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The Webheads Community of Language Learners Online by Vance Stevens (Military Language Institute, UAE) and Arif Altun (Nigde University, Turkey) Proceeds from a demonstration given November 7, 2001, 12:00-12:50 GMT HTML version: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/papers/t2t2001/proceeds.htm |
Contents: Abstract | Rationale for the study | Webheads communities | Methodology | Subjects in the study | Data collection | Findings | Conclusion | References | Related URLs
Writing for Webheads is an ongoing 'experiment in world friendship through online language learning' whose participants have been meeting on line each week since 1998. During that time, Webheads have experimented with numerous synchronous and web-based multimedia communications formats, and have presented at several live and online conference venues. Considering that the class is given free by volunteer teachers, its long-standing viability suggests that participants are getting more out of it than they are putting in.
In the presentation forming the basis for this report, we demonstrated our use of the latest synchronous communications technologies, including live-online video and voice, while showing delegates around the Webheads community. A particular focus was on Turkey, where one of the co-presenters, Dr. Arif Altun, met us online to explain how he has involved his university students with the Webheads project. We were also joined in two of the three sessions studied here by a class of English language learners and other individuals from China.
At one of the ongoing regular meetings of Webheads, Arif's class of EFL students was invited to join the group for the first time. Later in the year, his students agreed to re-join the group to participate in a demonstration given before a live audience at a conference in Abu Dhabi. One week prior to that, we had held a practice session, connecting two classes of non-native English speakers from Turkey and China live online in synchronous text-, voice-, and video-enhanced chat. This event was archived with pictures from both locations, and with reflections on the experience by the students from Turkey. In analyzing the qualitative data from these events, it was intended to observe how those newcomers felt about joining an online community from a distance.
Computer mediated communication enables people to communicate with others by means of computers and networks. With recent advancements of Internet technologies, there are now more opportunities for educators and their students to interact in cyberspace through CMC. These interactions can pave a way to the formation of authentic and communicative online communities which facilitate language learning in cyberspace.
Online communities provide the parties involved in computer-mediated interaction with possibilities to form communities of practice. A community of practice is defined by Eckert & McConnel-Ginet (1992) as "an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations - in short, practices - emerge in the course of mutual endeavour" (p. 464).
In such endeavors, online communities also attempt to develop a new way of thinking. According to Dede (1999), this process is best described as a new type of "cognitive ecology". Dede goes further to claim that communities of practice not only develop a mutual understanding but also attempt to create communities of mind.
The issues involved with the emergence and development of online communities have been investigated by various researchers from various standpoints (see Rintel and Pittam, 1997 for a detailed literature review). The effectiveness of these emerging communities both as communities of practice and mind, however, is subject to participants’ approval and/or rejection.
In a recent study exploring the benefits and limitations of using the Internet for mentoring purposes, Seabrooks, Kenney, & LaMontagne (2000) analyzed teacher trainees’ collaboration and interaction in a community of practice. Based on content analyses and descriptive statistics, the researchers reported that online communication was perceived as a positive experience for teacher trainees to develop their intervention and teaming skills. In addition, the findings supported the idea that task-oriented online communication is a viable process which benefits pre-service teachers.
Another study conducted by Hrabe, Adamy, Milman, Washington, & Howard (1998) investigated how online discourse can serve to create community for education students. By facilitating web-based communication, the researchers reported several important indicators that respondents had a sense of participating in a shared community. They were (a) motivation for participation, which is primarily internal, (b) awareness of social context and perception of others as peer members, and (c) the ability to acknowledge and appreciate multiple perspectives.
The studies and assertions cited above conducted from social interactionist and computer mediated communication perspectives can be interpreted as providing a rationale for establishing and communicating within the continuity of online communities. Yet, the formation of such communities needs to be explored from new participants’ perspectives since much depends on the perceptions of new participants toward joining an online community from a distance. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of EFL students of participating in an online community from a distance.
In this paper, we provide an overview of such an online community, called Webheads. Secondly, a detailed description of the participants and background of the study is provided. Thirdly, we present findings pertaining to reactions of newcomers to a community of practice based on qualitative analysis of transcript data. Finally, we conclude by discussing how these results bear on learner perceptions of such online communities.
Writing for Webheads http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/webheads.htm started around 1998 when three online teachers -Vance Stevens, Michael Coghlan, and Margaret Doty - started meeting coincidentally in regular online "3-D" chat class sessions. We soon met students who for their own reasons shared our interest in communicating online, and formed bonds among participants. Many students were steered our way by Dave Winet, coordinator of English for Internet at http://www.study.com.
We have always striven to engage members of our group in motivating, communicative, and authentic interaction. Our language learning activities are purely constructivist and rely on the participation of other community members in the zone of proximal development. After 3 years a community has formed that meets regularly, supports each other's goals and agendas, and makes and keeps commitments to one another. As an example of its commitment and continuity, the group continues to meet live and online each Sunday noon GMT as it has done since 1998. This community has been described more fully in Stevens (2001a).
The main reason for the group's cohesion is that it utilizes freely available technology to project its human side in as many modalities as the latest developments in CMC will allow. One of the most basic technologies available is the transfer of digital photographs over the Internet either as email attachments or posted on web pages. Many Webheads have sent us their pictures, and these are but one means by which group members perceive each other as tangibly human within a range of digitally transmitted artifacts (among which are voice, video, and writings -- both chat and essays). The photos are arrayed in a gallery on the group's main page, and they would likely be the most salient thing to draw the eye of a newcomer who hits on the Writing for Webheads website. There is also a Students' page at http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/students.htm where a complete list of Webheads enrolled in the efiwebheads YahooGroup is maintained. Introductions sent by new members to the YahooGroup list are used to create web pages for each member, who can then access each other's pages through links on the Students' page. Before material is placed on the student web pages, it is corrected, which is one reason we call this group Writing for Webheads.
Besides encouraging group members to get to know one another and serving as a means for providing feedback on their writing, the Students' page serves many other purposes favoring group cohesion. Participation in the group is tracked at the Students' page, as the listing is sorted on the most recent interactions of each member with the group. The students at the top of the list are therefore the more active ones (and those at the bottom the lurkers). Tenure in the group is also reflected through display of gif animated 'rainbow stars,' each representing a year of participation in Webheads (there are currently several 2- and 3-star members). This page also displays other information pertaining to each student, such as birthdays and anniversaries of joining the group, and links to webpages of members who have created their own.
Webheads have moved well beyond simply sharing voice and image files via email. The group has for the last couple of years engaged in regular synchronous online text- and avatar-based chat, augmented with voice and video events. A list of our most currently used chat clients is maintained here: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/software.htm. The ones most favored by Webheads these days are Tapped In at http://www.tappedin.org/ (easily accessible, well developed and purposeful graphics, easily navigable interface, built-in community, keeps logs, well funded) and for multi-user voice and video, Yahoo Messenger (enables us to find each other online and provides multiple user voice- and video web cam-enabled chat as well as instant messaging). For one-on-one voice- and video-enabled chat we have also found it convenient to use Netmeeting, which we generally access through sessions already established in MSN Messenger.
We document what we do with Webheads in a number of ways. Reports such as the present one are linked from a URL on the webheads page here: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/reports.htm and include a dissertation in 'Webheadery' by Webheads member John Steele (2002). We have also logged most of our chats from 1998 into 2002, and these can be found at this URL: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/chatlogs.htm
More recently the community has been attracting teaching peers. Many of these have joined the Writing for Webheads group while others have formed their own community, Webheads in Action http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads.htm. While the focus of the WFW group is more on students, the WIA group is composed entirely of language-teaching peers. This group in particular has evolved into a community of practice, a support group for those interested in learning and doing CMC. The goals of this community are forwarded through the maintenance of a virtual 'zone of proximal development' in which scaffolding continually takes place through synchronous and asynchronous online interaction. Whereas student Webheads tend to join only the former group, several teaching professional Webheads are members of both groups. Dr. Arif Altun, for example, is an active participant in both groups.
Teaching members of Webheads have occasionally involved the group in their own projects. For example, classroom collaboration activities were organized by Arif Altun in Bolu, Turkey, and WFW participant Yaodong Chen in Liuzhou, China. On these occasions, the students in each country spoke and wrote to each other, and photos were taken in both Turkey and China and shared among all participants in the chats. These events have provided data for the study described here.
This study is an interpretive case study. Case studies are considered to be very powerful when the researcher has no control over the environment and would like to focus on describing and interpreting the research from an exploratory perspective (Yin, 1989). The webheads community is an open community for participants as there is no moderator to control the interaction between participants. In other words, the participants introduce themselves and join the practice on their own. Accordingly, the research focus for this study is to explore the perceptions of students joining the online community.
Content analysis as a component in case study is another powerful tool for exploring the patterns and themes emerging in the data (Patton, 1990). In order to see the specific cases, a three-step process of case study, as suggested by Patton (1990) has been employed to analyze the data. According to the process of constructing case studies, the first step is to assemble the raw case data. In this step, the researchers organize all the available information collected about the participants and setting. In the second (optional) step, the researchers construct a case record. In the final step, a narrative is produced based on the case in question. The narrative can be either chronological or thematical, or both.
In the present research, the case study method accommodates the research focus to explore the patterns emerging in students’ perceptions on joining an online community from a distance.
A college-level EFL class in Turkey was offered an elective computer-assisted language learning course. One of the aims in the course was to give the students practice in joining synchronous text-based chat environments. Since the students had no prior experience with such chat environments, some of them raised the question where to go for practice. Therefore, the class teacher invited them to participate voluntarily in the Webheads community, where language educators meet language learners in a friendly manner in a variety of synchronous text-based chat environments (augmented sometimes by voice and video as well). A total of 12 EFL students, eight girls and four males, showed an interest in joining the Webheads online community from a distance and in participating the study.
Data were generated over the course of three meetings between the Turkish students and the Webheads community. The first meeting took place May 27, 2001, during one of the regular weekly online, virtual meetings of Writing for Webheads. In order to participate in this regular weekly Webheads session (held every Sunday noon GMT since 1998) the Turkish students had to make a special trip back to school on their weekend in order to experience participation in CMC. The next meeting was arranged after Arif had arranged with his class to assist with the demonstration Webheads would give at the Teacher to Teacher conference in Abu Dhabi on November 7th of that year. This second meeting, October 31, was set at the exact time of day of the conference presentation which would be one week later. What went on at the meetings is summarized briefly below.
First meeting, May 27, 2001
The first encounter of the Turkish students with the Webheads community started with Arif gathering his education students together in his office in Turkey. Just prior to their first synchronous online session with Webheads, Arif had got in touch with Vance in Abu Dhabi in ICQ (a chat client that allows its users to 'see' when others are online). Having established initial contact we moved to a text chat client that Vance has on one of his Homestead websites (anyone can use it: http://www.homestead.com/vstevens). Two other Webheads teachers, John and Maggi, arrived (from Puerto Rico and Germany) and we all went to Tapped In for convenience in keeping logs (Tapped In is a MOO environment for educators that emails transcripts of sessions to members who go there). Arif's students were very interested in our method of teaching, and they took turns asking questions from Arif's laptop. They sent pictures of themselves chatting and we experimented with GroupBoard, a free chat client that allows multiple users to share graphics on the same 'whiteboard'. Ying Lan, one of the Webheads students (in Taiwan), had by then joined us in Tapped In, but Arif and his students had to log off just as Michael appeared (from Australia). A record of the event, with pictures captured on web cam and those sent from Turkey, was set up here: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/chat2001/wfw010527.htm
Second meeting, October 31, 2001
This was a practice session for the live conference event coming up one week later at the Teacher to Teacher conference in Abu Dhabi. In this session, Webheads managed to connect two classes half a world away from each other, as Arif's class of computer-assisted language learning students in Bolu, Turkey interacted with Yaodong's English language class in Liuzhou, China. During the session, both sides communicated via live (synchronous) multi-user voice and text chat, augmented with video web cams visible to all participants. Each side took photos, and some of these and other records of the event were posted on the subsequent Webheads web page: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/chat2001/wfw011031.htm
Third meeting, Nov 7, 2001
The third meeting was at the Webheads' presentation at the MLI's Teacher to Teacher Conference in Abu Dhabi on November 7, 2001. As this demonstration was done in an auditorium at the conference facility in Abu Dhabi using conference computers working on an Internet connection installed only the day before, we were not able to test or use on the day all the software we had had available to us the week before. In particular, we were unable to get Yahoo Messenger working and therefore couldn't connect the two classes in the multiple user voice and video linkup we had had the week before. Instead we had to resort to Netmeeting which reduced the scope of our interaction to one-to-one presentations, with others in the chat unfortunately unable to either see or hear what was going on. However, we were able to get some kind of presentation working under pressure, and as far as our audience was concerned, they were at least able to observe us communicating with individuals in the various locations (Bolu, Turkey; and Wuhan and Liuzhou in China). In his presentation to our audience, Arif pointed out that the demonstration had been well worthwhile despite technical glitches, which should not cloud the thrust of what we are doing -- bringing global communities together for peaceful and scholarly purposes online. Arif gave some of his students the microphone and they introduced themselves via Netmeeting to our conference participants, and we also saw some of the Turkish students on Arif's web cam via Netmeeting. On the Chinese side, An-Lian in Wuhan was able to broadcast eloquently to our audience using Netmeeting. A website with pictures of the audience in Abu Dhabi was created here: http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/chat2001/wfw011107.htm
Portions of transcripts of these sessions were analyzed, and the students in Turkey were polled for their reactions to joining these sessions from a distance. Patterns in the discourse were discerned, and the qualitative results are presented below.
The findings of the study yielded windows on many issues in online interactions such as expectations, having fun, and interest raising. Furthermore, the audio-visual capabilities of the interactive communications used by Webheads seemed to draw both the students’ and teachers’ interest into a desire for further communications. The students' concluding remarks pointed in an encouraging direction: they wanted to try it again.
Here we would like to summarize the patterns that emerged from transcripts of the written discourse.
Raising interest
The Webheads community offers to its members an environment where content is not predetermined; participants control and negotiate at any given moment what to talk about. As the Turkish EFL students entered the community for the first time from a distance one of their initial strategies was to explicitly attempt to acquaint themselves with the other members of the community. In the very early openings, one group of students (sitting around one computer) asked:
344 rf [guest] says, "what can we do"
345 Maggi [guest] says, "just talabout things that interest you"
Topic initiation was not limited to explicit statements. Some students also mentioned in their reflection journals that they had "tried to take attention to them" (Oncel, Reflection journal) and that they had wanted to "meet others by speaking English" (Yurdagul , Reflection journal). Generally, students showed an interest in talking about their and each others` hometowns; about their personal curiosities, and about how they could develop their language skills.
Hometowns
Talking about one’s hometown is a very common characteristics of computer mediated communication (Turkle, 1995). The following dialogues show evidence of topic initialization based on talking about hometowns.
285 hi [guest] says, "have you ever been to turkiye"
288 VanceS says, "I've been there a couple of times."
290 VanceS says, "Arif told me I drove through your city."
291 hi [guest] says, "why have you been in turkey"
In another dialogue, participants tended to initiate conversation talking about hometowns:
1174 FanL asks, "who is from Turkey?"
1175 LianA says, "rif"
1176 LianA says, "and rif's students"
1177 ssFromTr [guest] says, "I am from turkey"
1178 LianA says, "ssfromtr, hi how are you"
1179 VanceS says, "I have voices in turkish fillig the hall here"
1182 ssFromTr [guest] says, "I am one of rif's students."
Participants tended to greet each other by asking where and which part of the world they were from. Moreover, such endeavors helped maintain the discourse as in the following dialogue:
1215 FanL asks, "Hi, Rif. which part of Turkey are you from?"
1226 rif [guest] says, "Bolu, Northern Turkey"
1318 trss [guest] says, "hifrom turkey"
1331 VanceS says, "Thanks again. Let's meet again in Turkey."
1400 SusanneN says, "I live in Farum, north of Copenhagen, denmark. In our village we have
1401 many Turkish families"
1494 rif [guest] says, "where do you live in denmark"
1495 SusanneN says, "I live north of Copenhagen in a town called farum"
1497 SusanneN says, "Farum has 17 000 inhabitants, and many immigrants"
1498 ssfromtr2 [guest] says, "hi susanne where u from"
Interpersonal exchanges
Another implied dimension of joining an online community from a distance was a tendency to engage in interpersonal information sharing. The participants, who of course could not see each other face-to-face, raised several personal questions to better know each other. In the very beginning of a conversation, the following dialogue is observed:
337 rf [guest] says, "who is maggi we wonder her"
338 Maggi [guest] says, "Maggi is the other teacher"
341 Maggi [guest] says, "I'm in Germany"
In another session, a similar conversation happened between the two participants:
1402 SusanneN says, "I have had many friends from Turkey but I never went to Turkey myself."
1404 rif [guest] says, "we are a full class here and can you introduce your self to us"1469 rif [guest] says, "we wonder if you want to learn abaut our university" (Tapped In)
1470 YaodongC [to Simple]: "i am here,watching the presentation."
1472 SusanneN says, "But I would rather hear more about Rif's university"
1474 ssfromtr2 [guest] says, "really you're so beatiful."
1475 SusanneN smiles and elaves the talking stick to rif
1478 rif [guest] says, "thanks a lot"
In this conversation, the participants wanted to focus on a single person to initiate an interpersonal information exchange. It should be noted that hometowns and physical location are used to initiate conversation. In addition, pictures which have been posted on the web give another impetus to maintaining the conversation.
Language skill development
One of the driving forces in joining an online community is the participants’ expectations of developing and/or practicing their language skills. Learners of English as a foreign language rarely find a chance to use the language they are learning in communicative environments. Such environments can be especially valuable if they provide the students a chance to practice spoken skills. This is of course possible on the Internet, but in the following example, the students exchanged information in writing on the topic.
342 rf [guest] says, "we are good at reading and writing but on the other hand we are not good at
343 speakig"
344 rf [guest] says, "what can we do"
346 rf [guest] says, "to improve our speaking skills"
347 VanceS says, "I just tried my telcopoint site, but we have no place where we can all meet and
348 speak that's private"
349 Maggi [guest] says, "oops...talk to each other"
350 VanceS says, "You could post messages on our voice board, though."
351 VanceS says, "There is a public speech forum, at englishtown.com"
352 Maggi [guest] says, "find tourists to talk to...there must be other speakers of English living
353 there"
354 VanceS says, "This is our voice forum"
355 VanceS says, "http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/wimba.htm"
356 rf [guest] says, "we have not opportunity to chat on internet"
357 Maggi [guest] says, "don't be afraid of making mistakes and don't try to be perfect"
358 JohnSte says, "If you can find movies in English, watch them. That will help you improve
359 your listening."
We see that in this case, the conversation was maintained through information exchange on developing language skills. The community welcomed the participants’ inquiries and provided information online to help them further explore on their own time. In addition, suprasegmentals (i.e., accent) also initiated a conversation topic among the participants:
360 Maggi [guest] says, "an accent is very charming"
363 rf [guest] says, "thanks for your suggestions"
364 Maggi [guest] says, "if not talking to each other is next best"
365 VanceS asks, "Try Englishtown. Have you been there?"
366 rf [guest] says, "no we haven't been there"
367 Maggi [guest] says, "try eViews for interviews with people of different accents"
368 Maggi [guest] says, "read out loud"
Audio-visual excitement
Audio-visual components in online communications draw a lot of attention and generate excitement among first-time visitors to online chat rooms. When the community members initiated audio-visual enhanced CMC, the Turkish students showed an increased interest in being able to see and hear what was going on.
1368 YaodongC [helpdesk] feels delighted Vance will put on webcam now
1369 LianA [to David]: "good luck"
1370 YaodongC says, "ok"
1371 SusanneN says, "By seeing both Yaodong's class and rif's om the Webhead homepage, I got
1372 a clear impression you were connected :-)"
1373 FanL says, "i can read words, but no sound getting into my ears"
1374 LianA [happy] feels anxious about tardy invitation
1375 VanceS says, "ok Lian, let's try it."
1376 rif [guest] says, "but we could not see yours"
Since this was their first experience, they seemed very excited and eager to see and hear from a distance.
1424 rif [guest] says, "we are very excited since it is our first experience"
1425 SusanneN says, "We need these experiments to find the best way to do this."
1426 YaodongC [to Rif [guest]]: "can we hear your students.pls?"
1427 rif [guest] says, "we hope so"
Other participants also showed a similar reaction to being able to hear others in the chat. Yaodong, for example, is a participant from China and he is very interested in hearing ssfromtr2 (which is another student in Turkey). Yet, due to some technical incapability, students at the Turkish end could unfortunately not make their voices heard from the other side at this point during the session.
1435 VanceS says, "the presentation is on now"
1436 VanceS says, "(to Yaodong, who asked)"
1437 YaodongC [to VanceS]: "it is a;pity we cannot hear it."
1438 VanceS says, "Lian's English is very good, Jim is impressed"
1476 YaodongC [to Rif [guest]]: "could u possssssibly invite us so that we can hear u/ur
1477 students?"
1480 ssfromtr2 [guest] says, "hi yaodong weare here"
1487 YaodongC [helpdesk] has disconnected.
1542 YaodongC [to Rif [guest]]: "we wish to hear u voice"
1546 YaodongC [to Ssfromtr2 [guest]]: "how can u hear him?"
However, this breakdown did not cut the conversation short. The participants showed an understanding toward each other's technical problems. They expressed their wishes for the next time.
1557 rif [guest] says, "next time our teacher will arrange it so that you can hear us"
1563 YaodongC [to Rif [guest]]: "how come we never heard yr voiice?"
1564 LianA says, "i hear rif's voice this afternoon."
1565 LianA [to YaodongC]: "you can hear his voice later"
On reflection, two of Arif's students summed up their experiences this way:
The important thing was we succeeded to communicate and it was the first time for us. On that time, Anil came near us and said she had a chance to speak to Vance. Therefore, Eda and I decided to try to communicate with him again" (Sema, personal reflection)
This experience was useful for us because we talked them in English, so it was useful for our English" (Emel, personal reflection)
Leave taking
Concluding a conversation in computer mediated conversation shows quite a wide variety of forms due to the very nature of connections and non-face to face communication (Rintel & Pittam, 1997). However, for the first-time participants in the Webheads online community, this was not the case. There as a unique and single pattern in concluding remarks. Students showed an interest in repeating this event again to meet online. In the following lines, for example, it is the students who mention to meet again:
1528 rif [guest] says, "we want to meet again later if you want"
1539 SusanneN [to Rif [guest]]: "and his students Fine! just tell me when we can meet again?"
In their reflection papers, the students showed a similar pattern of desire to repeat this event later. In her personal paper, Sema wrote: "I want to join this kind of communication again. In my opinion, it is useful for us and we are more active". Instead of feeling as foreigners in the community, they seemed to find something in common to further carry on the conversation. In another entry, Oncel wrote: "What I was impressed most is that I talked to an English speaking person without having difficulties. I really had a joyful time while talking. I would like to do this again". From these examples, we find that English and the Webheads online community provided a purposeful environment for EFL students to join in and be part of the community.
Unmet expectations
The Turkish students entered the community with pre-conceived notions. Before each meeting, we asked the students to prepare some questions about the EFL profession so that the community would provide responses. These questions seemed to guide the initial stages of conversation. For example, one of the students starts at the very outset of her joining the group with the following question:
428 rf [guest] says, "what are u thinking about question3"
430 VanceS asks, "What was question 3? Can you remind us?" (MSN Messenger)
As the above example shows, the students expected the remote teacher to be focused on the questions they had prepared in advance, but in reality, the remote teacher has his hands full juggling all the remote inputs to the session. The result is that some participant interactions can get lost in a flurry of multiple threads conveyed by constantly scrolling text. This is a characteristic of synchronous text-based communications that takes some getting used to (even for the native speakers in the chat). In a reflection paper, one of the students wrote:
We asked some questions but some of them were not answered and the others were answered late. I felt a bit angry …if I need to be honest, I was not satisfied wit this conversation because I couldn"t do anything that I thought or imagined in my mind before. (Anonymous Student, Reflection)
It is clear that students carry their expectations to the setting to initiate and continue the conversation. If they do not see their needs met, they feel angry and aimless. However, this was not the case for others who had joined the community earlier. Although they carried expectations with them, they tended to enjoy the sessions for what they were rather than being angry about not achieving all their goals. In an email correspondence, Susanne, a relatively experienced member of the Webheads community, mentions that she is still not sure what to expect, but that it is an enjoyable experience for her to encounter surprises:
"I was happy that you shared the correspondence from last week with rif as I got a better understanding of the situation where I did feel a bit confused - I still never know what to expect, just that I usually enjoy surprises, too." (Susanne, email correspondence)
In this study, it was aimed to explore a group of EFL students' perceptions of joining an online community from a distance. The students showed generally positive attitudes in joining the online community from a distance. The main findings were categorized and presented under seven headings: raising interest, hometowns, interpersonal exchanges, language skill development, audio-visual excitement, leave taking, and unmet expectations . Among these issues, talking about hometowns seems to be the most common way to initiate conversations. Regardless of gender and language origin, participants in the community of practice tend to be curious about where their peers are from. The moderators of such online communities might capitalize on this by requesting that participants introduce their hometowns from the very beginning to promote conversation.
The findings in this study support Seabrooks, Kenney, & LaMontagne (2000), who analyzed teacher trainees' collaboration and interaction in a community of practice. Based on content analyses, online communication was perceived as a positive experience for EFL students to develop their intervention and communication skills, as seen in initiating, maintaining, and leaving conversations. The present findings, however, contradict Seabrooks et al. in that task-oriented online communication was not a viable process for the students in the present study. Although the EFL students from Turkey joined their first meeting having prepared a set of questions to raise, they couldn't introduce them; rather, they ended up following the flow of conversation. This made them frustrated since the flow of synchronous online communications can be more along the lines of 'chaos navigation' than in traditional f2f communication (the term 'chaos navigation' was coined by Susanne Nyrop in online conversations with Webheads). This can present unexpected complications for first time participants in communities of practice from a distance. Some of these are documented in Steele's (2002) Ph.D. study of the Webheads community. Steele uses Stevens's (2001b) analogy of emoderation being not unlike 'herding cats' to characterize the manner in which Webheads seemed to 'organize' (or decline to organize) its interactions through what initially appears as 'chaos navigation' (but which Susanne later redefined, once she'd gained more experience, to be 'intuitive' chaos navigation). In his study, Steele observed a similar pattern when students were asked to prepare questions to be asked in the chat sessions.
The effectiveness of these emerging communities both as community of practice and mind, is subject to participants' approval and/or rejection (Rintel and Pittam, 1997). Students' willingness to participate in the Webheads community indicates that the Webheads community received students' approval as a community of practice. However, the students in this study did not indicate any particular perception of others as peer members. This may be due to the fact that the sessions were shorter and limited to three meetings, as opposed to those reported by Hrabe, Adamy, Milman, Washington, & Howard (1998). In their study, Hrabe et al. found participants in CMC to have a sense of participating in a shared community. In the present study, the EFL students were found to have motivation for participation with awareness of social context.
The Internet provides a media-rich environment for language learners. The Webheads community of practice makes use of the Internet as much as possible, and textual, audio, and audio-video tools can all be experienced by its users. However, the Turkish students participating in this community from a distance had relatively limited access to the audio visual equipment. These students had all indicated their willingness to participate in the study, but perhaps their motivation and participation would have been enriched if they had been provided the tools necessary to access all of the CMC tools used in these sessions. As developers of online communities, we should think not only about the possibilities of utilizing such tools to reach our goals and those of our students, but of their availability.
It is with these considerations in mind that the Webheads communities have been reaching out to language learners and teaching practitioners for the past several years. The CMC tools used in Webheads are the latest of those freely available. Free availability is indeed crucial to the Webheads concept. In other words, the communities of practice formed through Webheads have utilized the wide availability of free CMC tools in maintaining the cohesion and collaboration of a broad spectrum of student and teacher participants, who can download and use these tools on the most common denominator computers available worldwide, and through average-speed (often under 56 kbps) Internet connections. As we saw at the third meeting in this study, there is a trade-off between free availability and reliability, yet the community members managed to carry the presentation through genuine interest in its success on the part of all concerned. This study is of interest because it has given an insight into the reactions of one group of participants in describing how they coped with their first-encounters with experienced users in a chaotically evolving virtual community of practice.
Finally, although not overtly a focus of this study, the fact that this study was conceived and conducted at all is further evidence of the scaffolding power of virtual communities of practice. None of the participants in this study at any of the remote locations has ever met except online through participation in the various Webheads communities. The study was arranged and conducted entirely through use of the same CMC tools used with the students. These tools proved reasonably robust not only at the three meetings reported here, but particularly in the final stages of collaboration on this paper, as when Arif and Vance met in MSN Messenger, negotiated meaning, revised together, emailed revisions back and forth, and at times FTP'd documents to the master manuscript at the website in order to produce this document.
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Hrabe, M. E., Adamy, P. H., Milman, N. B., Washington, L. A., & Howard, L. A. (1998). Curry CONNECT: How online discourse creates community for education students. Proceedings of Society Society for Information technology and Teacher Education, Eds. (S. McNeil, J. Pierce, S. Boger-Mehall, B. Robing, & J. Willis), 1181-1185
Rintel, E. S. & Pittam, J. (1997). Strangers in strange land: Interaction Management on Internet Relay Chat. Humman Communication Research, 23, 507-534.
Seabrooks, J. J., Kenney, S. & LaMontagne, M. (2000). Collaboration and Virtual Mentoring: building relationships between pre-service and in-service special education teachers, Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education Volume 9 Number 2 pp. 219/ 237
Steele, John H. (2002). Herding Cats: A Descriptive Case Study of a Virtual Language Learning Community. A Dissertation Submitted to the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Graduate School and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in English John H. Steele I May 2002, http://netdial.caribe.net/~jhsteele/cats.html
Stevens, Vance. 2001a. Developing a Community in Online Language Learning. In Syed, Zafar, and David Heuring, eds. Tools of the Trade: Teaching EFL in the Gulf. Proceeds of the Military Language Institute's 1st annual Teacher-to-Teacher Conference, May 3-4, 2000, Abu Dhabi (UAE) pp 85-101
Stevens, Vance. 2001b. Implementing Expectations: The Firewall in the Mind. Plenary address given at the Implementing Call in EFL: Living up to Expectations conference at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia May 5th - 6th, 2001; Slide 31: http://www.geocities.com/vance_stevens//papers/cyprus2001/plenary/gvs31a.html
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen. New York: Simon & Schuster.
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