face-to-face relationships and become isolated, depressed, and alienated. Their findings further challenge concerns that Internet users might remove themselves from physical contact with their local communities, as they favor online communication with those in other parts of the world (Pew Research Center, 2001). Pierre Levy (1998), who has studied virtual communities, suggests that participants in e-groups can experience at times more satisfying relationships than in face-to-face groups in which bureaucratic and authoritarian personalities and organizations stifle individual participants. However, distance communication researchers and scholars further contend that the sense of belonging, unity, and support, which participants in e-groups can experience, further extends and augments face-to-face relationships and communities (Havel,1999).

            Barry Wellman (2001), a sociologist, suggests that many new societal arrangements have been developed through the contemporary process of glocalization. He defines this term as what the Internet produces as it expands users' social worlds to faraway people while simultaneously binding them more deeply to the place where they live (Pew Research Center, 2001). E-communities can provide for participants qualitatively unique experiences, which can enrich them in their virtual and visceral worlds.  

            Pierre Levy (1998) contends that communication in the virtual world can cultivate collective intelligence, which can encourage the development of intelligent communities.  He states that sharing of information, knowledge, and expertise in e-communities can promote a kind of dynamic, collective intelligence, which can affect all spheres of our lives. He contends that the virtual world can foster positive connections, cooperation, bonds, and civil interactions.  In e-groups or communities, which are flexible, democratic, reciprocal, respectful, and civil, this collective intelligence can be continually enhanced and enhancing (Levy, 1998).

            Researchers in scientific, educational, professional, and industrial arenas are pooling their collective intelligence, knowledge, and data in collaboratories. These are virtual centers in which people in different locations work together in real time, as if they were all in the same place. Science, education, commerce, and industry have become increasingly global. Therefore, collaboration, which is efficient, maximizing, and time-saving among distance researchers in these fields, has become more critical. As distance technology has become more efficient and cost-effective, distance collaboration has become more common. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health have encouraged grant recipients to form collaboratories. These scholarly, virtual groups are cybersteps beyond distance sharing of asynchronous data when researchers individually take what they want from online databases. Collaboratories enable researchers at distant locations to interact, hold lab meetings, and work with data in real time (Buyya, 2001).

            Educators have found that cyber group projects using e-technologies can enhance education and socialization in qualitatively unique and personal ways. Professor Edna Aphek (2001), who lives in Jerusalem, Israel, has experienced dreams come true in virtual, multicultural, learning communities in her region. She states, "It started somewhere out there, in the Cyberspace where no prejudice and hostility reign." Israel is a multicultural country made up of different ethnic groups who have separate cultures, languages and religions. There isn't much contact between some of the peoples, especially between Jews and Arabs, who comprise about 1/6th of Israel's total population. Online computer technology has endowed Professor Aphek and her associates with tools and possibilities for ongoing, multi-cultural, and multi-age communication between different groups. The technologies have no stigma and no prejudice attached to them. They make possible neutral, less biased communication between groups. Professor Aphek has witnessed Israeli and Arab youths learning together without hostility in the virtual worlds. The interactions of these young people have fostered meaningful, bonded relationships that have extended into their real worlds. Professor Aphek has been willing to use new educational technologies to reach out, to connect, and to promote understanding among diverse groups. Her efforts have significantly paid off for her, her associates, her students, her community, and her region.

            Educators around the world at all educational levels are seeing the unique empowerment of cyber groups in online courses where the students never meet face-to-face and in online components of onsite classes. Online e-technologies can provide valuable educational opportunities that enhance both distance educational and on-site, face-to-face educational programs. They provide easy access to a plethora of information and research. They facilitate access to specialists. They offer efficient group projects and social learning. Most students or colleagues can communicate asynchronously with each other and with professionals through commonly available distance technology resources, such as e-mail, bulletin boards, forum, and chat rooms.

            Today there are various forms of e-groups or e-communities.  In some e-groups, communication is primarily text-based. E-mail communication in e-groups is economical, fast, immediate, and efficient. Communicators can interact across great distances frequently, regularly, economically, and efficiently. In e-groups communication can take place in synchronous time, in which there is little time lag between textual comments. Working in synchronous groups can be especially efficient and time-saving for those who have critical time pressure. Communication also takes place in some groups in asynchronous time, in which one posts a message at one time and later someone else can read it and/or respond. Some e-group participants belong to newsgroups, in which postings go out to all group members, who respond at will.  Some belong to listservs, in which there is a moderator, who may collate and organize the messages before he or she sends them out to members of the group.  Some participants of groups post messages on electronic bulletin boards.  Furthermore, some e-groups are virtual communities in which hundreds or thousands of people around the globe can participate in real time in a virtual world, such as in a MUD (multi-user dimension). In all these various forms of
e-groups or e-communities participants are free to communicate ideas without the limits related to the physical body, i.e. appearance, gender, race, ethnicity, status symbols and so forth. Levy (1998) suggests further that they are free to participate in virtual community and to add to the collective intelligence.

     In Cyberspace…each of us is a potential transmitter and receiver in a space that is  qualitatively differentiated, nonstatic, constructed
     by its participants, and explorable. Here we no longer encounter people exclusively by their name, geographical location, or social
     rank, but in the context of centers of interest, within a shared landscape of meaning and knowledge…Cyberspace provides large and
     geographically dispersed groups with instruments for cooperatively constructing a shared context…communication  now involves
     participants in a form of interaction…This dynamic …collective context serves as an agent of collective intelligence, a kind of living
     bond…Cyberspace promotes connections…