Social Presence: Trust in the environment

After reading Bruce Richardson's posts noted below, I realize it's important to really work at establishing social presence to gain the trust of the students so that they're comfortable to move on to more sophisticated tasks.

Bruce Richardson wrote on May 2, 2009: I've read Tu?s (2002) article, a major finding is the extent to which learners perceive different forms of electronic communication as having different levels of privacy. Perceptions of social presence are higher the more a learner regards the environment as being private. Public communication which creates a permanent record was considered to be the least private and therefore contributed the least to social presence

I think this finding is related to trust and disclosure, a private environment creates a greater level of safety which makes it easier to disclose personal information. Disclosure facilitates interaction which in turn facilitates collaboration and community (Rovai, 2002).

Beaudoin (2002) has commented that learners who are prone to lurking are more likely participate in small groups. It's very likely this finding is related to Tu?s (2002) finding.

Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) have said that to facilitate the formation of a Community of Practice (CoP) you need to provide multiple forms of communication: formal, public, private, informal and spontaneous. This is necessary because the knowledge building task requires the group?s relationships to operate at different levels to ensure information gets propagated through the group. More importantly they also think it?s necessary because CoPs are not only build around a core group but also from the ground up with individual private connections aggregating and contributing to the whole.

This understanding should have a profound impact on the way you go about forming and maintaining your large (500) Community of Practice. You need to supplement the public forum with more private spaces that don't maintain a permanent record and you need to make this clear to the members. This could be facilitated chat sessions, in small groups supplementing the case studies you?re already planning. It could also mean facilitating email communication between the membership and particular thought leader/s who are provided with time to respond. It might also mean the formation of special interest groups which are related to the community but have their own space to meet online.

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References

Beaudoin, M. F. (2002). Learning or lurking? Tracking the "invisible" online student. The Internet and Higher Education, 5(2), 147-155.

Rovai, A. P. (2002). Building sense of community at a distance [Electronic Version]. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 3(1). Retrieved March, 10, 2009 from www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/download/79/153.

Tu, C. H. (2002). The impacts of text-based CMC on online social presence [Electronic Version]. The Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 1. Retrieved April 30 2009, from http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/PDG/1.2.6.pdf.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.