Book review
Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace
Authors: Rena M Palloff, Keith Pratt
Review by Donald Clark - Epic
I like books that change my views on things.
First published in 1999, Building Learning Communities in
Cyberspace did precisely that; opening my eyes to the reasons
why so many efforts in collaborative learning fail.
At last here was an explanation for my own often
frustrating experiences online. I'd signed up for too many
so-called communities where the community felt strangely absent;
where threaded discussions lay empty, or after an initial
burst of fervour lapsed into one-liners and finally petered
out altogether. I'd been in too many virtual classrooms where
I felt so disembodied and bored that I drifted away to check
my email - and never drifted back.
Palloff and Pratt, in this book, go a good way
to explaining why the boredom and impersonality that wrecks
so many online community building efforts comes about and
how such failures can be avoided.
The origins of the book lie in the authors'
mutual experience as Ph.D. students at The Fielding Institute,
a distance learning programme whose 800 students are located
all over the world and linked by Fiedling's own electronic
network. Frustrated by the limitations of this network, they
began creating their own 'electronic seminar' dubbed 'The
Cyberspace Sandbox' to explore the use of electronic communications
as a means of delivering distance learning programmes more
effectively.
What they found was that with the rapid arrival
and adoption of computer-mediated courses and programmes,
little thought had been given to the possible educational
and social impact of new delivery methods: 'traditional teaching
methods (were) being attempted in a non-traditional environment'.
More attention needed to be given to what actually
happens in a situation where instructors and their students
never meet face-to-face: 'When the only connection we have
to our students is through words on screen, we must pay attention
to many issues that we take for granted in the face-to-face
classroom.'
Nipper (1989) an early writer in computer based
learning, identified a need for 'social connection', a need
that almost supercedes the learning goals for the course at
issue. Palloff and Pratt take this further, elaborating a
'new paradigm for learning, which involves a more active,
collaborative, constructivist approach.'
Not surprisingly, perhaps, this leads the authors
to consider issues such as learning styles and the psychology
of learning in general, but the book delves even further in
its examination of how the internet has redefined the meaning
of community, covering issues such as spirituality and ritual
in online communities.
For the most part, however, its advice is eminently
practical. Interesting discoveries that come from their work
include the following:
- Coalescence of a community must take place over time
- Instructors and students who experience performance anxiety
in physical-world group situations may be more comfortable
online
- Online systems work well for those with English as a
second language
- There is a significant danger of addiction to being online
- There is a significant danger of 'infoglut' Other issues
covered include those of ethics, privacy, group size and,
particularly interestingly, time.
One salutary warning that I have heard reinforced frequently
since first reading about the mechanics of online collaboration
in this book is that, as instructors move into the online
arena, they find that they need more time than they traditionally
spent preparing for, and handling, classroom delivery.
Also on this subject the authors deal boldly with one of
the really contentious issues at the heart of the collaborative
learning debate; that of whether *synchronous* or *asynchronous*
environments produce the best results. 'Our preference, based
on our experiences with online teaching, is for the asynchronous
environment,' they say, and for my own part, everything I
have seen and heard since has convinced me of the rightness
of this position.
Indeed, I have come to believe in a refined version of this
method, which I call 'restricted asynchronous collaboration'
- keep it asynchronous, but to a series of tight but agreed
deadlines. To sustain motivation, learners need clear goals,
and these need to be near-term time frames.
Collaborative learning is a burning issue in e-learning right
now. But as the technology for supporting virtual classrooms,
threaded discussions, bulletin boards, instant messaging and
SMS rolls out, have we really reflected on what works and
what doesn't work? Those who are tasked with building communities
online could do much worse than read this book, at least as
a starting point to consideration of such issues.
In closing, I'd like to commend the refreshingly 'real-world'
nature of the book that Palloff and Pratt have produced on
a subject which could all too easily have been made dry and
abstruse. Garlanded with insightful case studies, it contains
a multitude of references to the views of actual online students
and is rich with psychological insights gleaned from real
practice. Perhaps what is most heartening about the evidence
presented in this book is the sense of wonder and amazement
frequently expressed by those students at the depth and nature
of the interaction that can occur online.
Donald Clark, 2002
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