Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

chats taking place at this time, one including
users labeled Bernd and Ambjörn and the other
one labeled Marc and Peter (with Marc’s hexagon
highlighted, indicating that he is speaking using
audio at that moment).
The text chat area shows 7 group messages related
to participants’ tasks for the proposal writing.
Hexagon was used in a rich mix, which certainly
included other technologies such as email and
telephone interaction, and one interesting aspect
of the ‘extended event’ awareness was to help
coordinate these other channels most effectively
over this time.
DISCUSSION
The current study gives some insights into how
different synchronous tools support social presence
and interaction patterns in online communities.
The tools presented have been proved useful
in supporting social presence and interaction in
working groups of short life for extended events
in different ways. Video meetings were used as a
foreground communication channel for arranged
meetings of relatively short duration in the context
of an extended event. The ambient video environment
has been used in the foreground for communication
via video and audio, for short one-to-one
audio interactions or group messages, but most of
the times it was running as an ambient presence
in the background. While video meetings were a
pre-arranged sub-event within the extended event,
participants selected the ambient environment for
opportunistic interactions, which allowed at the
same time to be concentrated at their work and be
able to communicate with peers for a short while,
to ask or answer questions related to work. The
work undertaken is seen by all respondents as a
very valuable and positive experience.
“We used it to write collaboratively a proposal,
we discussed the documents we were working on,
told each other when to expect the new versions
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Live Virtual Technologies to Support Extended Events in Online Communities
of the portfolios, which meant that we didn’t have
to send things around, as much as we would have
to do with e-mail” (AN)
According to Rovai’s theory (2002), the sense
of community is enhanced upon the realisation of
the information flow in a classroom community,
which is composed of components, such as spirit,
trust, interaction and learning. In communities
of practice, spirit defines the group sense and
belongingness and has been expressed often in
the community studied in expressions of group
sense in the text chat. Trust includes feelings of
reliability and confidence, which are expressed
with the high number of indicators of agreement
in the text chat. Interaction indicates shared goals,
which are expressed in both background and foreground
channels, and patterned activities, such as
the delivery of tasks amongst different participants,
answering questions related to deliverables etc.
Learning is linked to constructing knowledge, such
as collaborative authoring tasks in the Prolearn
community. The tool has proven to be especially
useful to help build working communities.
“… people were sitting all over Europe, were
logged into Hexagon and were working intensively
with each other ...” (MH)
It appears that community members select
which tools to use in extended events, according
to the goals to be achieved, for example if there
is an agenda of specific tasks to be accomplished,
arranged video meetings are more appropriate.
Nevertheless, in the final and intensive phases of
writing proposals, when all tasks were distributed
and members had to complete the proposal, ambient
video awareness was more suitable. While
some participants were involved in one-to-one
chats, others just used Hexagon as background
awareness, not exchanging messages, but still able
to read others’ messages and have a view of their
working community. In this way, the community
was able to handle the intensive workflow of the