Electronic Classroom, Electronic Community - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 90

of non-content related social discussions within
the discussion boards provided in each course
module. It was expected that students would use
the VSS to further develop these social relation-
ships. However, to the surprise of all concerned,
after initial use of this environment, few students
returned and no ongoing social contact occurred
via the site.
The third case study was a group of students
studying an undergraduate, context curriculum
course offered by the School of Psychology, RMIT
University, Melbourne, Australia. These context
curriculum courses are offered to students from
other faculties in order to provide them with an
extra-discipline experience. As such, the students
are from a wide variety of faculties and disciplines
and are generally not known to each other. This
course, Personal Identity and Community in
Cyberspace, operated within a text based virtual
environment of a Multi user dimensions-Object-
Oriented (MOO). This environment provided
students with a virtual environment that attempted
to replicate a campus.A MOO is a real time, three-
dimensional, text based virtual environment that
provides users with both a sense of location and a
sense of identity. A MOO replicates the real world
by having separate spaces (rooms, buildings, etc)
in which conversations and interactions can occur
privately. A user literally moves between rooms
and encounters others as they walk through the
spaces. Creating the spatial distinctions between
rooms is very important because it parallels as-
pects of the real world, for example when people
in a room are talking, people in an adjacent room
cannot see them or hear them unless they come
into the room. One can choose to join someone
in another room by either being transferred to the
space (via a @join command) or you can choose
to walk through the various gardens, corridors and
stairways until you get to the room - bumping into
others on the way.As Clodius (1994) suggests, the
MOO creates a sense of place through location
'The sense of “being” somewhere is reinforced by
the illusion of moving through spaces - one types

“north”, the description of the room changes, the
objects in the room are different, and different op-
tions exist' (para. 24).A virtual campus, the RMIT
Tokyo Building was developed in the saMOOrai
MOO. This MOO provided a virtual representation
of Tokyo and surrounding countryside.
Data was gathered from each of these cases
using a variety of methods including in-depth
interviews, qualitative surveys and 13 weeks of
ethnographic observations in the MOO. Over
50 students participated across the three cases.
Data was analysed and key themes developed
using the qualitative software computer program
NVivo.

key tHemeS

There are four major themes to emerge from
the three cases and each influenced a student's
capacity or willingness to develop community.
They are:

• Community, in the form of Social Learning
Support Networks, was identified as a criti-
cal factor in supporting student's learning
in each case.
• Work-life-study balance - Students choos-
ing to study online usually have significant
demands outside of their study includ-
ing family, work, recreational and social
commitments. The development of Social
Learning Support Networks had to be inte-
grated into their life as a student.
• Modelling behaviour - Understanding how
to be online for students was a result of
their interactions with others and the en-
vironment. University staff played a key
role in establishing the culture of how to
be online.
• Physical/virtual environment - turning
space into place. The physical and virtual
environments played a significant role in
providing students with the opportunity to