Electronic Classroom, Electronic Community - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 100

to explore their learning with peers.
• Student identity and social presence: decid-
ing what color shirt to wear that day! The
provision of social spaces with the capac-
ity for extended social presence by a stu-
dent has both a sense of time and location.
The capacity to author their identity and
leave their mark on a virtual space trans-
forms it into a place that students choose
to inhabit.
• Bumping into each other. Lastly, the pro-
vision of real time (synchronous) opportu-
nities for contact supported the incidental
sharing of information between students,
which proved to be important in the devel-
opment of trust relationships and the build-
ing of Social Learning Support Networks.

commercial drivers involved with some of these
projects (facebook.com for example), arguably
their success or failure relates to their capacity
to start from a student-centred approach and to
understand what happens for students as they
engage with the online environment.
It is clear that the success of online gaming
environments in teaching complex concepts and
context related knowledge to players is of inter-
est to the academic community. Authors such as
James Gee have started to explore these issues
in publications such as What video games have
to teach us about learning and literacy (2004).
At the same time, authors such as Chen (2006)
and others have started to explore the value of
immersive and non-immersive virtual reality
learning environments. Others are exploring
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)
to understand the education and engagement
principles within them (Young et al 2006).
Certainly, the remarkable growth of Facebook.
com (a website designed for university students
to create their own profile) relies on students
wanting to make connections with each other
and creating a web presence for themselves. In
April 2006, Facebook.com reportedly had over
seven million users and was worth more than
$1.30 Billion US (Kushner 2006). By 2007 the
site had grown exponentially, with a reported
seventeen million users (Robbins 2007a). The
acceptance by students of sites like Facebook,
has caused some authors to challenge educators
to abandon their university CMS altogether and
use social networking sites (such as Facebook)
to deliver their courses:

Although the ideas of integrating working en-
vironments into social spaces and the importance
of incidental, or what is often termed “chance
encounters”, is discussed in non-learning orien-
tated online work environments [as detailed in the
literature on Teleworking, Computer Supported
Co-Operative Work and Collaborative Virtual
Environments - see Avon (2001), McGrath and
Prinz (2001), Buscher et al (2001), Sonnenwald
et al (2001) and Wellman et al (1996)], these five
design principles provide a radical departure from
the dominant eLearning environments found in
most universities. It requires us to reassess both
how students use online environments and how
we conceptualise the boundaries of the online
environments we provide for students. The under-
standing of human interaction and the development
of SLSN's from this research contributes to four
emerging areas of research and thinking on eLearn-
ing, namely: understanding the learning principles
designed in successful online computer games;
the growth of identity based online communities
related to university student life; the development
of student portals by many universities; and the
use of virtual environments (such as SecondLife)
in higher education. While there are certainly

Getting tired of the Learning Management System
on your campus? Ever look to see how infre-
quently your students actually log in to see their
assignments etc? Let me tell you, it's pretty darn
infrequently. So why not create a course site on a
social network where they already live? (Robbins
2007b, para. 1)