Afterword: Building Our Knowledge of Virtual Community: Some Responses

Summary

The generic conventions of an afterword to a printed collection provide an author of the afterword with substantial freedom but also considerable responsibility. Not having been involved in the conception of the project or selection of the contributors, the author has relatively little stake in the outcome. Constrained only by those general rules of scholarly etiquette, the author can more or less say anything. By the same token, however, readers can presume that what the author says is indeed what he or she thinks!

In the light of these considerations, please permit me a few words of situating. I started thinking seriously about education, automated information technology (AIT), and change in general social dynamics like community a long time ago. In the early 1970s, I was a staff person for a new left U.S. organization, New University Conference (NUC). As described in my book, Cyborgs@Cyberspace? (Hakken, 1999), NUC's interest in this topic was political, prompted by concern for the de-skilling impact of computerized teaching machines on teachers' work and whether this might lead to greater militancy. I have continued to think about these intersections, as an educational anthropologist (who did a dissertation on workers' education in Sheffield, England); an ethnographer of technology and social change at levels from the local to the global; a consultant on numerous social programs, including the evaluation of several educational initiatives; and a college professor teaching about community more consistently than anything else for twenty-three years, using a variety of technical tools to do so.