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Preliminary Heuristics for the Design and Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice Systems

Josh Plaskoff, eLearn Magazine, Jan 20, 2003
Commentary by Stephen Downes

Though they claim to have discovered "uncovered additional issues previously unrecognized", the source for this warmed-over set of best practices for online communities is now thoroughly obscured, recycled as it is as a set of "heuristics drawn from published academic research into online communities of practice." Extracted and summarized, the advice offered by these authors is as old as the hills:

Support the creation of new ideasCRLF
Structure interaction around a regular servies of eventsCRLF
A community should have a unifying sense of purposeCRLF
Be able to add, change and delete informationCRLF
Give individuals and groups a place to express their identityCRLF
Establish social rules through moderationCRLF
Use a variety of discussion toolsCRLF
Create a space for interaction and learningCRLF
Connect to offline events and activitiesCRLF

CRLFAll of this could be taken (almost word for word) from Howard Rheingold, Cliff Figallo or Hegel and Armstrong in the mid to late 90s. Would it have hurt to acknowledge the source - not to mention the age - of this advice?

CRLFWhat really gets me - as this is intended to be a set of heuristics - is that it has been shown to be possible to do all of the above and yet fail to have created a viable online community. Just ask HotWired (d. 1998) and many others. Online community has evolved far beyond the idea that participants will gather in some predefined and designed website and exchange ideas. The combination of instant messaging, mobile computing, weblogs and content syndication have made that idea obsolete.

CRLFSo what should a proper - and original - article about learning communities in 2003 look like? It should shift the focus from an institutional environment to an individual's access to a set of services. It should discuss the creation of a distributed network of interacting knowledge workers (or knowledge seekers). It should talk about fostering a set of communication channels - such as email newsletters, aggregator websites, IM advice circles. It should address combining the roles of gaming, simulation, correspondance, commentary and assessment. It should emphasize the skill sets required in order to foster the creation of knowledge through a collaborative process.

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