Technology Stewarding as a Medium to Develop and Sustain Niche Online Communities

Context

Web 2.0 has been a promising technology to help improve learning and for building online communities. The term “Web 2.0” is often associated with Tim O’Reilly, because of a conference held in 2004 in which he used it. In a nutshell, Web 2.0 refers to the technology that presents affordances allowing end-users to contribute as much as developers, and to become active producers of the knowledge that accumulates on the Web. This co-construction of knowledge is possible because of various enabling social technologies, which were emerging in the early 2000’s. While Wikipedia, Wikispaces, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogspot, WordPress, Twitter, and Pinterest slowly became adopted social media sites in North America many niche online communities were taking form within these environments. Despite the mass adoption of social media, they were dismissed for classroom use. This gave rise to a stout debate between some scholars.

When CBC reporter John Bowman (2009) interviewed Carleton University professor Tim Pychyl about the value of social media in the classroom, Pychyl argued that “[…] while discussion groups, blogs and email can be valuable tools in the classroom, using commercial products like Facebook and Twitter can lead to distraction and procrastination.” He stated “Facebook is like taking a person with a gambling problem to Vegas. It's just too easy to get doing other things rather than the hard work of intellectual work. And Twitter is even worse.” On the other side of the debate, professor Ann-Louise Davidson from Concordia University claimed that educators had good reasons to be careful about the use of social media in the classroom, but insisted that much could be learned with social media in terms of generating content, developing a variety of competencies, and using them ethically and keeping oneself safe (Bowman, 2009).