Electronic Classroom, Electronic Community - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 93

some they were more like “acquaintance-ships”
that could be reliably called upon for assistance.
These relationships represented an individual
student's network of support that existed outside
of the constructed learning space and often ex-
tended beyond the duration of a single course. I
define these as Social Learning Support Networks
(SLSN) partially to distinguish them from both
the intensity of a “friendship”, with its sense of
longevity and intimacy, as well as from the less
reliable concept of an “acquaintance”, with its
sense of transience and lack of obligation to as-
sist another.
The use of the term “Social” in SLSN, denotes
these relationships as connections that exist out-
side of the designed learning space but are also
social in that they are defined by people coming
together (as opposed to learning support resources
students might find on a university web site for
example). And importantly, SLSN includes the
term “Learning” because this dimension was criti-
cal for students. Students valued SLSN's and put
energy into creating and maintaining connections
with others over time because they understood the
importance of these connections during times of
study stress, and importantly, that these personal
networks actually assisted them in achieving
their learning objectives. This was important for
undergraduate students, but postgraduate students
especially made the point that the choice to study
was a choice to redirect resources - time, money
and personal energy, from some other aspect of
their lives.

Students participating in this research clearly
identified that juggling their study with other
parts of their lives was stressful and affected the
way they developed connections with each other.
This research makes it clear how study is just
one part of a multifaceted identity for students.
While the depth of this feeling was very strong
for the postgraduate students from Sheffield, the
undergraduate students from the first case also
confirmed that most students who choose to study
online, do so in order to be able to fit their studies
in with other parts of their life. Palloff and Pratt
(2003) characterise the virtual student as someone
who “tends to be older, working, and involved
with family activities and the community” adding
that “The convenience factor is what draws these
students to the online environment, because it
allows them the time for other equally important
aspects of their lives” (p.113). The students in
this research certainly reflected Palloff and Pratt's
profile of an online student. For the students in
the first two cases, nothing in their constructed
online environment facilitated their engagement
with one another in the same way as the physical
campus did for on-campus students, or the way
the MOO did for students in the third case.
In the third case I did not explicitly set out to
explore this work/life/study balance. However,
students often commented in their daily interac-
tions in the MOO on the pressures of fitting ev-
erything in. Interestingly, some students from the
third case were able to integrate the time they spent
in the MOO with their work life. Some worked in
jobs that allowed them to have the MOO running
in a background window on their computer. They
organised for a pop-up message to hit their screen
if someone else logged into the MOO and would
click over to the MOO window and say “hello”
to whoever had logged in. Spender (1995) and
Turkle (1997) have pointed to multitasking as an
emerging capability linked to the use of technol-
ogy like windows-based computers, both in the
practice of having multiple applications open on a
computer as well as in terms of people's capacity

Work-life-StuDy balance

- I work hard and late, I have studies to do and
somewhere fit in a social life. This schedule does
not leave time to engage in VSS-ing (Sheffield
student from 2 nd case)