Another concept closely linked to social presence is that of community. In demon-strating the relationship between the two concepts, Tu and McIsaac (2002) stress that social presence is a measure of the feeling of community that a learner experi-ences in an online environment. On the other hand, Gunawardena (1995) points out that it is the types of interactions that take place between the participants and the sense of community that is created, for instance, during a computer conference that will affect participants’ perceptions of CMC as a “social” medium. Therefore, the impetus falls upon the moderators of computer conferences to create a sense of on-line community in order to promote interaction and collaborative learning.
Community psychologists McMillan and Chavis (1986) identify four key factors as contributing to sense of community. They are membership, influence, fulfillment of individual needs, and shared events and emotional connections. As for membership, a sense of belonging, community boundaries, identity, and per-sonal investment all contribute to membership in a community. The second key factor, influence, may include influencing the community as well as being influ-enced by it. The notion of influence also instills some pressure for uniformity and conformity that spurs even greater member closeness. As regards the third factor, fulfillment of individual needs, communities provide rewards and reinforcements that fulfill personal needs and are critical to staying within the community. Finally, in accordance with the factor including shared events and emotional connections, members have emotional bonds from shared histories that connect members and encourage continued investment and involvement in the community. In their sense of community model, McMillan and Chavis show how the subelements work to-gether to create and maintain communities. For testing theories and models there are “Sense of Community” scales and indices to determine the relative influence of each factor (Chavis, Hogge & McMillan 1986).
The four factors discussed above can also be considered important in forming a sense of community in a network-based learning community. In their review of
research into learning communities, Hughes & Hewson (1998, 48) indicate that although the group cohesion of a class meeting in a four-wall classroom has been extensively studied, interaction and the formation of learning communities study-ing in online environments is yet in its infancy. On the other hand, many teachers with hands-on experience in teaching in network-based environments strongly ar-gue for the importance of community building. For instance, Palloff and Pratt (1999) consider developing a sense of community paramount. Furthermore, Hiltz (1998) even argues that the most basic premise from which all online teaching should begin is the building of a learning community for facilitating the exchange of ideas, information, and feelings among the members of the community.
How then can a learning community be defined? In their analysis of the con-cept of learning community, Lin et al. (1995) point out that a number of theorists argue how ill-suited the structure of typical classrooms is to the goal of encourag-ing the kinds of learnencourag-ing necessary for the twenty-first century which includes the ability to think critically and reason about important content in addition to the abil-ity and motivation to learn independently throughout one’s life. They further point out the difference between traditional classrooms and a learning community, by arguing that the social structure of a typical traditional classroom involves students who adopt the role of passive receivers of the wisdom dispensed by teachers, text-books and other media. Typically, everyone is taught the same thing at the same time, and ideally, all students are expected to learn more or less the same things.
Lin et al. (1995) also argue that much of the interest in learning communities stems from analyses of successful informal learning environments that exist outside of school. In many learning communities, students are provided with opportunities to plan and organize their own research and problem solving together with oppor-tunities to work collaboratively to achieve important goals. Furthermore, learning communities usually emphasize the importance of distributed expertise. Students are allowed to specialize in particular areas so that the community can capitalize on diversity. An emphasis on distributed expertise is distinctively different from envi-ronments where all students are asked to learn the same things at the same point in time.
Lin et al. (1995) emphasize that the instructional strategies most frequently used in learning communities involve strategies for organizing the activities of stu-dents rather than strategies for delivering information. The overall goal is to help students learn to interact with one another as well as with teachers and other ex-perts, and to interact in a way that involves a reciprocal interchange of ideas, data, and opinions. In knowledge building, students continually struggle to identify what they don’t know and, as a group, attempt to collaboratively extend their under-standing. They also point out that the idea of distributed expertise makes the proc-ess of assproc-essing students’ skills and knowledge more difficult than in standard classrooms. According to their experience, communities based on distributed
ex-pertise are extremely beneficial because they have powerful effects on how stu-dents think about themselves and about one another.
Lin et al. (1995) summarize the nature of efficient learning communities as providing students with opportunities to 1) plan, organize, monitor, and revise their own research and problem solving; 2) work collaboratively and take advantage of distributed expertise from the community to allow diversity, creativity, and flexi-bility in learning; 3) learn self-selected topics and identify relevant resources; 4) use various technologies to build their own knowledge rather than using the tech-nologies as “knowledge tellers”; 5) make students’ thinking visible so that they can revise their own thoughts, assumptions, and arguments.
The concept of learning community as constructed and explained by Lin et al.
(1995) above is central for two main reasons from the perspective of the current study. First, it gives further support for conceptualizing the transition from the so-called traditional classrooms to the multimodal—and multidimensional—technol-ogy-enhanced learning communities. The second reason originates from the social theory of learning first introduced through the concept of community of practice by Lave and Wenger (1991) and further developed by Wenger (1998), who considers the primary focus of such a theory to be on learning as social participation. Social participation is also eminently present in a learning community and thus, further strengthens the link between community building and social presence.
6 Roles of the Teacher and the Learner
“As in other areas of social life, success in transaction and interaction in the classroom depends on our knowing the parts we have to play and how they relate with those that others enact in the encounters in which we are engaged.“
(Widdowson 1990, 191)
Fuelled by the spreading of the learner-centered movement in pedagogical think-ing, much of the discussion regarding educational contexts during the past two decades has centered on the classroom roles of the teacher and the learner. As the wave of technological advances is currently sweeping over the whole educational sector, special attention is drawn to the question of the roles of those acting in the new technology-enhanced educational settings. A common assumption seems to be that the roles of the teacher and the learner are changing in such settings. However, it also seems that such an assumption is made by implying that there would, in-deed, exist a set of commonly agreed norms for traditional teacher and learner roles against which the roles of actors in network-based learning environments can be compared. Drawing from previous research, this chapter will seek to explore such a potential basis for comparison, by focusing specifically on teacher-learner roles in language education.
The current chapter approaches the issue of roles from the perspective of what Widdowson (1990, 181) calls the “the sociology of the classroom”. The central concepts related to the role construct will first be reviewed, followed by an exami-nation of role, power, and metaphor. Furthermore, various types of classroom roles in addition to teacher and learner roles in communicative language teaching in par-ticular will be discussed. Finally, the question of roles in network-based learning environments will be explored.