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

 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

, whose domain or topic is that of com-

munities of practice. Conversations take place in

Web Crossing

, a community based discussion tool

with a number of plug-ins developed over the years

by some of its members. People come from more

http://www.cpsquare.org

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.

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

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”.

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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

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

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

http://www.timeanddate.com/

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

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-

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

” 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-

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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