Bill's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

“I used to grow lentils in yogurt cups in grade school” FaceBook group with 68,000+ members.
Is this a community?

This was a week almost entirely devoted to researching virtual ethnography and online communities. The anthropological aspect of ethnographic work always fascinated me in the same way I find traveling to a foreign country fascinating. In order to ethnographise a community you have to meet the natives and attempt to communicate in their language, observe their practices, learn about their customs, understand their common goals and their shared trials and tribulations. And although there are some fundamental common elements present in every community, god is once more in the details, in the minute (or sometimes not so minute) things that set each community apart from the others. In a way, one cannot hope to write an ethnographic report about a community without first acquiring a community-specific literacy, the ability to interpret, understand and analyse the inner workings of the community and workaday practices of its members. Is this something the aspiring ethnographer can hope to achieve in the short space of ten days? Our reports will show; but I have the feeling you either need to be an insider or you need to spend a lot more time studying the community.

Other than that, I continued to catalogue my Web 2.0 / new media books in LibraryThing, created a comic to express my frustration about the ridiculously huge number of great Web 2.0 tools available for educators and started contemplating a visit to the 2010 Learning Technologies exhibition in London. Anybody else thinking of going?