At a CREATEC seminar yesterday Janette Hill from University of Georgia presented a short session about community building in online learning environments.  Some important insights for my own investigations into shifting Process Drama into online contexts.

Janette introduced Turkle’s suggestion of the self as “sum of distributed presences” and I found the notion very similar to Goffman’s “Presentation of Self”?

There was a little discussion around the idea of framing the computer as “companion” or as interface. There was also the suggstion of community building devices such as shared artefacts…  there seems to be some correlates between online learning communities and social gaming networks.

There was some mention of  the International Society for Presence Research  – and I’ve followed up a little to discover some interesting work being done by Peter Senge and his buddies.

For more resources on presence, please visit ISPR’s sister sites:

  • Presence-research.org is the official website of the OmniPres project, funded under the European Community’s IST FET Presence Research Proactive Initiative.

  • Presence-Connect.com is the online companion to the MIT Press journal PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.

  • Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *