Hi - this is me again,
did a Google search to refresh my memory and found an article that I wrote back in 2002 (together with Nini Ebeltoft from Oslo). It was published in Danish but I wanted to have an English translation online as well.
As a pilot anthropology studt, we were exchanging first impressions as newcomers to four different online learning communities. Our view was to examine how helpfulness and gate keeping helps newcomers feel welcome and want to take part.
One of our researched communities were GEN - Global Educators' Network, with seminars very much like here in Scope,also initiated and miraculously directed by our own dear Sylvia C (oh what a coincidence!)
We're not using Lave and Wenger here, but the accept of lurking is mentioned as important ( passage with red types)
I've included a quite long passage from this article as I found this might be of interest. Reading this today however make me feel it was a bit naive as a form, but we had such fun when writing together, all online only ... :-)
"Following the discussion properly demands some prerequisite reading.
We feel unsure how to join the discussion as foreigners from outside the
community, but shortly after our first message, we experience how some people
are responding, welcoming us and referring to our fumbling message. This
openness makes us want to write back.
Lurking is accepted, to read only
without adding any content of your own, and the explicit welcoming is a
strategy of including new members. In the beginning, we are confused by
the multiple threads, as most people forget to create new headlines to cover
the head points. But soon, we are enjoying the challenge of following the
discussion, reading some of the referred articles found on the internet,
and finding out about who participants are, as persons and as professionals.
The discussion seminars run during periods from one to four weeks, and a
colorful crowd of experts and practitioners share their expertise with interested
members, with no fee. Formally, the GEN network has about 1.000 members,
distributed among more than 40 nationalities, but the active core group
consist of 40 or maybe 50 closer attached participants. We experience how
some of them are quite familiar, often sharing implicit strokes and hints,
and for some time, we feel like being in the periphery of a close community,
gradually opening up to include a new active member in the circle. Many
things may be read in between the lines and, after having read a few seminars,
we get some insight in how threads are drawn back to earlier discussions,
often leading to new topics in other seminars, and these sidelines document
a chaotic project of collaborative knowledge building.
GEN has a tradition to let even untrained participants experiment with
the planning and facilitating of shorter seminars. In its actual configuration,
the network has existed for more than two years, but is rooted deeply in
a cross subject practice, experimenting with distributed learning and open
knowledge sharing, instead of the academic exclusiveness you may often encounter
in the field of development of educational software and content. Many GEN
seminars have been goal directed towards research and development, including
the ideas and critical exploration of end users, testing new program elements
for computer supported cooperative learning (CSCL). The personal engagement
varies, some seminars generate more than a hundred messages in just one
week, while other topics do not really get ahead, or might run off the track.
As we do not score any points for participation, the interest in itself
should be a motivating factor. This puts a big demand on the coordinator
as well as the facilitator to get the dialogue spinning and be the line
keeper. Participants, too, are responsible to keep the dialogue alive. This
is a meeting place for peers, as well as for testing your own abilities
to debate: will our messages be read and commented upon, and can we draw
in other participants in the dialogue? It is a time consuming process to
read through the long line of messages and to respond within the frame of
time, but the asynchronous communication allows participation at anytime
convenient to the individual."
(From our article found at
home19.inet.tele.dk/susnyrop/helpful.html)