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Refereed Paper with Presentation (20 minutes)

Virginia Tucker, Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA, vmtucker@odu.edu
 * Facebooking in Distance Education: Constructing Virtual Communities of Practice**

As the popularity of distance education grows, educators face increasing challenges to offering quality instruction that accommodates the changing needs and expectations of today's tech savvy distance learners. As more students come into distance learning programs familiar with web-bsed collaboration and discourse, educators must consider updated methods of student group collaboration. Research on virtual communities suggests that dedicated interaction and identification with a group offers many benefits for members and strengthens the quality of knowledge-sharing taking place among them. By examining the development of virtual community within an asynchronous group communicating via the social media site Facebook, this study aims to learn whether a group participating in this environment can effectively move through the stages of virtual community outlined in current research. The study applies a content analysis of a student group's communication records in Facebook. After thirteen weeks of group communication, I accessed and collected all Facebook posts within the group’s page, then categorized each thread into one of five stages discussed by Waltonen-Moore et al. (2008) and Salmon (2002) in order to understand how effectively the group communicates knowledge, conveys trust, and constructs an “us” versus the “other.” In addition to discovering how the Facebook group moved through the stages of virtual community, I ask several specific questions about the stages themselves, exploring when members begin to convey trust, establish social norms, and construct "us" versus "other." Findings indicate that the stages of virtual community were recursive in this group and were motivated by assignments rather than the amount of time the group spent together. Results also suggest that Facebook may be responsible for participants disguising leadership contributions as social; however, the inherent rules for Facebook contributions were overlooked by the group in favor of group-established rules for discourse.

Novice, Intermediate virtual community collaboration Facebook