Electronic Classroom, Electronic Community - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 92

space. Conrad (2002) suggests the desire to en-
gage students in learning communities can result
in teachers designing activities where “learners
are pushed, not pulled, into a community frame-
work, somewhat like an arranged marriage”
and that doing this often results in “conscious
restraint on the parts of learners in contributing
to community” (p.4). Students from all three
cases confirmed Conrad's point, with only two
students from the first case mentioning that one
of the ways they made connections with fellow
students was through collaborative activities in
an on-campus class. I am sure, that at some level
this is not an accurate reflection, and that all the
students, at some point, developed connections
with other students via their engagement in class.
The interesting thing however is that the students
did not own those connections as their own. The
connections they owned were those they made in
spaces outside of the classroom. Importantly, for
many students with quite established networks,
they still did not identify as part of a community
when the term was used without further explana-
tion or clarification.
I suspect this was possibly because when
students hear the term community they overlay a
concept of community that represents some long-
past utopian dream that has been important to the
history of the social sciences (Toennies 1963). This
dream is a representation of community that is
outside of most peoples lived experience (Bauman
2001). Contemporary students are all too familiar
with idealised stories of political campus life in
the 1960s and 1970s - told by academics in their
fifties who drift nostalgically back to the days of
student activism, free love, drug use, no fees and
seemingly no consequences for not passing your
exams! It is unclear if this was ever an accurate
representation of the student community life.
Utopian ideals rarely are accurate. There is little
wonder that students today do not identify their
experience of university life as “feeling part of a
community” if this is the kind of image of commu-
nity that they are thinking about. Several students

from across the three cases, at some point in our
preliminary discussions regarding participating
in this research, talked about their experience of
university life as not being as good as X - “X” be-
ing what I call the X factor. For one student the X
factor was her husband's university experience 20
years ago, for another it was a mate at a sandstone
university. For another it was a friend studying
in the U.S. and for another it was a student in the
same school but in a different program. It may
well be that these friends and relatives did have
a better experience of university community life,
but it is also possible, as Bauman (2001) argues,
that the ideal of community is seemly never within
our grasp. Student's resistance to identifying with
the term community had a profound effect on this
research. During the initial call for participants for
the first case, a number of students commented
that when they heard that the research was about
community, they did not respond because they felt
they did not know anything about community. It
was from this point on I started to talk about the
research in terms of understanding the connections
students made with each other.
When community was put in these more subjec-
tive, practical and concrete terms it became a ques-
tion. That question pointed to issues like - what
support do I get from my connection with fellow
students, or what support do I give to someone I
study with? Students had no problem identifying
the value this type of connection provided for
their studies and why they would attempt, where
possible, to create these connections. In each case
students identified an understanding of how a
social network of associations with peers might
be of practical benefit. They provided their own
examples of these types of relationships working
within their lives. They could spell out how these
relationships developed and existed. They could
also detail how these relationships supported their
learning, and they could say how these relation-
ships were active inside and outside of the class-
room. Students did not always talk about these
connections in terms of strong friendships. For