I’ve been a fan of Stephen Downes ever since meeting him while sharing program space at the 2002 eLearning Conference at the Università degli Studi di Milano. (I laugh when I remember how I described to a colleague a dinner I had with Stephen and other presenters, telling my friend: “I think I met the Linus Torvalds of the eLearning community!!”)

Many in the eLearning community know Stephen thanks to his email newsletter, OL_Daily, and his RSS aggregator service, EDU_RSS. He is also a leading figure in Learning Objects research. But I enjoy him most when he writes about community, and his latest effort doesn’t disappoint: Learning in Communities, appearing in the Australian Flexible Learning Community.

Downes begins the article with the observation that most of the current talk around online learning focuses on the content rather than the community. Making the case that this is misguided, he presents 4 reasons why “community” should be emphasized when designing any learning experience. He then moves on to list 8 characteristics of successful (online) communities. While those who keep up with the communities of practice (CoP) literature won’t find anything new in Downe’s framework, all readers will appreciate the numerous real-world examples Downes provides to support his claims. These examples (links included, of course) move the reader from theory to laboratory, providing a credibility dimension increasingly absent in today’s research papers. Some examples also make their point through humor. To support the claim that personal commitment levels are higher in communities of learners than those found with students working alone, Downe’s gives us Howard Rhinegold’s observation “that People everywhere seem more interested in communicating with each other than with databases.”

For me, the most important point in the article comes in the closing paragraphs, where Downes draws a direct and simple connection that, surprisingly, most “community focused” learning scientists have yet to make. Specifically, Downes observes how, by relegating the discussion area as something separate and distinct from other course elements, today’s leading online learning platforms treat “community” as something that is secondary to the course (content). Says Downes:

The design of these learning management systems also reinforces the idea that discussion is not central to the course, that it is something tacked on. One ‘leaves’ the course material (usually via the main menu) to go to the ‘discussion area’ (imagine, by analogy, if once a professor finished his lecture the entire class got up and walked across the hall to the ‘discussion room’).

If there is a single point that I would like to make in this article, it is that the relation ought to be the other way around: that the course content (much less its organization and structure) ought to be subservient to the discussion, that the community is the primary unit of learning, and that the instruction and the learning resources are secondary, arising out of, and only because of, the community.

And so we see a wonderful example of how theory can inform practice, how form should follow function. While the grass-roots edu-blogging community is well versed in this new community learning architecture, the mainstream eLearning industry has yet to catch on. But there is hope. When enough researchers draw the same simple connection made by Downes, we will find ourselves spending the same amount of time (and money) developing new ways to let learners connect as we spend developing another new content packaging specification.

Additional links:
Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System, by Etienne Wenger
Content is Not King, by Andrew Odlyzko
Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?, by Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson
Are You Ready for Social Software?, by Stowe Boyd

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