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The Webheads Community of Language Learners Online by Vance Stevens and Arif Altun Proceeds from a demonstration given November 7, 2001, 12:00-12:50 GMT http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/papers/t2t2001/proceeds.htm |
Conclusion Abstract Rationale Webheads The Study Conclusion |
Conclusion
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 the headings of: 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, and this caused frustration.
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 utilizes to the greatest extent possible the textual, audio, and audio-video tools available on the Internet in hopes that these will enhance the experience of its users. However, the Turkish students participating in this community from a distance had relatively limited access to the audiovisual 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 pull off 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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Stevens, V. (2002b). Some CMC clients promoting language learning through chatting online. Retrieved October 30, 2002, from: http://www.vancestevens.com/findbuds.htm
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Appendix: Other URL's related to this document
Webheads document their activities in a number of ways. We have logged most of our chats since 1998, and these can be found in our online Chat Logs. Reports such as the present one are linked from the Webheads Reports page and include a dissertation in 'Webheadery' by Webheads member John Steele (2002). Recent presentations in which Webheads have been involved are catalogued at http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/. These urls and others shedding light on this report and on the various Webheads communities are shown below:
 Vance Stevens (MLI)  Arif Altun (Nigde University) |
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