Cornerstones for an on-line community of education professionals

摘要

We propose viewing the Internet as a landscape containing manyngathering places and addressing both design and social issues from thenperspective of each individual place and the community that shapes it.nDifferent kinds of public gathering places, or third places as R.nOldenburg (1997) calls them, attract and serve the needs of differentngroups of people both by design and adaptation. We have been working inna small corner of the Internet for the past two years (1996-8) to createna third place for practitioners of a particular profession-education.nOur goal is to learn how to grow a self sustaining online community ofneducation professionals that supports and enhances the professionalngrowth of its members over the length of their careers. In that respect,nour third place is intended to be both workplace and informal gatheringnplace. in the spirit of M.C. McFarland's (1995) search to find annappropriate metaphor, we have found that a coral reef might bestndescribe how we are trying to grow a diverse and thriving community (M.nSchlager and P. Schank, 1997). Our environment is built on two corentechnologies that have been in common use for several years: telnetnbased multi user virtual environments (MUVEs), and the Web-making thensystem cross-platform compatible and accessible by any computer that hasnInternet capabilities