Foreword: Virtual Communities for Learning and Development – A Look to the Past and Some Glimpses into the Future

Summary

The reader is in for a treat in the highly knowledgeable and varied chapters that follow. The volume includes authors from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, all of whom have experience working directly with computer-mediated communication and community building. Each chapter provides a different perspective on the many ways that human interactions are being mediated in some fashion by the Internet. Each chapter also makes suggestions about the implications of this new set of technological capacities for the social organization of learning and development in contemporary society. This vast territory is unusually well explored in this volume.

As the comments of several of the authors indicate, memories of becoming involved in computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a medium of intellectual communication have something of a “flashbulb” character to them. Not unlike my memory of where I was when John Kennedy was shot, I remember the conditions that led to my use of CMC and my discovery that it could be a resource for community building.

The year was 1978. I had just moved to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) with a joint appointment in Psychology and Communication. These two academic units were located on different parts of the campus. To complicate matters, my major research project was the study of classroom lessons in a school located approximately 20 miles from the campus, but my research laboratory was part of an organized research unit located near the psychology department.