_____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network () ASCII ribbon campaign -- don't use HTML email /\ _____________________________________________________________________ I have recently received the sad news that SIGGROUP is no more: the Special Interest Group on Group stuff of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The group's Bulletin (an informal journal) has been shaky for some years. SIGGROUP's shakiness is puzzling, because I found lots of life at the ACM's recent CSCW conference (that's Computer Supported Cooperative Work, literally; Group and Social Network stuff, more generally) and reportedly at their annual GROUP conference (which I haven't attended in a while). Fortunately, both conferences are continuing. Also good news is that two more Special Issues of SIGGROUP Bulletin will be published in the first half of 2005, although I don't know in what order: 1) Less of You, More of Us: The Political Economy of Power in Virtual Communities. Editors: Jason Nolan, Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto Jeremy Hunsinger, Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech The goal is to bring into the dialogue a number of researchers on virtual community who are looking at the borders and peripheral locations that are ignored, unknown or explicitly overlooked. Within the notion that community, often the walls we build around ourselves form mechanism of power and preference, this issue will examine online communities that are excluded or self-excluding from the dominant forms, norms and discourses. For example, there are a large number of researchers inquiring into the recent blogging phenomenon, but many explicitly exclude technologies/communities such as LiveJournal.com with his 3.8 million users (1.7 active), and discount the value of teenage bloggers, who are mostly female (67% of Livejournal users). Because researchers tend to cover familiar territories, we encourage authors to explore alternatives. Our issue will provide researchers with the opportunity to expose the readership to a wider sense of virtual community and what is going on at the edges of the event horizon. Some of the themes are: hacking virtual community; the overlooked, broken down, subverted or reconceptualized virtual communities; borders and breaches, the ordering of virtual community; hacktivism; sexually focused virtual communities; questioning the value of online community; collective intelligence is just the fordism of the mind; the Slash Fiction communities; MOOs the early forgotten virtual communities; and the code beneath the community - exploring programmer and system administrative communities. 2) Online Learning Communities. Edited by Anabel Quan-Haase University of Western Ontario, Canada). As we spent more of our time on the Internet sending and receiving emails, talking on chats, and surfing through the web, we learn from others - informally from family and friends, formally from online classes, and as apprentices in communities of practice. Learning via the Internet is not a lonely endeavor but consists of exchanging information with others, debating current issues on chats, and participating in listservs. A wide range of online learning communities have emerged from the wide range of opportunities the Internet makes possible, for example, grass roots communities based on shared interest, informal interaction, and voluntary participation; knowledge communities and communities of practice which support information exchange, knowledge creation, and sharing of group practices. Other learning communities are more formal in nature. These communities are often set up by institutions, such as colleges and universities, who offer learners the opportunity to obtain a degree through distant education. Learners often prefer online learning as it has the potential to overcome many of the traditional barriers encountered in face-to-face settings such as distance, time constraints and combining work and study. Thus, online learning offers a flexible, alternative to traditional learning settings. However, critical analyses of social and psychological issues including access, literacy, personality, group interactions, temporal aspects, and online conversation are needed to better understand the nature of online learning communities and to make informed decisions for supporting and developing practices that best suit the needs of online learners. This special issue contains papers that examine online learning and knowledge communities, both formal and informal. Papers are empirical and theoretical in nature. The authors explore the nature of online learning communities, key characteristics of online learning environments, major challenges for creating and sustaining online learning communities, and best practices for online learning communities among other possible topics. Authors: 1. Leila Alem & Simon Kravis: Design and evaluation of an online community: a case study at CSIRO 2. Michelle M. Kazmer & Caroline Haythornthwaite: Multiple Perspectives on Online Education 3. Michelle Kazmer: How technology affects students' departures from online learning communities 4. Christopher Hoadley & Peter G. Kilner: Using technology to transform communities of practice into knowledge-building communities 5. Kirk St.Amant: Distance Education in a Global Age: A Perspective for Internationalizing Online Learning Environments 6. Anthony Papargyris & Angeliki Poulymenakou Learning to fly in persistent digital worlds: The case of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games