Online Communities

I had forgotten that this afternoon I had my once-per-semester parent-teacher meeting with my fifth grader's teacher. The good news - no surprises and she's doing fine, in spite of her noticeable aversion to mathematics. The bad news - I had to miss class.

So I am going to add a few notes about the reading from today's assignment on Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability.

Overall, it is interesting, although certainly during the first two chapters it really seemed that much of what was said could have been said in (at least) half the space. I realized, however, that some of that perception may have come from already having read many of the authors that Preece cites in this book. In addition, given that Preece's book was published in 2000, it is only fair to note that much of this material would have seemed much more novel to me then.

Overall, I couldn't find any points of disagreement with Preece's exposition, although there were a couple of places that it seemed she made some flat-out assertions that were more in the realm of opinion than proven fact, and that she would have done well to justify them. For example, on p. 63 she says, "Should all classes be held online? Absolutely not, students need face-to-face interaction, too." Now, I actually agree with her on this, but the trends in distance education do seem to be toward increasingly web-oriented coursework. Unfortunately, Preece offers no real rationale for her preference for face-to-face interaction or for this assertion.

I thought Chapter 3 would make a good template of topics to begin looking at the online communities we will be reviewing in our term projects. She provides a good structure for analyzing a particular community, or even for thinking about necessary community elements when considering the possibility of starting up such a community. One thing I would have liked to see a bit more emphasis on was the tendency (or lack thereof) for communities to expand beyond what was originally intended by its developers, but perhaps that will come in a later chapter. For instance, do certain software structures, by-laws, or moderating techniques tend to support or reduce organic growth and change? Preece does mention this briefly, but more discussion of empirical examples would've been cool.

Chapter 4 also provided an interesting list of attributes one could use to analyze a community, and I was especially interested in Preece's mention on p. 126 of the desirability of creating "broad, shallow menus rather than narrow, deep ones." I was also interested in her comment that the gap between the use of the Internet by the rich and poor, the well-educated and less education is increasing . (pp. 130-131) I was wondering, since this book was published 7 years ago, whether that is still a trend we are seeing. Does anyone know this?

Finally, Preece notes that MUDS have their instances of "killers." What's that?