What is a community? Is it people coming together “to escape uncertainty” or is it a confusing and potentially conflicted place (Brent 215)?  I live in a community with a homeowner’s association and all the signs, marketing and newsletters stress the community that we live in.  But it is a forced community, a mere by-product of buying a house on a certain street.  With very little in common with our neighbors, we rarely participate in any structured community events.

In our blogs, as individual articles were shared and analyzed, we had the opportunity to read exponentially more material and be exposed to many more authors than we would have been if we would not have posted our information communally. I analyzed the topics and sources used [Appendix], identifying 44 unique sources.  Of these, only four sources were used more than once, with only one source used more than twice (nine times).  Of 55 total references, there was only one duplicate reference posted [figure 1].

How do communities develop within a class? Community building techniques need to be “explicitly explained” in a distance class as to their purpose (Neff 85). While explanations of purpose at an undergraduate level may be needed for “modeling an intellectual community,” this should not have to be explained at the graduate level, as I posit that the purpose of blogging or other asynchronous discussion forums are more than a tool to create class community [1], as students may use these spaces for different purposes and community-building may only be a peripheral benefit. Garrison and Vaughan point constructivist learning theory, in which individuals are “making sense of their experiences” with “inquiry at its core” (13-14). We each had autonomy in our blog subject matter, with broad latitude applied to the interest areas we chose to explore. Pointing to the necessity of students being “actively engaged in the process of inquiry,” with a community of inquiry (CoI) as a method to achieve this, our class blogs could be viewed as both CoI and applied constructivism.

Neff looks to asynchronous communication as created spaces “where students can control the direction of the conversation in ways that they cannot in traditional educational classrooms” (93). She stresses that “learning is enhanced when it is more like a team effort than a solo race.  Good learning like good work is collaborative and social, not competitive and isolated. Working with others increases involvement in learning.  Sharing one’s ideas and responding to others improves thinking and deepens understanding” (Gamson as cited in Neff 100). Encouragement can also be given for students to use online posting avenues outside single assignments by drawing the content in to other discussions, encouraging students to continue participation, noting that instructors should not be “the bottleneck” and that low-stakes writing often encourages better participation if students aren’t always just writing with assessment in mind or for a particular assignment (Warnock 83).

While graduate students may use blogging for their own research purposes without external motivation, I have used both ungraded and graded blog posts/comments in numerous undergraduate online classes, without clear guidelines as to when, what and how much to post and undergraduate students, in my experience, will usually only post to the requirements. Warnock points to the benefit of assigning primary and secondary posts, with a discussion around the necessity of outlining the expectations and timing for when students should post to encourage active participation, but recognizing that a reward/punishment system will change how posts are perceived within a class.  In our class, by having blog posts due at certain times, but with no expectation of what follow-up comments or conversations might ensue from the posts, it was left open to interpretation and posts only appeared sporadically, but never became a major place of conversation within the class.

Requiring comments on a blog will elicit increased response, as students are often grade motivated, but is commenting on a blog building community or just increasing forced participation – a form of the medicine that is good for you? Warnock focuses on conversation and asynchronous message boards as being a “cornerstone” of his own online pedagogy with a goal of wanting students to “talk with one another” (68). Focusing conversations on students and their responses, Bakhtin points to the response as being the foundation of understanding, rather than teachers talking “to” students (as cited in Warnock 68) it pushed us to think in new ways about active learning and student agency in their own learning.

Figure 3: Total Comments to Student Blogs

Participation, conversation or interaction do not necessarily equate to community. On our blogs, there were a total of 49 comments averaging 4.5 posts per blog, but only 6 out of 11 students participated by providing comments. 5 students did not participate beyond their own blog posts (Figures 3-5).

Figure 4: Response Comments to Student Blogs

Did the lack of participation on our class blogs diminish the establishment of community within the class?  Not at all, because beyond the instructor-required blogs, the class had a private Facebook page in which all of the students were enrolled, but not the instructor. On that page, there were posts almost daily, ranging from shared resources, to assignment questions, to support and encouragement.  Social community was established outside the confines of the classroom, but with greater and fuller interactions in the Facebook group, than on any individual blog.  As a private, closed space, students may feel freer to express their thoughts, opinions and share on their own terms than on a public blog space, or one required as part of a class.

Figure 5: Comments to Own Blog

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[1] I refer to blogs, discussion posts, and bulletin boards as all asynchronous methods of communication within an online classroom and associate them as a single construct for building community or fostering class interaction for the purpose of my analysis, while recognizing that each is its own individual technology, having its own affordances and limitations.