PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL
VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
A Social Learning Perspective
Beverly Trayner
Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais, Setúbal, Portugal
John D. Smith
Learning Alliances and CPsquare, Portland, USA
Marco Bettoni
Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences, Brig, Switzerland
Keywords: International virtual learning communities, international online communities, identity of participation, com-
munities of practice, social learning perspective, e-learning, technology wishes.
Abstract: A promise of new web-based technologies is that they provide learning opportunities for people distributed
across the globe but who can participate across time and space in the same virtual learning community. How
do they do it? In this paper we report on some of the experiences of a virtual learning community which has
members from twenty-five countries across different time-zones and who communicate in English. Through
a communities of practice perspective we focus on the social nature of learning and describe some of the
challenges and design issues raised in this community as it explores and develops practices for learning in
an international online environment. While our focus is on social practices, and on developing an identity of
participation in relation to those practices, we also make some wishes for web-based technologies that
would better support these practices in an international virtual learning community.
1 INTRODUCTION
Web-based technologies and increased access to the
Internet promise learning solutions for anyone, at
any time and in any place. As Paloff and Pratt, lead-
ing writers in the field of online learning communi-
ties, claim: “(t)he beauty of technology now is that
software allows for the translation of material and
allows all voices to be heard regardless of what one's
native language might be.” (2002: online seminar)
They go on to attribute increased access to interna-
tional learning communities as the result of advances
in the use of technology: “Thanks to the software
we're all using here, we're able to be a part of your
(Brazilian) community and you a part of ours.”
These are promising words in a challenging sce-
nario for education, juggling competition for stu-
dents, internationalization and e-learning. It repre-
sents a cozy view for training organizations compet-
ing for a share of the growing international learning
market as they increasingly turn to the idea of start-
ing online communities of practice to share knowl-
edge across cultures and borders.
However, our concern is that international online
communities may be more problematic than Paloff
and Pratt claim. What is referred to as an “interna-
tional” learning community often refers to a course
offered in English (Mason, 1998), possibly with
translation of the materials and sold with some lin-
guistic concessions to students or participants for
whom English is not a first language. At the same
time learning paradigms are moving away from the
transmission of (easily translatable) content towards
social constructivist views of negotiation of meaning
and co-construction of content. If we are to take
such a paradigm seriously, then how do we design
for negotiating meaning with people who speak dif-
229
Trayner B., D. Smith J. and Bettoni M. (2006).
PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES - A Social Learning Perspective.
In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and
e-Government / e-Learning, pages 229-236
DOI: 10.5220/0001257502290236
Copyright
c
SciTePress
ferent first languages and who come from diverse
social and cultural contexts?
Our principle aim in this paper is to report from a
virtual learning community that has members from
various work settings, professions and countries
around the world with a view to sharing some of its
practices. The authors are active members of this
virtual learning community and have individually
and collaboratively designed and presented a signifi-
cant number of international courses and online
workshops during the previous six years. For each of
the practices we describe we also propose a wish for
a web-based technology that could help support that
practice.
Underlying our review and description of inter-
action practices are the words of Barab, Kling and
Gray who emphasize that “Building online commu-
nities in the service of learning is a major accom-
plishment about which we have much to learn
(2004:4, italics in the original). We would add that
paying attention to cross-national and cross-cultural
dimensions in international online communities adds
to the complexity, challenges and value in such an
accomplishment.
2 A THEORETICAL LENS
Our social learning perspective has its roots in Ban-
dura's social learning theory (1977) which empha-
sizes the importance of observing and modeling the
behaviours of others. It draws on the notion of situ-
ated learning (Lave, 1988) where learning is a func-
tion of the activity, context and culture in which it
occurs and where people move from the periphery of
a community to the centre as they become more ac-
tive and engaged in the practices of a community
through a process of legitimate peripheral participa-
tion (Lave and Wenger, 1991).
In a communities of practice theory of learning
the principle focus is that of social participation
(Wenger, 1998:4) where participation means “being
active participants in the practices of social commu-
nities and constructing identities in relation to these
communities.” (ibid. italics in the original). Partici-
pation, according to Wenger, is the process of taking
part in a community of practice as well as the rela-
tions with others that reflect that process (ibid.:55).
Participation includes but is not limited to collabora-
tion; it involves all kinds of relations, cooperative
and competitive, conflictual and harmonious, inti-
mate and political (ibid.:56). Participation in this
sense is not something that refers to specific activi-
ties with specific people; it is a constituent part of a
person’s identity. It is an accountability to a com-
munity and the meanings that are given through their
participation in it (ibid.:57). Wenger refers to this
identity that is constituted through participation as
an identity of participation.
In this case our concern is with identities that
arise from participation in the social practices of a
community that spans different geographical loca-
tions and different first languages rather than with
identities or practices that arise from particular na-
tional characteristics or traits. Therefore we have
avoided traditional frameworks of viewing commu-
nication between people from different national cul-
tures in terms of concepts such as high/low context
cultures developed by Hall (1976) or cultural dimen-
sions developed by Hofstede (1980). Rather, our
premise has been that culture is in an ongoing proc-
ess of negotiation of meaning and the development
of an identity of participation in a third space, with
the notion of a “third space” coming from writers of
cultural and post-colonial studies such as Useem,
Useem and Donoghue (1963) and Bhabha (1994).
Our primary focus with the virtual in a virtual
learning community is to view it as a location for an
ongoing transformation of practice and identity of
participation in a process of doing things together;
our secondary focus is on the technology that en-
ables the virtual to happen. Our concern with the
learning” in e-learning is that in an environment
that is mainly electronic, the social processes still
need to enable learning or negotiation of meaning to
happen.
In terms of terminology we have been casual in
our use of the terms “online” and “virtual” learning
communities as we use them interchangeably. Fur-
thermore, “online” community implies that conver-
sations only take place through an electronic envi-
ronment, while some community conversations take
place in telephone conferences and occasionally
when some members manage to meet face-to-face.
And finally, we have used “international” to refer to
people participating across different linguistic and
national boundaries in English, glossing over the
overlaps and helpful use of the term “distributed”
communities.
3 CONTEXT
Our main focus is on a virtual learning community,
CPsquare
1
, whose domain or topic is that of com-
munities of practice. Conversations take place in
Web Crossing
2
, a community based discussion tool
with a number of plug-ins developed over the years
by some of its members. People come from more
1
http://www.cpsquare.org
2
http://www.webcrossing.com/Home/
WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING
230
than 25 different countries and 15 different time-
zones around the world and use English as the main
language. In this community learning is not seen as
transmission of content, and the question of translat-
ing materials is not an issue. Rather, its principle
learning focus is that of sharing and supporting each
others’ professional practices in a process of dia-
logue, trust-building and mutual support. The pro-
fessional practice of most members includes work-
ing in or with communities of practice in different
contexts in different parts of the world.
Three years ago questions arose in the commu-
nity about improving points of contact and commu-
nication in CPsquare between people living in dif-
ferent time-zones, from different national and cul-
tural contexts and often with different first lan-
guages. In particular the writing of some interna-
tional guidelines took place in 2003 as a response to
some people feeling excluded from CPsquare events
because of their geographical location, far from the
United States. Meanwhile, some people were also
asking the question: while CPsquare talks about in-
ternational participation, how does, or how should,
that translate to practice? A discussion took place
with the aim of producing some “emerging logisti-
cal, cultural and linguistic guidelines for facilitating,
participating and collaborating in an online distrib-
uted community that includes people from different
countries”. The results of these discussions were
published on the public community blog.
3
In 2005 we decided to review the document writ-
ten in 2003 to find out to what extent the guidelines
were being used or had been helpful to people work-
ing in international communities. We collected data
from three main sources. First we sent a short web
based survey to all community members about the
importance of these issues and the usefulness of the
international guidelines to them in their communi-
ties. We also narrowed down the 60 original princi-
ples of the 2003 guidelines into seven key recom-
mendations and invited members to contribute in the
online discussion space with examples and stories of
where these recommendations had been helpful (or
not) in their practice. During this time we organized
and recorded two telephone conferences to comple-
ment these discussions,
In response to a question about the importance of
“issues such as different nationalities, languages,
time zones, technology standards, etc.” in the com-
munities they worked with most closely, 95% of the
thirty-nine responses to the web-based survey said
that these issues were between “somewhat” and
“very important.” As one community member said
3
Internationalisation: guidelines and considerations,
http://www.cpsquare.org/News/archives/000021.html
in response to an open-ended question “[They] mat-
ter in some [communities] quite a bit, in others
barely at all. It is totally context dependent.” How-
ever, we discovered in the survey that few people
had actually read the guidelines or were even aware
of their existence. This comment by one member
reflects those of a number of others: “I have only
just read the CP2 guidelines and I think this docu-
ment is an excellent starting point for a community.
It lets them know of issues to consider.”
Interestingly, the discussions that came about in
preparation for this paper stimulated more people to
read the guidelines. A related finding was that over
three quarters of the survey respondents considered
that other community members, not the guidelines
themselves, were the most helpful resources for im-
proving their practices for supporting communities
spanning different countries, cultures or languages.
Such a finding reinforces the notion that role model-
ing of good practice is at least as important as pro-
viding guidelines.
Two of the authors of this paper were involved in
producing the original guidelines. All three authors
have similar and different types of experience of
participating in international communities. One au-
thor lives and works in Portuguese speaking com-
munities while her first language is English. The
second author lives in the United States, coming
from a family that is bilingual in Spanish and Eng-
lish. And the third author lives and works in Swit-
zerland, his first languages being Italian and Ger-
man. At many levels our practices and identity have
shaped and are shaped by our immersion in different
communities in different languages and in different
social and cultural contexts.
4 EXAMPLES OF PRACTICE
In our review of the International Guidelines written
in 2003 we discussed that what may appear to be
“little things” in the design, organization and facili-
tation of international virtual communities often
represent practices that can have a high influence on
someone’s participation in a community. However,
it is frequently these “little things” that are over-
looked in the quest for creating communities around
attractive content and the latest technology. What is
more, with fewer visual cues and a slower response
for repairing misunderstandings, the little things can
become magnified to the extent that they can seri-
ously affect a person’s participation and the meaning
they get from the community. We have selected
seven of these “little things” from the original guide-
lines, highlighting some of the social practices that
PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES - A Social Learning Perspective
231
give meaning to participation in the community’s
learning processes. In summary they are:
1. Time for participation;
2. Use of user-friendly language;
3. A standard time unit for synchro-
nous meetings;
4. Graceful ways of bringing people
into conversations;
5. Articulation and reflection of cul-
tural and learning expectations;
6. An “ecology of communication”
modes and skills;
7. Modeling of good practice.
We discuss each of these practices, identifying
some of the reasons why they have been important
in CPsquare or in related workshops and learning
environments designed or facilitated by CPsquare
members. For each practice we make a wish for a
web-based feature or tool that could be used to sup-
port it. Neither the practices nor the wishes are in-
tended to be “solutions”, they are reflections on
practice. Moreover each practice and wish poten-
tially brings a further challenge. Most of the wishes
are already feasible as principles and features of new
web-based technologies. However, they are not inte-
grated in the Web Crossing platform. In common
with many other virtual learning communities it
would not be feasible or even desirable to be chang-
ing platforms to keep up with these new technolo-
gies. Rather, our wishes come in the context of being
able to combine and integrate some of these new
features into an existing system.
4.1 Time for Participation
Common to most people’s experience in CPsquare is
that participation in international communities re-
quires taking more time: time for “talking”, “listen-
ing” and negotiating meaning, and time for reflect-
ing. Without taking the time to establish, maintain
and reflect on the social practices of people whose
first languages are different, and who come from
different contexts, opportunities for negotiating
meaning, and therefore learning, are lost.
However, Trayner’s main finding in an inquiry
into multilingual participation in an online workshop
was that “Time, or lack of time, was a thread run-
ning through almost all reflections … from both
participants and … organisers” (2003:417). It was
also the main finding in a report on another interna-
tional online workshop co-presented by White,
Smith and Trayner, who wrote: “The overriding les-
son for the workshop designers and facilitators was
the excessive number of hours that it took to facili-
tate the workshop” (2004:17). They added that
“(b)oth the multilingual nature of the workshop, the
shifting elements of the group and the topic, and the
expectations from sponsors and participants about
the role of the facilitators led to an unsustainable
work level” (ibid.).
A problem that arises in designing and allowing
for more time to participate in social processes is
that it often creates a tension in relation to host insti-
tutions, sponsors and participants who measure
value in terms of amount of content covered rather
than depth of learning and the negotiation of mean-
ing. A further problem is that the time required of
facilitators for working across languages and cul-
tures can result in an unsustainable work level for
facilitators but which is often invisible to partici-
pants and sponsors.
A technology wish for supporting “taking the
time” would be a tool that helped make online inter-
actions more visible. While web-based tools often
count number of posts written, it is also helpful to
know number of posts read. A personal tally that
kept a record of the time an individual and groups
spent in specific community spaces or activities
could also be useful for managing and budgeting
time, although there would be issues around trans-
parency and who had access to this information.
This would be particularly so if the information was
to be used for assessment, evaluation or remunera-
tion purposes. A more ambitious wish would be a
way of measuring or making visible the practices
involved in shaping and transforming an identity of
participation in order that it could be recognized and
valued by sponsors and participants.
4.2 Use of User-Friendly Language
It is common to hear people whose first language is
English, say “We don’t have a problem, we all just
speak English.” However, where many members are
not using their first language, or indeed are using
their third or fourth language, the choice of lan-
guage, colloquialisms, abbreviations, jargon and
culturally specific references can discourage partici-
pation. For example, to the American presenter wel-
coming people into a discussion of his work “a baby
shower” seemed like an obvious reference to the
discussion topic’s parentage but it was mystifying to
others. In another case, people doing doctoral re-
search in Europe and Australia were puzzled and did
not feel described by the label “grad students” in the
call to a conversation by US participants. Specifi-
cally in terms of language, someone’s use of “Let’s
move on” could have been easier to understand for
people who spoke languages of Latin origin if the
phrase had been “Let’s continue”.
WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING
232
In the international guidelines of 2003 we em-
phasized ways in which the English language can be
“Latinized,” making it more accessible to speakers
of languages of Latin origin (p.10). However, it was
pointed out that fine-tuning your sensitivities to the
use of language and cultural references could be
more helpful than a blanket rule of “Latinizing”. It
also looks as though those people in the community
who have online friends with whom they can check
their understanding or interpretations are more likely
to continue participating in the face of potential mis-
understandings than those who do not. This means
that ensuring that the social processes and techno-
logical means are in place for checking meaning
with fellow-participants could be as important as the
choice and use of language.
In fact the tension between knowing and not-
knowing what words mean is an opportunity to ex-
plore the shades of meaning and for the community
to create new meanings and to develop and identities
practices around those meanings. In an online event
in this community three years ago someone referred
to a Scottish slang word “Glasweg”. When asked to
clarify the meaning he said it was “a Glaswegian
usage” meaning that it was part of the dialect of
Glasgow. A German participant understood his ex-
planation to refer to a type of usage by a leading
writer named “Glasgow”, as if it were a Bandur-ian
or Wenger-ian or Glasweg-ian usage. This misun-
derstanding led to the light-hearted creation of a
fictitious character “Ian Glasweg” who, to this day,
is a shared reference and mark of identity for some
community members who participated in that event.
The ways in which new meanings are given to
language and the jargon and colloquialisms that de-
velop as a community matures can then appear in-
comprehensible to newcomers. This means that de-
veloping user-friendly language and managing the
tensions and inventiveness of negotiating meanings
in the third space is an ongoing enterprise that is not
only limited to first and second speakers of English.
A technology wish for facilitating language
would be an easy way for people to be able to create
link titles over words, sentences or chunks of text.
That way the author of a post could create a link title
which showed up when a reader had their pointer
hovering over the selected text giving synonyms,
explanations or context. Similarly, software could
automatically create links to explanatory entries to a
resource like Wikipedia. However, such a wish
would need to be modeled as a complementary lan-
guage tool rather than as a substitute for playing
with and creating new meanings.
4.3 A Standard Time Unit for
Synchronous Meetings
Organizing collaboration in a group of people across
many time zones and with widely-varying levels of
experience can make an apparently simple thing like
deciding when to meet, synchronously, a significant
challenge. An example of a problem in CPsquare
was that convenient meeting times for the majority
of people in the group meant that a minority of
members had to participate at five o’clock in the
morning. Another problem was a difficulty express-
ing one’s own local time in relation to others’ so that
people could effectively agree on a time to meet on a
chat, phone conference or one-to-one telephone call.
Merely arranging to meet at time in relation to
“PST” or even “GMT” did not seem to be sufficient
for people who do not know those abbreviations, nor
did it help with the complex calculations necessary
for working out the different local times of many
people in different time-zones. Additional factors
such as “daylight savings” and local holidays have
turned a seemingly simple act of setting a meeting
time into quite a complex one.
Using both a standard time reference such as
GMT, and a time calculation tool such as The World
Clock Meeting Planner
4
has proved to be one way of
avoiding confusion. However, the issue of including
more people at the cost of holding synchronous
events at inconvenient times is one that a tool cannot
help to solve: it still requires flexibility and social
consideration. A technology wish would be a world
clock meeting planner that is instantly customized
with the name, location, time and public holidays of
all community members when they join a commu-
nity or register for an event. It would also be helpful
to have easy access to member spaces which could
contain RSS
5
calendar feeds, allowing members of a
community to selectively share their calendars with
each other.
4.4 Graceful Ways of Bringing
People Into Conversations
Learning conversations develop their own momen-
tum once people engage with a subject and with
each other. However, many people need to over-
come technical and social barriers to feel comfort-
able enough to fully engage in such a conversation.
Most online courses or workshops provide instruc-
tions and manuals to help bring people into the
4
http://www.timeanddate.com/
5
Real Simple Syndication
PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES - A Social Learning Perspective
233
online environment. However, even when they are
read, manuals and instructions about how to operate
the technology or how to interact in the platform are
often misinterpreted. Comprehensive manuals and
instructions can also be so detailed that they are
overwhelming, especially if they are in someone’s
second language. What is more, strictly followed
instruction manuals can discourage learning strate-
gies such as exploration and invention.
More helpful than detailed instructions have been
designs for incorporating social interaction and prac-
tice with technologies that help people into the con-
versation one-step-at-a-time. For example in an
online facilitation workshop
6
for Portuguese partici-
pants we used a game at the beginning called “Just
Three Words” where no posting could be more than
three words and each posting followed on from the
next. This simple game provided an opportunity for
people to become familiar with the technology while
also socializing in an informal and non-threatening
way. A second example of graceful ways of includ-
ing people was through the use of personal journals.
People who were not confident of posting in the
main forum (for language reasons, for example)
could post their reflections and thoughts in personal
journals. Those journals became places for reflect-
ing aloud and developing a voice alongside or as an
alternative to the conversations taking place in the
main arena. The journals provided a bridge and a
sheltered passage to the main forum. Finally a third
example in the same workshop was that of bringing
in new people to a community as guests. Building on
the social bonds and group accomplishments that
had accumulated over a 6-week period more senior
practitioners were invited in as guest critics of a joint
product that had been drafted by small groups during
the workshop. Having a guest enter a space where a
small group of participants played the role of hosts
meant that people who had begun the process by
feeling like “newcomers” now became “old hands”
in the welcoming of new expertise into the commu-
nity.
However, if it is difficult for a participant to
navigate to the location where these activities are
taking place, then the process is not such a graceful
one. A technology wish would be a pop-up window
or a personalized desktop where someone could find
links to and navigate between those locations as
soon as they entered the platform. A further wish
would be an integrated desktop that included web
conferencing, email, instant messaging, telephone
conferencing and other media that allowed a partici-
6
Facilitação de projectos de aprendizagem em comunida-
des de prática: http://www.learningalliances.net/CoPs_
em_Portugal_2004/index_em_Portuguese.htm
pant or facilitator to easily select a technology for
reaching out to people on the periphery of a conver-
sation.
4.5 Articulation and Reflection of
Cultural and Learning
Expectations
Many people have stories of misinterpreted commu-
nication online when members were not familiar
with someone else’s expectations of collaboration or
learning. These misinterpretations have been easily
exaggerated in the absence of cues and feedback
from the other person or fellow members.
Having a space within the online learning envi-
ronment for members to keep personal learning
journals has been a way of providing clues about
people’s changing perspectives of what is happening
and about potential areas of miscommunication. For
example in one workshop a participant wrote obser-
vations about the informal relationships between
facilitator and participants compared to her own ex-
periences in a Portuguese course. Another wrote her
frustrations and anxieties about what looked like a
“big confusion” rather than structured learning ac-
tivities and uncertainty about what was expected of
him. Some people followed a conversation in Eng-
lish but were able to reflect on the conversations in
Portuguese. These examples provided opportunities
for fellow members and facilitators to understand
and use the reflections as a springboard for learning
rather than an invisible reason for dropping out of
the learning event. It has also been important to en-
courage people to articulate and reflect on their as-
sumptions about each other. Importantly, a welcom-
ing, encouraging style of communication from a
facilitator who is curious and values discussing these
issues is one that models openness and an attitude of
“not knowing” in a way that helps surface people’s
assumptions about learning and expectations rather
than taking one set of assumptions for granted.
However, despite good intentions of designing
for this ongoing articulation and reflection of expec-
tations, if other practices are not in place, then this is
one that easily becomes side-tracked. For example,
if a lot of time is spent becoming familiar with the
technology or completing structured tasks, or if the
language and cultural references make someone feel
excluded, people rarely articulate and reflect aloud
regardless of the facilitator’s style or whether they
have a personal learning journal.
A technology wish would be to have spaces for
personal journals that are both easily accessible but
which are sufficiently discrete so as not to over-
whelm the online space. They would not be too
WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING
234
complicated to set up, use, or administer (for exam-
ple, in terms of controlling access). The journals
would be private, open or shared with spaces for
photographs, audio recordings or podcasts. It would
also be helpful to be able to use RSS feeds in a jour-
nal so that it recorded entries from a blog kept out-
side the community space in a personal journal in-
side the community space.
4.6 An “Ecology of
Communication
7
” Modes and
Skills
While conversations in CPsquare began as asyn-
chronous discussions with occasional telephone con-
ferences, over the years the use of different modes
for communicating and coming together has
changed in number and complexity. For example, a
member is invited to talk about a particular project
she is working on and she begins with an online dis-
cussion that includes a paper or a set of slides and
maybe some photographs. After two weeks of online
discussion, a telephone conference is held with some
members who continue or develop the discussion for
an hour on the telephone. This telephone conversa-
tion is recorded and the audio file put in the online
discussion space. Also, during the telephone conver-
sation some members enter the Web Crossing chat
room and take notes during the call. These notes are
also posted to the online discussion space. Making
sense of the discussion about a member’s project
through different modes is helpful in this cross-
national and cross-linguistic setting for a number of
reasons. It provides a range of modes for people to
participate and facilitates access to people who have
different types of linguistic competencies. Audio
recordings and notes from telephone conversations
are available for people to refer to and discuss even
if they could not participate, for example because of
a schedule conflict. Audio recordings also mean that
conversations can be re-listened to if following or
participating in the conversation was difficult the
first time.
However, not only do different people have dif-
ferent access to different modes, but becoming com-
petent in several or many modes can also be over-
whelming. Telephone systems in different countries
have different cost structures and different capabili-
ties making it an easy option for some and an expen-
sive one for others. Integrating synchronous conver-
sations into a mainly asynchronous community con-
versation highlights the differences between coun-
7
An expression coined by CPsquare member, Dr. Steve
Eskow
tries even if it can bring members closer together.
Moreover, adding different modes to the communi-
cation ecology is not an end in itself; this ecology
includes layers of skills, practices and attitudes in
the ongoing shaping and modeling of social prac-
tices.
A technology wish here is to make all of the re-
sources of a community equally available and easy
to integrate with each other. Currently, integrating
several resources together requires considerable ex-
pertise on the part of facilitators and community
leaders whereas it would be more helpful if these
resources could be used selectively so that a facilita-
tor did not feel that they had to use all the tools all
the time and members would feel that they had a
choice of tools for different events.
4.7 Modeling of Good Practice
Modeling good practice is integral to all the six prac-
tices we have discussed. Most people agreed that
any set of guidelines and instructions were only as
effective as the way in which they were put into
practice by facilitators, leaders and co-members.
They also reported that modeling an attitude of in-
quiry and reflection, or the use of user-friendly lan-
guage, or graceful ways of bringing people into the
conversation have been the basis of improved prac-
tice and learning in their communities. Hearing sto-
ries of success and how people overcame challenges
in online communities that cross cultural or national
boundaries is a key factor for learning and improv-
ing practice.
A technology wish that could help in noticing
and reflecting on modeling would be to have ways to
record and label representations of practice, such as
an easy to use bookmark or “clippings” folder for
recording, managing and referring to examples of
practice. This would also include the possibility of
making reflective notes about these clippings or
bookmarks. There would be different ways to link,
categorize and represent them to other members.
The wish would also be for tools or standards that
make it possible to share or compare clipping and
bookmarks across platforms and systems, integrating
disparate tools such as online discussions and tele-
phone conferences.
5 SUMMARY CONCLUSIONS
We began this paper by suggesting that participating
in international virtual learning communities is more
challenging than is sometimes acknowledged. This
is particularly so when the philosophy for improved
learning is that of developing recursive social prac-
PARTICIPATION IN INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES - A Social Learning Perspective
235
tices for the negotiation of meaning-making or of
developing an identity of participation, rather than
merely developing better methods and technology
functions for transmitting or sharing information.
We highlighted seven social practices in a specific
virtual learning community with a view to sharing a
description, wish list and discussion of the ambigui-
ties and complexities that each one currently and
potentially presents in that community.
In the future we would like to reformulate both
the content and the mode of presenting the guide-
lines in the community. The data and stories we col-
lected about member’s perspectives and experiences
of international communication still need to be ana-
lyzed, reflected and written about in more detail in
our cycle of action research. Further research also
needs to be carried out into the identity of participa-
tion, not only in the context of one community but
on how an identity of participation is negotiated in
the context of membership in multiple communities
that straddle different countries, time-zones and lan-
guages. Such research could possibly lead to a
communities of practice framework for analyzing
cultural, or third space, dimensions of online com-
munication.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A heart-felt “thank you” to the people who partici-
pated in the online and telephone conversations and
helped shape this paper, including Derek Chirnside,
Joitske Hulsebosch, Ancella Livers, Barb McDon-
ald, Susanne Nyrop, Ueli Scheuermeier, and Meena
Wilson. In particular we used specific ideas from
Nancy White and Steve Eskow. Thanks also to
Sherry Spence who made comments and sugges-
tions to an earlier draft. Thanks of course to Ian
Glasweg who continues to help maintain a sense of
humour in relation to international communities.
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