Online Communities Wrap Up

Joseph Reagle

We set out to learn

How can we design successful online communities

And in the process we enhanced important skills…

Skills

  1. learned key concepts and theories
    • social proof and cognitive dissonance
  2. asked complex questions
    • how to best moderate different types of community?
  3. dug into specific communities of
    • Wikipedia and Reddit
  4. increased proficiency
    • community analysis, peer collaboration, Wikipedia contribution
  5. improved communication
    • scholarly and encyclopedic writing; public presentation;

Approach

  • geeky
  • meaningful
  • engaged and active

Geeky

A lot of stuff is interesting and even boring stuff can be made so.

Meaningful

  • hopefully Kraut & Resnick was informative
  • thank you for reading and discussing my work
  • for the interesting show & tells
  • and for your contributions to Wikipedia

Engaged and active

active discussion; QICs; in class exercises; peer feedback

TRACE Feedback

I appreciate your feedback and specific recommendations

reading X was useful because …;
reading Y was not because of …

So please do give feedback and don’t succumb to “checkbox fatigue”

Nuvola emoticon - happy

Finally

At the beginning of the course I asked if we are a community?

We concluded

Not yet

Now…

I’d like to think we are.

We have had common interests, history, and culture.

Thank you

for joining this community and

for the fun discussions.

for your patience, curiosity, and willingness to share and learn

I hope you will stay in touch!