An article I chose to read from the Journal of Interactive Online Learning was titled, “Internet Relationships: Building Learning Communities through Friendship” by Dawn Bikowski. I selected this article because the title seemed very interesting to me and the abstract made me want to continue reading the article. Even though there was a lot of information presented, it was not difficult to comprehend.
In this article, a study was done in a course with undergraduates. They were put into teams and worked with students from Thailand on a project for a Thai client. Throughout the course, and afterwards, five students were interviewed and asked a series of questions about the project, their international teammates, and their feelings of community and friendship. Although the majority of the students did not feel like they had a sense of community throughout the online portion of the project, the researchers looked into other factors that might have caused a barrier in building relationships and that sense of community.
The researchers findings were that three factors could have effected reaching a sense of community in the online portion of the project. These were; individual factors, sharing, and support. If the students were not open to making friends or building a relationship through this project, willing, or comfortable, to share information that was non-project related to help further build the relationship, and have support from other teammates and advisors, the researcher found that this could possibly effect their sense of community. Although this study was a small sample, they hypothesized that further tests might have a similar result.
#1 by lmcritc on November 29, 2012 - 9:27 pm
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Stasia,
Based on your summary, I thought that this was an interesting article. The article reminded me of our online class right now. We get to interact with one another but not really form a community or friendships. I am glad I got the chance to learn more about this subject.
Leah
#2 by sarrutz on December 2, 2012 - 6:01 pm
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From what you’ve described, this article seemed very thorough and interesting. I think that an important thing to note is that, through this study, the students were asked about the friendships that they made with students that were completely across the world. Even though the students did not feel like they had a great sense of community with the students from Thailand, it provided good research for future classes and educators regarding how they would handle something like this in the future to allow students to feel more within a group in future classes.
#3 by dfoland on December 2, 2012 - 11:45 pm
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Stasia, i agree this was an interesting article. I like you am interested in online relationships because it such new world research as the internet and internet communication is pretty new, since we were the first generation who really grew up with internet.