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Transcript of Cyber Communities of Learning
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Cyber Communities of Learning
An examination of the processes through which members of an open-
source e-Learning community learn and exchange knowledge.
Andrs-Pablo Vaquero Ibez
BA (Hons) Media and Communication
August 2010
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Cyber Communities of Learning
An examination of the processes through which members of an open-
source e-Learning community learn and exchange knowledge.
Andrs-Pablo Vaquero Ibez
BA (Hons) Media and Communication
August 2010
Word Count: 11,450
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Abstract_________________________________________________________________________
This research makes an in-depth examination of a thriving open-source e-Learning
community. The study primarily focuses on the ways in which this community is used for
e-Learning and knowledge exchange. It is theoretically based upon other works on the
subjects of the Internet, online communities and e-Learning, and uses virtual
ethnography to throw light into its main issue of concern.
It was found that the modes of learning employed in this community strongly resonate
with the communal constructivist theory of learning. Furthermore the research suggests
that altruism, community, open-source, and personal and communal reputation all
interplay an important role in the thriving and success of such a community. The
research shows how the sustaining and maintenance of the community happens
spontaneously through a global commitment that is based upon the value that is put into
the possibilities and benefits that the technology and the specific environment grant.
Finally it draws attention to the effectiveness and potential of new open-source systems
of online knowledge exchange, and encourages the focus of further academic research
in this area in order to improve, promote, and expand their uses.
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Dedication_________________________________________________________________________
To my family, my future wife, and my friends, and to all those who have had to put up
with me at times.
A special dedication to my father, who no longer will be able to read this work, but who
has given me the greatest of infancies and a no-less greater life.
Finally to all of those who will read this work.
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Contents_________________________________________________________________________
Introduction........................................1
Chapter One: Literature Review.............................................3-12
The Internet......................................................................3
Online Communities.................................................6
E-Learning.......................................................................8
Chapter Two: Methodology......................12-17
Definition...............................................................................12
Justification.............................................................14
Classic Study...............................................15
Ethics.............................................................................15
Proceedings.......................................................................16
Chapter Three: Kirupa.com..........................................................................................18-36
Description and Background Information.....................................18
An Online Community?....................................23
Why do They Contribute?.....................27
Collective Order Maintenance.........................30
In Which Ways do They Learn?...................31
Self-Reflection......................................35
Chapter Four: Conclusion........................37-38
Bibliography.........................39-43
Appendices.......................44-62
Appendix I: Kirupa Chinnathambi on Post Figures.....................................................45
Appendix II: Forum Thread: Website Critique.............................................................46
Appendix III: E-mail Interview to Trevor McCauley......................................................50
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Appendix IV: Kirupa Chinnathambi on Kirupa.coms Moderators................................51
Appendix V: An Online Tutorial by Senocular..............................................................52
Appendix VI: Forum Poll-Question - What IDE Are You Using for Flash Action- Script
and why?....................................................................................................................54
Appendix VII: Forum Help - An Example of an Incorrect Approach to Asking for
Help............................................................................................................................59
Appendix VIII: Forum Help - An Example of a Successful Approach to Asking for
Help............................................................................................................................60
Appendix IX: Kirupian on Forum Behaviour...............................................................62
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Introduction_________________________________________________________________________
This study explores the ways in which users of an open-source e-Learning community
learn and exchange knowledge. It uses virtual ethnography to make an examination of
Kirupa.com, a thriving online community where thousands of people share knowledge
on the subject of web design & development. It explores the ways in which their users
are empowered to learn, and it also throws light into correlated issues such as the
concept of community, motivation for contribution, and the sustainment and
maintenance of the community.
The Internet, despite having undergone rapid and extensive development so far, is a
technology in its very early stages. Online e-Learning communities are novel
environments that provide interesting new opportunities. It is important for scholars to
study them carefully so as to understand their potential benefits for education and even
for society at large, as well as to find ways in which they can be developed further.
At a personal level the reasons that have motivated the research relate to the benefits I
have obtained through open-source e-Learning environments. After getting used to the
fact that I could freely use them I became conscious of their novelty, and I started
asking myself numerous questions regarding the effectiveness of an otherwise solitary
self-taught experience into the complex area of web development. This is where I
realised the importance of this subject and that further research on this new area can
never be enough right at where we stand.
The study will firstly draw on academic works related to the three main frameworks of
academic knowledge that encompass it. Subsequently it will examine the methodology
applied exploring its definition, its main features, its advantages and disadvantages, its
justification, and the ethical issues involved in the research. It will proceed with the
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application of the methodology to the analysis of the website, where a detailed
description will be made and further aspects related to the main issue of research will
be studied. Finally the study will be summarised concluded, suggesting further areas of
research.
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Chapter One: Literature Review_________________________________________________________________________
This study encompasses three different frameworks of academic knowledge: the
Internet, online communities, and e-Learning. They will be explored below through the
mentioned order, although as you will notice at times the topics overlap. Let us get
started...
The Internet
As Bernadette Hlubik Schell shows us (2007, 1-52) an Internet is a network connecting
computer systems; what begun at first as an experimental military defence system for
the U.S. Department of Defence in the late 1960s called the ARPAnet (a computer
network for the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency) swiftly has come to be a
system by which part of the world population is able to perform, through their personal
computers at their own homes, a variety of tasks that range from instant messaging and
telephony, to e-commerce, internet banking, online gambling, political activism and
online voting (Schell 2007, 51). Even Schells definition above is quite lacking, as there
is a whole array of other things that are happening right now on the web. Therein are
online e-Learning communities such as Kirupa.com and innumerable others, where
many thousands of people exchange knowledge.
The Internet is still in its commence and therefore it is very likely to see important
changes in forthcoming years (Schell 2007, 138). It is good to notice as well that we are
rarely able to predict the future of technology. As David Winer perfectly puts it : Thats
what makes each of these revolutions so exciting its because all the prognostications
are always wrong (David Winer, cited in Richards, 2002, 195). Wilson and Peterson
(2002, 462) show that the revolutionary impact that was believed the Internet would
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make in terms of power relationships and the rapid transformation of society has not
been realised hitherto (perhaps we need more time), on the other hand in terms of the
social uses that have been put into it the impact has been astounding and almost
completely unprecedented.
Meanwhile all kinds of theories are emerging. There is a strand of thought with people
like Howard Bloom (2000), Peter Russel (1983), or Mayer-Kress and Barczys (1995,
1-17), who see the Internet as having the potential to become the nervous system of a
global brain. In Wolfgang Hofkirchners words (2007) this strand supports the idea that:
after the inventions of speech, writing and the printing press the diffusion of modernICTs is setting the stage for extending human collective intelligence into novel socio-technical forms that might regain the interconnectedness of bacteria, if not transcendboth the intelligence of humans and machines of today by a greater degree thanhuman information processing systems transcended pre-human ones.
493
After all we know very little of what is possible and almost nothing of what is awaiting. If
we could travel to the past, not so long ago, with any modern technological artefact we
would surely have an amusing time observing fellow-human reactions, yet new
generations are already used to these modern technologies.
Many regard the Internet as having triggered a revolution on its own right and claim that,
if used properly, it holds big potential to help in solving many of the most urging
problems that threaten humankind and society, or of what Carl Sagan called
technological adolescence (1995, 328-332). Humankind evolutes exponentially and in
the same way grow the problems that it faces. Hofkirchner (2007, 492-497) believes
that the Internet can be used to raise global consciousness and properly address many
of these problems. Online communities, according to him, would play the main role in
this task. He talks about two different kinds of communities whose boundaries are
sometimes blurred. In one, individuals just communicate with each other, in the other
one, individuals also share certain values that make them co-operate, that is,
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collaborate and act together in real life situations (Hofkirchner 2007, 496). The first type
is the community of interest, primarily designed for learning (Wikipedia, e-Learning
2.0) or networking (MySpace, Facebook etc) purposes. The second type is the
community of action, which according to Hofkirchner is what is needed to work out
collective intelligence and accomplish that leap in quality that is required to move
societal development onto a sustainable path (Hofkirchner 2007, 496). ##
Anyhow we need to realise that we are still far from achieving the full potential of the
Internet. Adefemi Sonaike (2004, 41-61), for instance, illustrates us with an array of
different complex problems that need to be addressed before the Internet can even
come close to be accessible for the whole of Africa. In regards to the digital divide we
need to be aware of the fact that there is still much road to be paved before the Internet
can reach the world population. We should not assume thoughtlessly that this is going
to happen any time soon or perhaps even ever, as in order to provide Internet
accessibility for the whole world we would firstly need to address some of the most
basic problems of humankind such as war, starvation or poverty. David Gunkel (2003,
499-522) provides us with a critical perspective on the digital divide urging that access
to technology should not be assumed to be automatic or universally applicable (500).
According to the statistics at WorldBank.com (The World Bank 2010, [online]) Internet
usage reached 23.9 per cent of the world population by 2009. The growth in Internet
usage has been fast and as new generations come it is expected to increase. What will
surely be more challenging is to address the issues concerned with providing physical
access to the technology for a large part of the world population.
Towards a definition of the Internet that is more concerned with its communicative and
social aspect, Dennis D. Waskul (2007) explain that the Internet is a place where self
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and society must be made to exist in a process where both are translated into the
conventions of the medium (47). Waskul (2007, 47-63) identifies two states of the self
towards society. One is the static state in which there is no difference between reality
and representation. In this case we would believe we are what we portray ourselves to
be. The other one is the ecstatic state, which Waskul describes as the state of being
outside of ones self and society, where distinctions of representation and reality are
not only recognised, but also actively manipulated (2007, 60). It is this latter state that
Waskul attributes to the Internet and the ways in which we use it. He urges us not to fall
in the same trap as other scholars have done in the past by considering these
manipulated representations naturally problematic. Waskul recognises them as a vital
part of human social life through which we step away from social structures and the self
in order to return to them revitalised. He tries to save us from prejudice related to
ecstatic reconstitutions of the self and considers the Internet as a good opportunity to
broaden our understanding of the nature of these, which according to him are a very
important part of social life that we should not disparage or consider deviant to society.
Online Communities
Exploring into the subject of online communities we find that, as means to approach
Internet studies from a more impartial position and escape vagueness and
preconceptions in scholarly work, academics have recently given much significance into
the issue of accurately defining the term community. Paul Baker and Andrew Ward
(2002) explain that the development of digital information and ICTs have had a number
of important consequences, including a reconceptualization of what it means to be a
community (207). Moreover as Gordon Graham puts it: Community has become a
vogue word on almost every lip, a word now used or abused, to the point of
meaninglessness (1999, 131). Jan Fernback (2007, 49-69) urges how academic
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knowledge would benefit much in carefully reconsidering the meaning of the word
community when studying online environments, and that if scholars continue to
thoughtlessly embed the word in Internet studies they will weaken the potential of the
research to understand how online communities are constituted, how they operate,
how they are integrated into offline social life, or what they provide (2007, 66).
Furthermore Andrew M. Cox (2008, 327-345) shows there is an ongoing debate over
the terms meaning, pointing out how the word is commonly used in a feeble way to
refer to the internet tools that enable users to generate content in a website such as
bulletin boards (2008, 330). In order to avoid futile interpretations Susan Herring (2004
cited in Cox, 2008) provides six criterions that contribute to a stronger definition of the
term community:
1. Active, self-sustaining participation; a core of regular participants.2. Shared history, purpose, culture, norms and values.3. Solidarity, support, reciprocity.4. Criticism, conflict, means of conflict resolution.5. Self-awareness of group as an entity distinct from other groups.
6. Emergence of roles, hierarchy, governance, rituals. 330
This studys main intention is not to address whether Kirupa.com can be considered an
online community or not but rather to explore how it is used. Anyhow applying Herrings
criterions to Kirupa.com will strengthen and solidify the foundations of the research as
well as shed direct light to it.
There are several other interesting studies of online communities. Some of them focus
in open-source communities. For instance Andrea Hemetsberger and Christian
Reinhardt (2006, 187-214) study the processes by which people construct knowledge in
open-source online communities, providing some interesting conclusions:
members of innovative online communities learn and build collective knowledge
through the use oftechnologies
and the establishment of discursive practices that
enable virtual re-experience.187
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Additionally Mohanbir Sawnhey and Emanuela Prandelli (2000, 24-54) propose a new
business model that tries to benefit from the advantages of the open-source model,
which is sustained through what they call communities of creation.
Other online-community studies focus in firm-hosted communities. For Example Sonja
Utz (2009, 357-374) examines the motivational factors that induce to knowledge
contribution in online consumer communities, determining whether their nature is
altruistic or egoistic. Research on the same topic as Utzs will be useful for this research
in order to determine what are the differences, if any, between motivation for knowledge
contribution in firm-hosted and in open-source communities and the why of these
differences.
E-Learning
There are many types of online communities on the Internet; one of them is the e-
Learning community, to which Kirupa.com belongs. Let us explore then the subject of e-
Learning.
According to Bryn Holmes and John Gardners simplistic definition e-Learning is:
online access to learning resources, anywhere and anytime (2006, 14). As they put it
e-Learning enables learners to have as much choice as is practically and economically
possible (Holmes and Gardner 2006, 14). They explain that society is undergoing
changes at such speed that the educational system is being left behind in the respect
that teachers and students increasingly have new things to learn and do but a lack of
new ways of learning and doing them (Holmes and Gardner 2006, 17). Governments in
Europe and the U.S.A. are investing large amounts of funds into e-Learning with the
hope that it will provide a solution to the problems that education is currently facing and
make learning environments more efficient; The European Union has invested large
sums of money and resources into the research of the potential and current role of e-
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Learning and digital-content delivery (Holmes and Gardner 2006, 18). In short it seems
that the hope and the current bet for improving education is on e-Learning. Holmes and
Gardner briefly summarise in five bullet-points the ways in which e-Learning can
improve the quality of education:
Contributing to an evolution in the way the students learn; enriching and extendingthe learning experience of students; providing powerful tools for learners to exploitthe World Wide Web; contributing to the evolution of theories of learning; opening uplearning to students who might otherwise be restricted;
2006, 31
Moreover they illustrate us with the different learning theories developed during the last
hundred years to finally arrive to explain the most contemporary one: communal
constructivism (Holmes and Gardner 2006, 76-89). This is a learning theory that arises
from the learning opportunities that technology is granting to society and it is the most
modern so far. It evolves from the socio-constructivist theory, which can be shortly
summarised with the following words: ones contribution to the learning of the
collective is likely to benefit the individual as well (Salomon and Perkins, cited in
Holmes and Gardner, 2006, 85).
In the communal constructivist theory:
e-Learning provides the learners with the tools to create new learning for themselvesand to contribute and store their new knowledge, in whatever form it is, projects,artefacts, essays and so on, in a communal knowledge base for the benefit of theircommunities existing and new learners.
Holmes and Gardner 2006, 85
As Holmes et al. (2001, [online]) explain: Communal constructivism is about
empowering the learners to allow them to reclaim a role in their own education (6). This
model for learning provides many improvements over traditional and static ways of
learning. In it teachers become learners and learners become teachers; the learning
process becomes active instead of passive, and learners are granted the power to
become part of an active community of members and be in charge of their own learning
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(Holmes and Gardner 2006, 87). Everyone can contribute permanently to everyones
learning and the whole process becomes dynamic, self-generating and builds always on
new knowledge instead of being repetitive (Holmes and Gardner 2006, 86). Its main
reason of being is to learn for other people and with other people. This kind of learning
can take place in formal communities with a tutor-teacher system or in an informal
community as, for instance, Kirupa.com. As Holmes and Gardner put it: In such a
scenario the motivation of the learners to learn is increased and the learning process is
made more meaningful (158).
The communal-constructivism theory lies at the very core of this research because as
we will see it has many similarities with the ways in which members of Kirupa.com
learn.
As Leask and Younie (2001, 117-134), and Scrimshaw (2001, 135-141) show there is
current concern into the viability and effectiveness of applying communal constructivism
through ICT into the educational and pedagogic system, a matter which is not as simple
as it may seem at first. On the whole, as Tavangarian et al. (2004) explain :
despite the fact that e-Learning exists for a relatively long time it is still in itsinfancy. The focus on technical gadgets and promising business models haveinfluenced the development into the wrong direction, at least as perceived from aconstructivist point of view.
278
Vivienne Bozalek and Lear Matthews (2009, 235-246) have made further research into
cross-cultural e-Learning showing much promise for this learning method in their
conclusions. Their findings state that through the e-Learning environment an
unexpected level of intimacy between users from different cultures was reached,
allowing them to work more effectively despite any identity issues that may have arisen
from differences in culture, gender, ethnicity or class.
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Martin Weller in his book Delivering learning on the Net (2002, 19-35) explores some
of the myths that surround online learning and its position in education such as that the
internet will mean the commercialisation and globalisation of education, the death of
campus university, the declining of standards in education, and that it is good for
training but not for education. On the whole he arrives to the conclusion that right now
we live in both the best and worst of times for education. He believes that in the next
twenty years we will see more change in the education system than since the
universities removed knowledge from the power of the church (Weller 2002, 33). During
this change that we are facing, he argues, we run the risk of weakening many of the
most important values integrated in the education system. Although he dispels many of
the negative myths against e-Learning he urges educators to actively take part in
shaping the decisions that are going to be made in the near future towards the
education system, because if these choices are not shaped by them they will be taken
anyway by people other than educators and this can result in a declining of the overall
standards (Weller 2002, 34).
I have gone above through the definitions, main issues of research and arguments that
academics have previously made in the fields of what constitute the main frameworks of
knowledge in which this research study falls. In as much as possible I have explored the
broad and the concrete issues related to this research.
It seems a common agreement that change in society is coming faster and faster due to
the advent of new technologies such as the internet, a vast universe in itself, very
complicated to fully understand but hugely interesting at the same time. It is an exciting
as well as a delicate time that runs faster than we have time to assimilate. Research
must be in the vanguard of what is happening right now, especially in the convoluted
and critical times we live in. This research tries to address an issue of current concern
and hopefully add relevant findings and a new perspective to scholarly knowledge.11
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Chapter Two: Methodology_________________________________________________________________________
Kirupa.com is an online environment where thousands of users are active producers
and consumers of online content related to web design & development. Virtual
ethnography offers the best approach available to shed light into the question of this
research. I will address further the main issues concerning this type of methodology
and why it is relevant to the research.
Definition
Virtual ethnography emerges from an older methodology that goes by the name of
ethnography. Ethnography had to be readapted to a new setting seen by the recent
advent of the Internet. This new setting is the online environment. In order to
understand what virtual ethnography is we should take a look first at its definition and its
basic concepts. Ethnography,
In its most characteristic form it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly orcovertly in peoples daily lives for an extended period of time, watching whathappens, listening to what is said, asking questions in fact, collecting whatever dataare available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research.
Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995 cited in Hine 2000, 41
As Christine Hine explains (2000, 41), ethnography is a qualitative methodology that
has no specific formula for verifying the accuracy of the results obtained. Because of
this issue it has been criticised against quantitative methodologies that have more
rigorous ways and techniques for conducting research and verifying results. However it
is realistically fairer to see ethnography just as a different approach that will bring both
strengths and weaknesses to the research. In ethnographic research, researchers are
not so constrained in the way in which they want to conduct their research and arrive to
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conclusions. This promises a better way to address the complexity of culture. As Hine
(2000) puts it :
It offers the promise of getting closer to understanding the ways in which peopleinterpret the world and organise their lives. By contrast, quantitative studies are
deemed thin representations of isolated concepts imposed on the study by theresearcher.
42
Ethnography requires the ethnographer not only to observe but as well to be a
participant of the culture under study. This brings a risk to the equation, which is that of
losing a sceptical approach to the study and to what the people under study take for
granted (Hine 2000, 54). It is important that the ethnographers are able to immerse
themselves into the culture but it is of the same vital importance that they are able to
detach themselves from it, in order to arrive to unbiased conclusions. Hine (2000,
55-56) explains three different approaches to addressing the aforementioned risk. The
first would focus in how people perceive and define their cultural space. With this
approach the ethnographers are denied privilege in the account and their views would
be blurred with those of the people in the cultural setting being studied. The second
approach focuses on the ethnographers, in which there is a self-reflection on the
perspective, background and standpoint that led them to shape the study in the way
they did. There is a risk with this last approach for the researchers to end up telling
more about them than about the culture being studied. The last approach is to make
clear to readers that accounts are constructed and contingent in their very nature.
Virtual ethnography is the same as ethnography in its core, however there is a vital
difference, which is the nature of the very setting. While ethnography studies culture in a
physical setting and in the physical presence of people, virtual ethnography deals with a
non-physical environment, which is set in the Internet and in which we are not able to
see its participants. This in itself poses quite an important difference from its mother
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methodology, and raises quite a few issues for consideration. As Hine (2000) says
There is no guarantee that the identity performances seen in cyberspace will mirror
those performed in offline settings (118). In an online environment we could not
interpret what people say along with their body language for instance. As well people
can construct false identities without this being noticed. Therefore we need to be careful
with authenticity by being aware of the fact that the data collected could in many
instances be unreliable. Interestingly, for the same reasons that there are
disadvantages there are quite often discernible advantages. Not dealing with people in
a face-to-face fashion can save us from prejudicing in terms of gender, age, race, etc
allowing us to make more objective conclusions.
Justification
Virtual ethnography has been devised for the study of online settings where people are
able to consume and produce texts and culture. As we have seen the basic definition of
ethnography draws upon observing and collecting any data available that could shed
light into the purpose of the research. This research will be gathering data from a
website and an online community that has a wealth of learning resources, features and
innumerable forum threads that its own users have produced. We already know it is
also important for the ethnographer to participate inside the culture being studied.
Asking relevant questions to the site members will be very useful in addressing the
question of this research. The freedom of research approach that ethnography offers is
very suitable for addressing the complexity of researching such a site; therefore there is
no better methodology to address the issue of how Kirupa.com is used by its members.
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Classic Study
Marleen Huysman and Yuwei Lin (2005, 56-69) conduct a virtual ethnography on their
study Learn to Solve Problems: A Virtual Ethnographic Case Study of Learning in a
GNU/Linux User Group. They explore different interesting issues regarding knowledge
exchange and the processes of mutual help and mutual learning in an online
environment where people are actively engaged in learning on the open-source Linux
computer platform. The researchers closely followed online conversations. As they put
it: even in virtual ethnography, there is no substitute for being there, even if there
simply means sitting at your computer looking at the website on a regular
basis (Huysman and Yuwei 2005, 60).
In order to make their research manageable they have selected only two examples of
mutual learning for analysis, however with substantial amounts of data and with plenty
of participation from different members. They carefully go through every stage of the
thread analysing the different ongoing processes. They point out that the drawback of
ethnographic research is that reporting about the gathered data can be a long-lasting
labor and thus they have selected only a small sample to study (Huysman and Yuwei
2005, 67).
Ethics
In regards to ethics concerning the ethnographic approach there are several vital issues
that need to be considered and appropriately addressed. Asking permission to carry out
the study and informing the people that they are under research and under acceptable
conditions to them seems to be a sensible approach to the matter. Hine states that to
participate in a newsgroup without revealing ones role as a researcher would, in all
cases of covert ethnography, pose a considerable ethical problem (2000, 23). She
points out that there is controversy when considering if the messages that people post
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online can be regarded as public statements or as the property of their authors not to
be appropriated for academic purposes without permission (Hine 2000, 24).
Furthermore disclosing the names of the authors of online posts in the research can
bring further ethical implications, as they could consider this unacceptable (Hine 2000,
24). Not revealing their names is therefore a sensible approach, however in certain
situations this is not enough. Thanks to search engines the content of online posts can
be traced back to their authors and reveal their identity. This brings a new problem and
a dilemma; as Hine puts into words Refraining form making verbatim quotations would
pose a considerable challenge to the reporting conventions of discourse-based
research (Hine 2000, 24).
Ultimately, as Hine explains, there are no definite rules to applying an ethical approach
to the study, but rather ethnographers need to have present the ethical implications of
their actions from the start and act accordingly (2000, 24). In this respect it is always
helpful to draw on other literature to see what other people have to say. Flicker et al.
(2004, 132), for instance, provide a list of twelve different points for ethical consideration
when researching in online communities; these are no easy matters and present the
researcher with further limitations.
Proceedings
Before starting research I have considered correct to contact the author of the website
under study, Kirupa Chinnathambi, to ask for permission to carry out ethnographic
research in his website. After this was granted I have thoroughly explored the website
and collected useful and relevant information and observed several forum threads as
they unfolded. All participants of each of the forum threads selected for this research
were clearly informed about the intentions of the study, and were provided contact
details for any questions they might have had or to opt-out from having their posts
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published. In order to avoid intrusion I have created a thread of its own where I give
detailed information about the research.
- http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=352411 -
Then on every thread I have selected to study I have posted a link to this thread, briefly
indicating the situation. Every member is notified by email if a new message is posted to
the thread. This way I could partly ensure that my post was going to be viewed by
everyone involved. I also selected threads that were unfolding or recent, so as to further
ensure that everyone was notified.
The most relevant forum posts and threads were selected and carefully analysed in
order to gather useful information that could shed light into the study. I also privately
contacted Trevor McCauley, who is one of the most active members at Kirupa.com, to
ask him for permission to mention him in this work, and also I interrogated him with a
brief questionnaire.
I used the second approach to ethnographic reflexivity that Christine Hine mentions
(2000, 56) by self-reflecting on the perspective, background and standpoint that have
led me to carry out this research. The reason I have chosen this approach to reflexivity
from the three available ones is because having been quite an active user of the fora at
Kirupa.com for the last two years I found important to carefully reflect on my background
and my position as an ethnographer, and by doing so to make clear that this study is as
well limited by my own perspective.
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Chapter Three: Kirupa.com_________________________________________________________________________
This chapter will discuss the findings obtained through the research. It is going to be
divided into five sections: Description and Background Information, An Online
Community?, Why do They Contribute?, Collective Order Maintenance, and Self-
Reflection.
Description and Background Information
Kirupa.com contributes today over 2.6 million pages to over 550,000 unique visitors
each month, as stated on the site (Chinnathambi 2010, [online]). In short it is a free
portal where novice and professional web developers and designers come to learn,
share knowledge, help each other with specific technical problems, and ultimately have
fun.
I will explore next some of the background and general aspects of the website such as
its author, how the site came into existence, the different sections it includes, how does
everything work etc
The Author
Kirupa Chinnathambi was born in Salem, India, in 1984. He migrated with his family to
Italy when still a child and then to Germany where he studied First and Second grade.
In 1991 he moved to the USA where he graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 2007, majoring in Computer Science and Technology. He started
Kirupa.com in 1999, which was back then just a small website covering several
computer topics on Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Adobe Flash. Even still a
young man Kirupa has achieved several undertakings worthy of recognition such as
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writing at the age of sixteen a 530-page book for McGraw-Hill on the topics covered on
his website, working as a Program Manager for Microsoft, meeting Bill Gates twice, and
last but not least making Kirupa.com be what it is today.
Advertisers & Supporters
Kirupa.com has several commercial advertisers and supporters. Throughout the
homepage we can access links to their websites. Activeden.net is a website where a
wealth of different web developers and programmers sell various kinds of website
devices such as galleries and image viewers, website templates, media players,
animations, application pre-loaders etc all of them built with Adobe Flash technology.
Snacktools.com, Digicraft.com.hk, Flashcomponents.net, Flashloaded.com, and Page-
flip.com, sell website components and applications. Mediatemple.net is a hosting
company that offers a 15% discount to members of Kirupa.com. Flash-filter.net and
Everythingfla.com have free Flash tutorials. Finally the Thehungersite.com is a website
dedicated to charity.
Members
Although the above supporters may have surely helped Kirupa.com grow bigger we
must not forget their members. Kirupa.com has today 156,445 members, many of them
who are actively engaged in by producing tutorials, helping people with technical
problems gratis, moderating the fora etc Without its members Kirupa.com would not
be what it is.
Becoming a member is free of charge and the only thing that is needed is to fill-in a
simple form with some basic personal data. By becoming members we are allowed to
perform a whole array of different tasks such as posting in the fora, participating in
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contests, posting our own tutorials, customising our profile by adding pictures and other
personal information, adding other members to our friends list, creating and becoming
part of social groups, sending private messages to other users, creating and uploading
picture albums, using the forum live chats, subscribing to forum threads etc
Tutorials
Through the first five links down Kirupa.coms main menu we can access literally
hundreds of video-based and text-based tutorials produced by a wealth of different
authors who have contributed to the website, including Kirupa himself. The tutorials
cover problems on plenty of different web programming languages such as C#,
ASP.NET, PHP, ActionScript and AJAX; on IDEs such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft
Silverlight; on other software such as After Effects, Photoshop and Fireworks; and on
topics such as animation, design and game development.
Contests
Further down the main menu we will find the Contests section, where different contests
on design and web-related topics are held and in which any of Kirupa.com s members
can participate. Contestants have to follow some guidelines, which are stated in the
contests relevant section. After the submission deadlines are over members will vote on
their favourite designs and web applications, and the three winner contestants will
receive cash prizes.
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The Fora
I will pay special attention into explaining how the fora work, as it the most complex part
of the website, and one of much relevancy to this research. The whole forum system is
powered by vBulletin, which is a popular commercial community software product.
The forum area contains several sections, which are Talk, Flash, Expression Blend /
Visual Studio, Development , Art and Design, Careers and Forum Information. Each
of these sections is divided into subsections. The Talk section contains five different
fora, which are Random (a place to talk about anything you want), Kool Sites (where
people post links to websites they like), Showcase & Critiques (where users review
each others websites), Computers & Games/Tech (for talking about technology or
games), and Source/Experiments (for downloading source files for cool or useful
things). The Flash section contains five different fora related to the Adobe Flash
software, which are ActionScript 3 (for discussing technical problems related to Flashs
programming language), Flash IDE (for discussing questions related to the Flash
software), ActionScript 2 (and Earlier), Game/AI Programming, and Best of
Kirupa.com (where the most useful posts written by members are displayed). There are
five other sections with many more subsections. I will not go through all of them for the
sake of brevity, however I will point out that there are enough forum categories to talk
about anything and everything, almost all of them related to web design & development
specific topics.
Inside each of the forum categories we find numerous links to different threads. These
links are displayed in a one-column view containing information such as the threads
title and its author, the number of views and replies it had from other members, and the
date, time, and nickname of the member who posted last.
The first threads we notice in some of the fora are sticky threads, which are privileged
over normal threads and hence will always stay right at the top. These sticky threads
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have been created by some of the most active members at Kirupa.com and contain
useful information for the users, such as answers to frequently asked questions, code
snippets, links to tutorials, general tips, and important notes for the correct usage of the
relevant forum. Every other thread will stay below these. If we post a new thread with a
particular question or problem that we need help solving, a link to it will appear at the
top (below the sticky threads). If someone else posts a new thread, or replies to an
older thread after us, then our thread will appear in second place and so on. Each forum
may have hundreds or even thousands of pages, which can be accessed through some
numerical links at the top and at the bottom of the forum page, each with links to thirty
different threads. The Flash IDE forum, for instance, is one of the most active and
oldest ones, containing today 4378 pages with thirty threads each, which add exactly up
to 131,340 forum threads. The first post recorded was posted in March 2002. If we
make the mathematics we get roughly an average of forty-five new forum threads per
day. This gives us a sense of how active these fora can get.
There is a search system built onto the website that can be very useful in finding
particular problems that have already been answered. Not all threads get replies
though. This might be in some instances for the fast pace in which new threads are
created, sending unanswered ones down the list and back to pages other than the main
one. In other cases it might be because the problem is not properly explained,
insufficient data is given, or the answer to the question already figures in the sticky
threads. It is encouraged that users try to find answers to their problems before posting
in the fora. Being such activity, asking for help on questions that have already been
answered is not generally well seen (specially I would guess, by the people that
contribute more effort and spend more time at the community), and may reflect a lack of
care or just overall laziness, as it has many times been the case. We must not forget
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that this is a self-supported community where people help each other gratis and without
any obligation.
Inside each of the threads, and to the left of the main content of every post some
information is displayed, such as the authors name, an avatar, the members location
and the number of posts the member has contributed to the community. This number of
posts helps to give an idea of how experienced or at least how involved in the
community that person is. Some very active members have over 10,000 posts. Kirupa
himself has posted, up to this date, 14,712 times to the fora.
One further thing to add is that the fora at kirupa.com have thirty-five moderators who
make sure that members follow forum rules and behave appropriately.
About Kirupa
Through the last of the main-menu sections we can access several pages with different
information about the website. We can find here an article where Kirupa Chinnathambi
introduces himself in a friendly and informal way. Other pages introduce the websites
moderators, offer different graphics authored by members to be used to link to
Kirupa.com, give information on the websites evolution, and credit and thank people
who have contributed to the community.
An Online Community?
As we have seen in the literature review there has been much scholarly concern
focusing in and stressing the importance of properly defining the term online
community (Gochenour 2006, 33-51) (Fernback 2007, 49-69) (Cox 2008, 327-345)
(Baker and Ward 2002, 207-224). Susan Herring (2004 cited in Cox, 2008, 330)
provided us with six criterions that would help in deciding if an online group could be
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considered an online community; in this section we will see if according to these
Kirupa.com can be considered so.
Herrings first point states it should be an active and self-sustaining group and it should
have core of regular participants. Kirupa.com, since its start as a forum in 2002 and up
until today has had, according to their statistics, a total of 2,206,573 individual posts in
the fora. Making a rough calculation by taking the number of posts and dividing it by the
number of days in eight exact years we find out that there is an average of around 750
posts per day, which is quite striking. If we have a look at Appendix Iwe can read what
are Kirupas views on this figure. According to him the global count of forum posts
should be wrong, however he points out that by adding individually each of the fora
post-count we should get a reliable number. By doing that we would get an average of
only 50 posts less per day, which is not such a huge difference. Overall it seems that
these numbers are unreliable because the site was hacked some time ago. Anyhow by
looking at the amount of members, posts, information, and the activity at any given time
in the fora we will reach the conclusion that Kirupa.com is definitely a very active and
self-sustaining place. The latter point will be reinforced by the fact that there are thirty-
five moderators monitoring the fora who definitely help in sustaining the community by
making sure that everyone behaves well and follows the rules. Also, as we will later see
in more detail everyone takes part in maintaining and moderating the fora. There are
also plenty of users that have over a thousand and even several thousand posts. The
moderators themselves are some of the most active members in the fora, which is
probably the reason why they became moderators in the first place. The Random
forum at Kirupa.com is used to talk about anything. People that do not participate much
in the fora will be less likely to use this section. On the other hand members that have a
long history together are far more likely to engage in conversation here. Without any
doubt by observing the Random forum for some time we will reach the conclusion that
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Kirupa.com has plenty of regular participants who not only talk about web design and
development.
Herrings second point talks about a shared history, purpose, culture, norms and values.
It is difficult to determine what an accurate and reliable evaluation of some of these
points can be in an online environment. It can be ascertained though, that Kirupa.com
forum users have a shared purpose, which is that of learning, constructing knowledge
on specific topics, and helping each other with specific problems. We could also agree
that Kirupa.coms members share norms and values, as there is a forum solely devoted
to forum guidelines and rules.
The third point of Herrings definition of online community states there should be
solidarity, support and reciprocity. Without any of these three elements the fora at
Kirupa.com would clearly not burst with life as they do. One of the main purposes of the
fora is asking for help and if no one felt solidarity, reciprocity or the desire to support
each other forum activity simply cease to exist.
The fourth of Herrings points refers to criticism, conflict and means of conflict
resolution. If we refer to Appendix II we can find a transcription of a forum thread posted
at Kirupa.com. This thread is situated inside the Showcase & Critiques forum. A
member (Subject A) is asking here for a review of a website. As we can see Subject B
misbehaves by answering in a very rude and non-constructive manner and as a result s/
he is banned from the fora. What follows is a participation of several other members
giving extensive valuable and constructive criticism on that website. Finally Subject A
thanks everyone and adds a few other points referring to specific comments that he
obtained from other members. We have here a clear example of criticism, conflict and
conflict resolution.
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Why Do They Contribute?
One of the most interesting things about online communities such as Kirupa.com is the
way in which people help each other and to learn. As I have stated earlier there are
many active members producing considerable amounts of content to serve the
community and helping others to solve specific technical problems, who have no
obligation to do so and who act out of free will. I will explore next the particular case of
one of the most active members at Kirupa.com.
Trevor McCauley, also known as Senocular, works at Adobe as a Flash Player Quality
Engineer and is an expert on Adobe Flash, which is one of the technologies that have
been most extensively covered at Kirupa.com. He has contributed a very large amount
of knowledge to the website, in the form of tutorials and also by answering to other
peoples problems. As we can see on his profile page he joined the community in
December 2002 and since then he has posted 17,296 times to the fora. His profile page
at Kirupa.com is filled with messages from other users that simply praise his hard work
and knowledge or that even ask him for further help on specific topics, as if what he has
already done for the community was still not enough (his personal webpage at
Senocular.com has further tutorials and source-code that can be used for free by
anyone and for any purpose whether this commercial or not). It is interesting to ask the
following question, which has been one of much scholarly interest: What motivates
people to contribute so much into these communities?
According to a brief e-mail interview that Trevor has answered in a very plain fashion
(Appendix III), the reason that he contributes so much to Kirupa.com is simply to help
others. Sonja Utz (2009, 357-374) has argued that the main motivation for contribution
inside these community environments is of an altruistic nature: people contribute
mainly because they like to help others and find pleasure in interacting with other
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community members (2009, 370). However other factors come into the equation too.
Wasko and Faraj (2005, 35-57) make a slightly different case in their research study:
Individuals contribute knowledge to electronic networks of practice when theyperceive that it enhances their professional reputations, and to some extent because
it is enjoyable to help others. They contribute when they are structurally embedded inthe network, and when they have experience to share with others. Surprisingly, wefind that individuals who contribute knowledge do not seem to be more committed tothe electronic network of practice than noncontributors, nor do they seem to expecthelp in return.
53
It cannot be rebut that professional reputation can play as well an important role in
defining the motivational nature of knowledge contribution in online communities. Trevor
McCauley will surely benefit in several ways from having posted so much material at
Kirupa.com. He is a well-respected community member and he can as well impress
potential employers with his non-profit work. Furthermore Trevors huge amount of
knowledge on his area of expertise makes us doubt that he would use Kirupa.com in
order to solve his technical problems or even to learn anything about Flash. When
asked what was the thing that he most valued about kirupa.com he simply answered
community (Appendix III). Therefore, instead of being one or the other, community,
altruistic action and professional and communal reputation might just reinforce each
other in motivating for contribution.
Mark Sharrats and Abel Usoros study Understanding Knowledge-Sharing in Online
Communities of Practice (2003, 187-196) resonate with the above and provide us with
further factors that will influence motivation in knowledge sharing in online communities
such as:
the ease of use and perceived usefulness of the information system; trust basedupon the benevolence; competence and integrity of the community; the perceivedproximity of knowledge-sharing to career advancement; sense of community; andorganisational value congruence.
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It is important to note that without the factors above these communities would cease to
exist. Not all members contribute in the same way to the community; some might only
ask for help and others might just read the content of the website. However non-
contributors are as well very important to the community as they conform the audience
for contributors.
It is interesting to see, as Caroline Wiertz and Ko de Ruyter show (2007, 347-376), that
in firm-hosted commercial online communities participants are more reluctant to
produce and contribute quality knowledge for the community. This, they explain, might
be because:
A customer who is very committed to the host firm and its products and servicesmight expect better treatment than that, and in fact expects the host firm to providethe service, rather than fellow customers. As a result, s/he is not willing to make aneffort in the community and provide high-quality answers.
Wiertz and Ruyter 2007, 370
Kirupa.com can be considered an informal and friendly community whose main purpose
is to provide people with the tools to help each other to learn on a specific area of
knowledge. Even though it has advertisers, these are non-intrusive and they simply
provide services that may be useful to, and benefit users of the community. Let us not
forget that the website also provides a link to a charity organisation. On the whole,
although Kirupa.com may benefit commercially in several ways, we can consider its
main purpose to be non-commercial. This factor, along with the efficiency through which
Kirupa.com serves as a place for learning and the way in which it connects a large
number of people working or learning in the same industry allowing them to conform a
community of their own, might be the reasons for its thrive.
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Collective Order Maintenance
By comparison with early dystopic prophecies from both left and right, the Internethas become neither anarchic nor an Orwellian nightmare, rather, it has becomeremarkably ordered. This sense of order results from a complex assemblage ofnetworked nodes of security that continually shape virtual behaviour.
Wall 2007, 410
As we have seen Kirupa.com has thirty-five moderators responsible for maintaining
order and making sure that members behave appropriately within the community. As
Kirupa explains (Appendix IV) he initially asked a few members to moderate the fora.
Overall and following to that, moderators themselves nominated all subsequent
moderators. They do not have any official responsibilities nor do they have to comply
with any special rules, as apparently they do the work for free. Only if they want they
can use an array of different tools, which are only available to them, in order to help in
running the fora. Kirupa says that there is a balance between very active and inactive
moderators. One will surely ask, how can only 35 moderators, of which only about half
are active, monitor such an active environment in which any of 155,629 members may
participate? The truth is that every member can easily help to moderate and in fact a
great number of them do. The fora provide the ability for any member to report on any
post that is considered offensive or that contains spam or advertising. As Kirupa states
members use them considerably and moderators inboxes are filled with reported posts.
Interestingly we can see how every member of the community actively takes part in
maintaining and sustaining it. This clearly reflects further on the value that the
community has for its members, which make them participate actively and also help to
sustain and maintain the community.
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In Which Ways do they Learn?
In this section I will discuss the different ways in which Kirupa.com members learn
through the website.
We have seen that Kirupa.com contains online text-based and video-based tutorials. To
illustrate you with one between hundreds of examples on the website you can refer to
Appendix V. Here Trevor McCauley (Senocular) explains the basic principles of
isometric perspective for the creation of 3D objects in Adobe Flash. We could simply
argue that by reading tutorials and putting their ideas into real practice, users of
Kirupa.com are able to learn. Moreover, as Claudio G. Cortese argues (2005, 87-115),
there is as well extensive learning that can be acquired through teaching. Even those
who, like Trevor McCauley, are gurus of the subjects discussed at the fora and their
main activity lies in producing learning materials for others, we could argue, take as well
an active part in learning. By writing tutorials, for instance, one will organise knowledge
and synthesise it properly. Delivering knowledge in a successful way is not an easy
matter and by actively producing tutorials the skills involved are put into practise and
developed further. It may be even argued that you cannot know something properly
before you can teach it. So I support the idea that producing tutorials is as well a very
active take in learning. Even this element can be added to the list of motivations for
knowledge contribution in online communities discussed above. Paradoxically one
might be willing to contribute knowledge just in order to learn.
The contests are as well an interesting matter. People may engage actively in these and
make an effort to win the incentives. By being challenged to be the best among others
one might put extra effort to produce some quality work and learn something new in the
process.
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The fora at Kirupa.com provide as well a very interactive and useful way for members to
share knowledge and learn from each other.
If we take a look at Appendix VI we will find a forum conversation between several
users. The author of the thread basically tries to gather knowledge about what software
development systems and text editors are other fellow developers using to write
ActionScript, and the reasons why they are using them. We can see how participants
actively engage producing knowledge on this subject, which is based on their own
experiences. They draw upon the advantages and disadvantages that different kinds of
software have and they state which is their preference among them. Having access to
this kind of information produced by plenty of people involved in the same tasks can be
invaluable for any fellow person. It can save them time in testing other software and
they will have a critical and comprehensive view of what other people, who may be
more experienced or may not, think about the subject. To collect so much information on
the topic in any other way than through the Internet or through an online community like
Kirupa.com would require one to have direct contact with many experienced people that
work in the same industry. It may very well not be the case that people have the time to
gather this information outside their own homes, and certainly not in less than a day,
which is the time span in which this thread has unfolded. In this way online communities
such as Kirupa.com empower their users by giving them a very effective way to collect
knowledge that otherwise would have been difficult or even impossible to obtain with
such efficiency. This empowerment and effectiveness of knowledge sharing resonates
with the concepts we have seen of collective intelligence that Hofkirchner (2007, 496)
mentions or even the global brain theories by Bloom (2000), Russel (1983), or Mayer-
Kress and Barczys (1995, 1-17).
A further way to learn through the fora is, as we have seen in Appendix II, to post some
original work to get critical reviews from other members. This as well can be very helpful
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and enlightening for any person. We would all agree that having our work critically
reviewed by many other peers can make us learn about what can we improve and how
can we improve it, where did we go wrong, or at least what are other peoples views on
it.
In Appendix VII we can refer to another example of a forum thread. We can see how
this time a member is asking for help in order to solve a particular problem. However,
because s/he does not expose the problem in an appropriate way s/he does not get any
help. On the other hand s/he receives two replies from two different members who
explain why they are unwilling to help him/her.
In a way it could have been thought that online communities such as Kirupa.com in
some instances promote easy help and the ability for someone to seek for this help
without having looked first into the problem carefully and by their own, or without having
explained the problem with enough detail. However we can see how in instances like
this other members are unwilling to help. In order to use the fora at Kirupa.com to seek
for technical help one needs to learn how to explain problems properly and in detail, and
through this make it easy for others to provide help, or otherwise it would have been a
vain attempt. As Subject Cexplains in Appendix VII: you need to sell the problem to us
a bit to get us interested.
In Appendix VIII we can find, on the other hand, an example of a successful way to ask
for help in the fora. Subject A explains the problem carefully and provides some sample
code as well as an error message that he/she gets when testing the code. Subsequently
and in the mere time span of one hour and twenty-five minutes three other members
provide two different solutions. Subject B replies plainly by just providing a link to an
Adobe resource that explains a certain method that will be useful for solving the
problem; Subject C elaborates slightly more on the same solution; and Subject D
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provides a much more elaborated response that sheds light into a different solution, and
explains why he/she considers the first solution not effective. He as well offers further
help if anything was left unclear to Subject A. Finally Subject A thanks for both
suggested solutions and explains how he/she was able to tackle the problem.
Here we have seen an example of a very common way in which Kirupa.com is used for
learning.
Members at Kirupa.com have to have as well the knowledge and education to behave
appropriately and have good manners inside a community, even if those are limited only
to a textual environment, as are Kirupa.coms fora. As we have seen in Appendix II
users may be banned from the fora for lack of respect to other users, and in this way be
taught a lesson by loosing access to a valuable community. In Appendix VIII we can
read an interesting post that is inside the Forum Guidelines/Suggestions forum. Here a
member urges other members to have respect for others and do not abuse each other.
We can see then how in order to remain a member of a big and international online
community one has to be polite or either has to learn to be so.
Above we have seen most if not all of the ways in which the online community
Kirupa.com is and can be used for e-Learning. We could argue that these very much
resemble the communal constructivist approach, whose main characteristics we have
seen back in the literature review. For instance Kirupa.com has people at all levels of
experience in web development. Anyone who has the knowledge to solve anyone elses
technical issues, be she or he an expert or a beginner in the field, can have a go to help
or to teach anybody else. Furthermore we have seen how writing tutorials is as well a
way of learning. These points fit into the communal constructivist concept we mentioned
earlier where learners become teachers and teachers become learners. The way in
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which Kirupa.com offers free dynamic ways of learning as well resonates with the
concept of empowerment of learners in the discussed theory of learning.
Self-Reflection
In this section I will reflect on the perspective, background and standpoint that have led
me to carry out this research so as to seal the ethnographic approach and proceed to
conclude the research.
For the last three years I have been learning web development in languages such as
HTML, CSS, ActionScript, JavaScript and Php. I am mostly self-taught and since I
started learning on the subject I have been using online communities such as
Kirupa.com. The way I found them is by searching on Google for keywords related to
specific problems I was having and finding answers in the forum posts of some of these.
I became more drawn to some such as Kirupa.com and I ended up becoming a
member.
I found them really useful to help me in solving particular problems mainly, in my case,
for the lack of offline support I had and for knowing almost no one that worked in the
same field in which I have been training myself. At first I got used instantly to the fact
that they were there and that I could use them freely to ask for help. After a while it
struck me. How would I have managed to get answers to my problems without these
communities and without any formal teaching on the subject, or without anyone around
me who was experienced on the topic? The answer is surely through books; however
reading is quite a solitary task and many times I had to read through much information I
already knew in order to get to the specific problem I was looking for. On the other hand
by searching keywords on the Internet I could easily find forum posts with the answers
to my specific problems. On last resort I would make a forum thread asking for help and
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many times, to my surprise, I had several answers within incredibly short amounts of
time that gave different ways and solutions for approaching the problem. At this point is
where I became conscious of the power that these communities were giving me.
Without them my self-taught learning experience would have been much more tedious
and long lasting. So it is here where I felt a genuine Interest to research the subject.
It is important to note that this research is limited by my very perspective on the subject.
Having been a member of Kirupa.com may have biased my findings and although it
may have facilitated my research for the knowledge I already had on the website, its
uses and some of its members, it may as well have made me take certain aspects for
granted, and in doing so miss out other elements that may have produced further
insights into the research.
It would be interesting therefore to see what results produce other studies that explore
the same topic, but that are researched by someone that does not belong or has not
participated in the community being studied. Then two different perspectives could be
weighed against each other and a more impartial view would be reached.#
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Chapter Four: Conclusion_________________________________________________________________________
The purpose of this thesis was to study the ways through which users of the open-
source, online, e-Learning community Kirupa.com learn and exchange knowledge.
In doing so it was determined that Kirupa.com is in fact an online community according
to the criteria set by other scholars. Furthermore light was shed into aspects correlated
to the main issue of research, such as member motivation as well as community
sustainment. Looking at a thriving community such as Kirupa.com facilitated to
determine the reasons that might make this system of informal learning so appealing. It
was found that altruistic action, community, open-source, and personal and communal
reputation all interplay an important role in its thrive and success. Other factors that
have a major impact relate to the empowerment that the medium and the technology
grant for their users. As we have seen the World Wide Web, despite its rapid growth
and development hitherto, offers enormous potential and is yet in a very early stage of
evolution. As Scott Wright and John Street argue (2007, 849-869) the interface design
as well as its commissioning play a vital role in defining and expanding the democratic
potential of the web. In the same way these factors play a major role in defining the
ways in which these communities are and can be used. It would therefore be very
beneficial to focus further research into improving the efficacy of web interfaces as well
as expanding the possibilities that these grant for online communities.
The research showed how the sustaining and maintenance of the community happens
spontaneously through a global commitment that is based on the value that is put into
the possibilities and benefits that the technology and the specific environment grant.
It was discovered that knowledge is exchanged through a dynamic and rich system that
strongly resembles the cornerstones of the communal constructivist theory of learning. It
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is therefore suggested that it would be very valuable for the educational sector to study
further how these communities have sprung, how do they operate and why they are so
successful. This way there would perhaps be a better chance to successfully apply
communal constructivism to a formal learning environment. Furthermore Andrew
Sackville (2010, [online]) enlightens us with some interesting thoughts regarding the
relation between formal and informal learning:
We shouldnt see formal and informal learning as distinct and independent entities.They are part of a continuum. They can take place alongside each other enrichingeach other.
9
It might then be a good strategy to find effective ways of coupling formal and informal
education, so as to combine the best of both into a synergistic new model for education.
Limitations of this study relate to the very position and standpoint of the researcher. It is
suggested therefore that further research on the same topic, carried by someone who
stands in a different position, will help to give perspective and to validate this research.
On the whole this research has drawn attention to the effectiveness, advantages, and
potential of new open-source systems of online knowledge exchange, and encourages
the expanding of academic knowledge in this area in order to improve, promote, and
expand their uses.
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