Communities, Networks, and Education

This paper is an overview of my PhD research proposal. It is concerned with investigating evolving notions and expressions of community and networks in the context of educational culture which is engaged in the process of discovering the opportunities and challenges presented by Communications and Information Technologies (CITs). Parallel to this is the task of identifying key elements or threads that might be common to a wide diversity of educational “electronic communities”. The research is further focused on a theme of “the changing paradigm”, particularly within higher education, which runs through and across technological, organisational and academic domains. One perspective on this is articulated by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne Alan Gilbert when he argued in his keynote speech in November 1996 at The Virtual University? Symposium2: … the first step to survival is to ensure that the information superhighway runs through every great campus, and the second is to ensure that the riches it brings are in turn enriched in a real learning community. The notion of “learning community” is one that will therefore form a locus for this research. In pursuing this, many so-called online learning communities will be analysed in terms of their creation and stated mission, development and methods for determining their effectiveness or otherwise. Following, in particular the theoretical model of Tiffin and Rajasingham, a range of case-studies will be presented. However, at this early stage of the research and for the purposes of WWW7, the primary case-study is concerned with the development of Education Network Australia (EdNA). EdNA is a government-sponsored “meta-network” launched in Australia in 1997 primarily as an online Information Directory Service—although its beginnings were some two years earlier, when it was conceived more in terms of connectivity and infrastructure. In its current (early) stage of development its foundations have firmed as a framework geared toward fostering collaboration and co-operation throughout the various Australian education and training sectors - that is, schools, vocational education and training, adult and community education, and higher education. In order to develop, it has had to adopt principles of exclusion (as well as inclusion) in order to provide only “quality” online educational resources for its constituency. In this process, identity is a key success factor.