I still ponder what goes on within the virtual world that is different than the face to face world. The other day I thought that we should be looking at the use of 2.0 tools in conjunction with community building. Vicki Davis's blog triggered this thought with her discussion of building a "blogging" audience and the interaction of the blog.
One of the key factors in community building is trust. Ruth Brown's study on community building brings in many of the factors that I think are important in the use of Web 2.0 tools. I have found, for example, that as my students get to know each other better, they are more apt to use the wiki and edit each other's works. Community comferment, in the form of comments and answers to comments, is a turning point, I think, to developing a blog. Dr. Brown found many causal conditions in the development of distance learning communities that I think could be applied to the success or failure of Web 2.0 tools.
So what are the attributes of "community" within Web 2.0 communities? And what types of communities are created? How can group dynamic theory help us to improve learning in these communities?
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