Chapter 8: Creating An Online, Course-Integrated Generational Learning Community

This chapter describes the creation and management of an ongoing course-integrated Web community that spans the semesters of a college social science course in Hawaii. Every student enrolled in the course automatically becomes a cyber-community member by reading, processing, and identifying with the reports of prior-generation students, and then contributing their own reports to the cumulatively expanding “generational curriculum” topics. The benefits of such an approach are discussed in terms of psychological models of acculturation, identification, cybercitizenship, and the student as scientist model functioning in a Web environment that is increasingly shaped by human social processes.

User empowerment is strengthening and spreading as thesocial-biological technology (Nahl, 2007a >, 2007b) transforms personal knowledge and individual situation to group information and social practice that are cumulative, collaborative, archived, and accessible to the public. For example, at the beta version of Askville by Amazon (2007), visitors “can ask a question, get real answers from real people.” Anyone can join the online community and provide answers to the questions. Often one question gets answers from several people within hours or a few days. According to the site’s FAQ,