A Review of _Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace

Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom arose from the authors' desire to humanize the experience of computer-mediated education. As doctoral students at the Fielding Institute, a distance education program specializing in graduate training for working adults, Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt made their learning context the subject of their research on human and organizational systems. Central to this research were questions of interconnectedness in electronic communities. Palloff and Pratt sought a richer understanding of the way people address problems, resolve conflicts, and make meaning together online. Ten years after the construction of their first "Cyberspace Sandbox" for collaborative inquiry, Palloff and Pratt's scholarship includes two influential texts on distance learning. Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace is the first and the more instructor-focused of the two. (Their second text is Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching; Jossey-Bass, 2001.)
           Palloff and Pratt maintain that the essence of distance learning is community. This metaphor has become so ubiquitous that some instructors may overlook this book as yet another discussion of fairly common collaborative learning practices for online students. What makes this book worthwhile is that Palloff and Pratt's pedagogical perspective demonstrates sensitivity to community-based learning–principles and strategies that may be more familiar to service-learning specialists than to computers and writing specialists. As writing instructors who specialize in community-engagement pedagogies, we recommend Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace for its insights into community-oriented learning in local as well as virtual environments.
           The text begins with an account of Palloff and Pratt's early experiences as collaborative learners online–the origins of their concerns about the interpersonal dimension of distance learning. They introduce new instructors to the principles of designing, facilitating, and assessing a collaborative learning environment. After discussing key terms and concepts, Palloff and Pratt guide instructors through such stages of course development as organizing learning groups, developing syllabi, and evaluating student progress. Although the book is geared to those who are new to online course development, it is likely to be useful to any experienced developer seeking a broader understanding of the theoretical and practical challenges of collaborative pedagogy in cyberspace.
           As its table of contents suggests, Palloff and Pratt's text emphasizes community orientation within every area of the online teaching and learning process. Distinctive features of this approach include their emphasis on active learning and on the transformational shifts in perspective that students can experience through the disorienting dilemmas inherent in unfamiliar contexts and communities. Two additional features we found especially useful were the array of practical strategies for building a sense of community within a course site, and for evaluating community-oriented learning. Here too, the authors' suggestions are relevant for instructors in any classroom configuration–totally online, face-to-face, or something in-between.