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The increasing presence of the Internet in our everyday life raises important questions about

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We use a social network approach to examine how work and friendship ties in a university research group were associated with the kinds of media used for different kinds of information exchange. The use of electronic mail, unscheduled face-to-face encounters, and sched-uled face-to-face meetings predominated for the ex-change of six kinds of information: Receiving Work, Giv-ing Work, Collaborative Writing, Computer Program-ming, Sociability, and Major Emotional Support. Few pairs used synchronous desktop videoconferencing or the telephone. E-mail was used in similar ways as face-to-face communication. The more frequent the contact, the more “multiplex ” the tie: A larger number of media was used to exchange a greater variety of information. The closeness of work ties and of friendship ties were each independently associated with more interaction: A greater frequency of communication, the exchange of more kinds of information, and the use of more media.

Practice, then, both shapes and supports learning. We wouldn’t need to labor this point so heavily were it not that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction. Brown & Duguid (2000, p. 129) Over the past decade, education reform and teacher training projects have spent a great deal of effort to create and support sustainable, scalable online communities of education professionals. For the most part, those communities have been created in isolation from the existing local professional communities within which the teachers practice. We argue that focusing on online technology solely as a mechanism to deliver training and/or create online networks places the cart before the horse by ignoring the Internet’s even greater potential to help support and strengthen local communities of practice within which teachers work. In this paper, we seek guideposts to help education technologists understand the nature of local K-12 education communities of practice—specifically their reciprocal relationship with teacher professional development and instructional improvement interventions—as a prerequisite to designing online sociotechnical infrastructure that supports the professional growth of education professionals.

The goal of the proposed work is to develop a theory of design for building on-line social environments. The underlying hypothesis is that in order to foster the development of virtual communities and cultures, the environment must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the patterns of activity and affiliation that reveal the structure of a community and to have a fluid and subtle vocabulary for conveying cultural information. The theoretical foundation for the research is drawn from traditional studies of society and culture and from observations of contemporary on-line systems. Starting with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies - most notably, the presence and absence of the body - the first section examines the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, discusses the limits imposed on online communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and explores directions...

Abstract. Through ethnographic research, we document the rise of personal social networks in the workplace, which we call intensional networks. Paradoxically, we find that the most fundamental unit of analysis for computer-supported cooperative work is not at the group level for many tasks and settings, but at the individual level as personal social networks come to be more and more important. Collective subjects are increasingly put together through the assemblage of people found through personal networks rather than being constituted as teams created through organizational planning and structuring. Teams are still important but they are not the centerpiece of labor management they once were, nor are they the chief resource for individual workers. We draw attention to the importance of networks as most CSCW system designs assume a team. We urge that designers take account of networks and the problems they present to workers. Key words: activity theory, collaborative work, communities of practice, social networks Modern work and the rise of intensional networks In the past, much work took place in relatively stable settings. Many people were employed by large corporations. Long-term established relationships existed between businesses, suppliers, and customers. It was not unusual for white collar

The authors examine the experience of the residents of Netville, a suburban neighborhood with access to some of the most advanced new communication technologies available, and how this technology affected the amount of contact and support exchanged with members of their distant social networks. Focusing exclusively on friends and relativesexternal to the neighborhood of Netville, we analyze "community" as relations that provide a sense of belonging rather than as a group of people living near each other. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is treated as one of several means of communication used in the maintenance of social networks. Contrary to expectations that the Internet encourages a "global village ," t hose ti es t hat previously were " jus t ou t of reac h" geographically, experience the greatest increase in contact and support as a result of access to CMC. Keywords: glob al v ill age, Netvil le, social networks, technology and society. American Behavioral Scientis...

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This dissertation addresses the question, whatwill be the fate ofcommunityand social relations as a result of the growth of new home-based information and communication technologies? How have social networks, social capital and community involvement been affected by the rise of personal computers, the Internet and computer mediated communication (CMC)? Will the Internet reconnect the disaffiliated, or will CMC only contribute to a further disengagement of American community life? Survey and ethnographic data from along-term study of "Netville," a wired suburb near Toronto, are used to investigate the effects of advanced communication technology on social relationships. Netville was one of the first residential developments in the world to be built from the ground up with a broadband high-speed local computer network. Netville provided a unique opportunity to observe the effects of advanced information and communication technology on people's daily interactions with family, friends and neighbours. The "wired" residents of Netville are compared with a similar group of non-wired residents who lived in the same neighbourhood, but who were never connected to the local computer network. Greater involvement with friends, family and neighbours is linked to use of CMC. Internet use is associated with high levels of in-person and telephone contact, the exchange of support, the growth of personal network and increased community involvement.