Electronic Classroom, Electronic Community - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 91

connect with each other and develop Social
Learning Support Networks.

felt part of a community at university. He paused
and tentatively responded 'You mean like, have I
got any friends!' (Harris 2007, p. 209). I suspect
community has become something we either do to
people or it is represented as some utopian dream.
This binary either results in people wanting to
avoid it or else never feeling like they are quite
part of it. It is worth exploring this binary because
it shapes student's notions of what it means to be
part of a community.
When we are “doing” community “to” people
it is often represented by a deficit model, as if the
people we want to be part of community suffer
a lack of capacity (Frank and Smith 2006), that
is there is a problem, and a bit of “community”
will fix it. Typical scenarios go something like
this. It is said that there has been a “break down”
in community when young people in an area are
rioting; community development workers are
employed to improve 'troubled' housing estates,
or people 'with problems' (for example drug
users, the mentally ill or young people at risk of
suicide) require support. In this deficit model,
being someone who “needs” community equals
being someone who has a problem or worse, is
lonely. A student from the second case, reflecting
on the Virtual Social Space (VSS), comments as
if he is an outsider on a space he desperately does
not want to be associated with:

In exploring the significance of community
for students, these factors emerged as core to
understanding the value of community from a
student's perspective. This research points to the
value of stepping outside the electronic classroom
and recognising that for many students, developing
support networks is as much about what happens
between them as it is about what the teacher either
does or designs into the electronic classroom.

Social learning
Support netWorkS

- Arranged marriages vs. having mates: being
pushed rather than pulled into connecting with
each other.

Stage one of the research explored definitions of
community, trying to get to the heart of why the
concept of “community” has been so important in
the online learning literature. Interestingly, through
the process of research, I have come to understand
something fundamentally problematic about the
way we theorise “community”, and therefore how
we try to operationalize it. For the most part in
the literature and in many student engagement
policy documents (Conrad, 2002; Palloff & Pratt,
2001; Tinto, 2000; The University of Melbourne
Teaching and Learning Plan 2006), the term “com-
munity” is used in a very “objective” way. It is
generally referring to something we should create
for the students or that the students should have
or be engaged in - because we know it will be
good for them! In the interviews for the first case,
students from the RMIT University undergraduate
social science course often responded to the idea
that they needed to be part of a community with
a question. Typical of this, one student looked
at me rather quizzically when I asked him if he

The VSS as a social space is akin to sitting alone
in a bar with no atmosphere drinking diet Tango
and, just before you leave, jot a cryptic message
to say that you have been there on a post it note
and stick it on the fruit machine. (a bit sad really)
(Harris, 2007, p. 216)

There is nothing in his reflections that might
hold the slightest hope that he could get some-
thing positive out of such a space. Sticking the
post-it note on the fruit machine is the desperate
act of a lonely person - but it is not what he did
or wanted to do. Everything about his reflection
points to a resistance about the very idea of the