Just read (again? feel that I saw this one last year as well?) the article "Social Capital in Virtual Learning Communities and Distributed Communities of Practice" by Ben Daniel. He writes in the introduction of his PhD paper about social captital, trust, distributed communities and much more that:
Social capital has recently emerged as an important interdisciplinary research area. It is frequently used as a framework for understanding various social issues in temporal communities, neighbourhoods and groups. In particular, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have used social capital to understand trust, shared understanding, reciprocal relationships, social network structures, common norms and cooperation, and the roles these entities play in various aspects of temporal communities. Despite proliferation of research in this area, little work has been done to extend this effort to technology-driven learning communities (also known as virtual learning communities). This paper surveys key interdisciplinary research areas in social capital. It also explores how the notions of social capital and trust can be extended to virtual communities, including virtual learning communities and distributed communities of practice. Research issues surrounding social capital and trust as they relate to technology-driven learning communities are identified.
I wasn't looking for this article but stumbled across it when I searched for another document by the same journal. What struck me was not the paper that was written by him (which is more introductionary and never goes really profound) but he leaves us with a couple of notes on the further research agenda. If you read through the article you can find it at the bottom, before the huge list of references - most of which have been used to substantiate the same point. Two things that I found interesting and wanted to share (some comments in blue) of his further research points are:
- Social capital depends on different levels of trusting relationships. However individuals in virtual communities are geographically and culturally distributed and often have different levels of knowledge and skills. Since these individuals span space, time, and cultures, they have little knowledge of others beyond assumptions and stereotypes. A lack of sufficient information about others hinders individuals' abilities to develop trust.
Not necessarily true in all cases of virtual communities. In virtual communities of practice there can be other factors that influence the amount of trust conveyed through relationships, because of sense of belonging and common interests in a practice or learning area. Also belonging to a sub-culture or organization that supports the virtual community (e.g. corporate company) can positively contribute to the trust - however I have to admit that this is by far always the case. There's a dozen of arguments more why I feel this is an incorrect statement, the way it is written down suggests something that I feel is not always the case.
- Social capital has been applied to understand different social issues but there is no work done on the effects of social capital on learning in more traditional environments, technology_based environments or "blended learning" environments. What about McKalla's work that followed, in 2004 and 2005 and some of the works of Ann Arbour ?
This happened at 10:46:32 PM or
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