Cornerstones for an on-line community of education professionals

Abstract

We propose viewing the Internet as a landscape containing many gathering places and addressing both design and social issues from the perspective of each individual place and the community that shapes it. Different kinds of public gathering places, or third places as R. Oldenburg (1997) calls them, attract and serve the needs of different groups of people both by design and adaptation. We have been working in a small corner of the Internet for the past two years (1996-8) to create a third place for practitioners of a particular profession-education. Our goal is to learn how to grow a self sustaining online community of education professionals that supports and enhances the professional growth of its members over the length of their careers. In that respect, our third place is intended to be both workplace and informal gathering place. in the spirit of M.C. McFarland's (1995) search to find an appropriate metaphor, we have found that a coral reef might best describe how we are trying to grow a diverse and thriving community (M. Schlager and P. Schank, 1997). Our environment is built on two core technologies that have been in common use for several years: telnet based multi user virtual environments (MUVEs), and the Web-making the system cross-platform compatible and accessible by any computer that has Internet capabilities.