A Review of Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice
Caroline Haythornthwaite and Michelle M. Kazmer, eds.
New York: Peter Lang, 2004
Review by Nora Wright
University of California, Santa Barbara
Introduction
Bees have always been considered highly organized, successful producers of a complex physical and social system whose locus is the hive. New high-powered image capturing technology shows a different story about bees. They are klutzy. Their social, physical and technical communication is not smooth. For example, their take offs and landings are frequently off balance; they collide into each other or fall. Despite individual failures, bees function successfully. The species is sustained as a collaborative body, overcoming failure and disorder over time.
The idea of a perfect order or the ever-improving evolution of any organization is wishful thinking. That collaborative constructions and shared outcomes of a successful hive are borne out with mishap and failure should not surprise us, but it does. So, too, does it surprise us to learn that our own carefully constructed systems are haphazard and chaotic despite expertise, funding, practice and care. Online education bears comparison to organization of the hive.
According to Caroline Haythornthwaite & Michelle M. Kazmer, editors of Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education, the social, physical, and technical communication in the electronic classroom is not smooth, nor should it be, not until the dimensions of the opportunity are magnified and the advantages that evolve from “problems” are understood. Haythornthwaite, Kazmer, and contributors argue that certain successes as well as certain meaningful failures are required to advance new forms of instruction–forms that are changing what education means, what it does, where it happens, and to whom.
In 1996, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign launched a highly innovative Master’s degree program in Library and Information Science. It was a distance-learning program known as LEEP (Library Education Experimental Project), an enormous success and a model for study and research for anyone involved in online education now. Caroline Haythornthwaite and Michelle M. Kazmer and contributing authors do the exploring for us in the enormously engaging and useful Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice.
Published eight years after LEEP commenced, the collection includes seventeen essays and introductions related to the editors’ key areas of research and study, and stands as a tribute to the program’s success. More importantly, the volume is surprising because it probes what is meant by success. Further, it challenges educators to re-imagine education and society, both conventional and online, through a deep analysis of the LEEP program’s best practices and impact on participants over time.
The collection includes essays by writers and researchers working in diverse disciplines and areas of research. Adding a great deal of interest is the inclusion of archived writing and reflections by LEEP participants. Introductions to each section by Haythornthwaite or Kazmer have the depth and interest of stand-alone essays. The collection is a pleasure to read. Despite the enormously diverse offering, the collection has the impact of an extended co-authored essay about learning in the 21st century. I could not put it down. And I wanted more. I hope to see that Volume 2 is in the works.
|
Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education is not for library information science people only, although it may seem to be at first glance. A book about a Master’s degree program in Library and Information Science is not exactly the first book I would pull from the shelf. This is the only problem with the book. I would like to see it read by a wide audience that includes experienced and prospective online educators, students, researchers, and observers of community in every field.
LEEP proves to be an invaluable case study, whose value spirals in many directions and even works as a kind of hands-on manual or example for those of us working in the field. I recently brought Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education to a meeting to discuss how a college English department might link to its Writing Center to generate greater student success in writing across the curriculum.
The book employs perspectives from multiple disciplines to create a complex, detailed picture of online education. Writers from library science, technology, administration, philosophy, education, folklore, and sociology, among others, construct a complex, intensely detailed, frequently metaphorical picture to describe prospects, promises and concepts in online–and traditional–education.
The Forward by Amy Bruckman expands the editors’ intent to examine best practices in distance learning, thus far, and to consider with some urgency what is needed to establish new practices in the rapidly expanding distance learning community of the present and future.
In the collection’s first essay, “Navigating the Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Pedagogy,” Nicholas C. Burbules is deeply critical of accepted notions of success:
In my view, educational success entails the risk of failure, or more precisely, sometimes what appears to be a failure from one standpoint may turn out to be an educational success from another standpoint, and vice versa. Teaching and learning, like navigating, is about finding a way–and sometimes making a way–in an ill-structured domain. It isn’t a matter of “best practices” but of better or worse practices, experimental, learning from mistakes, and improvement along multiple axes of what constitutes success, one axis of which is maintaining a reflexively critical attitude toward what we are considering to be success. (Successful for whom? Successful in relation to what purpose? Successful in relation to short-run payoffs, or in the longer run?). (4)Burbules is not alone in his perspective. Contributors to this collection are bound together by their seeming delight in discovering the opportunities that so-called failures and problems afford. I could not leave this book without co-opting what Burbules calls a “reflexively critical attitude toward what we are considering to be success.”
I cannot name a single section or essay in the collection that is not noteworthy; however, I have space here only to mention contributions that hold a particular interest to me in my experience as an online educator and as a graduate student in Teaching and Learning.
In “Community Development among Distance Learners: Temporal and Technological Dimensions,” (Chapter 3), Caroline Haythornthwaite, Michelle M. Kazmer, Jennifer Robins, & Susan Shoemaker conclude:
Lastly, we see something unique from this kind of distance program–that students receive a dual education. They learn to use new technology and gain experience in distanced interaction as well as learn the subject matter for the program. We believe this is an important addition to the repertoire of any educational program, and one well worth pursuing. (53)Their conclusion is echoed in my experience. It astounds me that most community college students who sign up for my online classes frequently have little or no familiarity with computers or the Internet beyond email and limited shopping online. Workers and professional people, recent high school graduates, returnees with families–students enroll in online classes to eliminate travel time and to work in their free time, on nights and weekends. They gravitate to the opportunity that online education affords, but frequently do so without owning a computer or having reasonable technical know-how, such as keyboarding.
Distance and online learners receive instruction in coursework and in technology, a “dual education” that is rewarding, empowering, and life-changing. Students tenacious enough to hang on tend to communicate with each other more than they might in a traditional classroom. They work together to tackle technical problems and to engage in branching discussions directly and indirectly related to coursework. These kinds of student interactions and archived writing from students and teachers in LEEP are considered closely in Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education.
The volume is its most exhilarating–yes, exhilarating–when it incorporates student responses to a dramatic and powerful story-telling lesson analyzed by folklorist Betsy Hearne and Anna L. Nielsen in their essay Catch a Cyber by the Tale (Chapter 4). This essay contains a great story by itself–and uses it to demonstrate the uses of traditional narrative, which can invigorate new responses and electrify the sometimes unseen corridors of student reflection that extend the classroom beyond instruction. I loved this essay.
In “Juggling Multiple Social Worlds: Distance Students Online and Offline,” (Chapter 5), Kazmer & Haythornthwaite challenge the persistent and very backward idea that online classroom activities are separate from other activities and that they are isolated “worlds” or spaces of academic practice and performance. The authors write: “Such a priori definitions of what constitutes a world fail to acknowledge the way in which individuals spread their social relations across multiple means of communication and social contexts, blurring locational and medium-specific definitions of worlds” (91). In summary, the authors prove that online learning communities are co-constructed and co-criticized by participants, teachers, learners, technicians, administrators, and peripheral learners such as family and friends.
What is community and how does it help us learn? Are we online learners part of a community or not? The editors reject the hypothesis of no community. The definition, evolution, and uses of community form the centerpiece of the collection. “Visibility,” “Relation,” and “Co-Presence” are necessary components of online learning considered in Haythornthwaite & Alvan Bregman’s essay, “Affordances of Persistent Conversation: Promoting Communities that Work” (Chapter 7).
In “Changing Patterns of Participation: Interactions in a Synchronous Audio+Chat Classroom,” (Chapter 9), Karen Ruhleder points out that the distinction between expert and novice becomes blurred in distance learning instruction. This alone could signal some very big challenges to pedagogy–if not to instructor ego and learner autonomy.
In the wonderful essay, “Over-the-Shoulder Learning in a Distance Education Environment,” (Chapter 10), Michael B. Twidale & Karen Ruhleder pinpoint how online education entails collaborative problem solving, including assistance, contribution, and participation, and learning by people who are not enrolled in any class. They “term this kind of collaborative problem solving Over-the-Shoulder Learning (OTSL)” (179). Although it emerges from different circumstances and locations, OTSL reminds me in a good way of LLP, Legitimate Peripheral Participation, the focus of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s 1991 monograph.
In “The Virtual Classroom as Ludic Space,”(Chapter 13), Christine A. Jenkins reminds us that the virtual classroom is playful:
Although students and teachers are sitting in front of a computer screen separated by great distances and multiple time zones, these instructors experience the LEEP classroom as the common connective space that they can all inhabit together. The virtual classroom becomes a gathering place in which all may participate using a panoply of communication channels to collaborate in creating a playful and participatory ludic space that verges on what philosopher and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would describe as carnivalesque (Turner 1982; Bakhtin, 1984). (233)Bakhtin’s notion of the carnavalesque and Jenkins’ use of it are provocative. Opponents of online education often say that this kind of learning is just fun. Jenkins’ points is, it is fun. And the fun is dead serious. MIT and Harvard jumped into the opportunity early. Smaller or lesser known traditional institutions that fail to develop user-friendly, intellectually engaging and rewarding opportunities are competing with so-called pay-for-degree online universities that are proliferating online, free from bounds.
Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice uses the example of LEEP to argue that online education is still too new to form a conclusive analysis and that the subject is extraordinarily complex and rich for study. Thus, far more useful than any answer is the question Haythornthwaite & Kazmer ask in their Introduction: What kind of problem is an online degree program?
In closing, let me reiterate my only criticism: that this collection will not fall into as many hands is it should. The words online degree program do not fully stretch to accommodate the wide influence that this collection can and should achieve. In addition to anyone involved in online education, I strongly recommend this book to educational anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers, and graduate students whose research and practice fall into any one of the following areas: learning, culture, community, or online education–distinct fields of interest that are joined together here and that give this important collection its title.
Lave, Jean & Wenger, Etienne. (1991). Chapter One, “Legitimate peripheral participation.” From Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, pp. 29-43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.