Conversation and community: The potential of electronic conferences for creating intellectual proximity in distributed learning environments

Conversation and Community: The Potential ofElectronic Conferences for Creating IntellectualProximity in Distributed Learning Environments

Judith WeedmanSchool of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University, P.O. Box 4150,Fullerton, CA 92834-4150. E-mail: [email protected]

As distance-independent technologies increase the flex-ibility with which students may participate in higher ed-ucation, they may decrease the opportunities for peerinteractions. This report explores electronic confer-ences as a medium in which community can developamong students. It examines a conference that was setup by graduate professional school students for theirown use. Questionnaire data were gathered 9 monthsand 27 months after the conference was initiated, andthe conference content for two corresponding 9-monthperiods were analyzed using a coding dictionary derivedfrom the literature of professional socialization. Re-search questions addressed student perceptions of theconference as a communication environment, the role ofthe conference in the professional school experience,and the differences between individuals who posted en-tries to the conference and the conference lurkers. Theresults indicate that students used the conference envi-ronment to extend their educational community, withstronger effect for posters than lurkers.

Introduction

Informal social interaction is an important component ofintellectual work. It has been studied in scientific and schol-arly communication patterns; conversations conducted inhallways, over the telephone, through e-mail have beenfound to be essential to the growth of knowledge. Onephysicist has asserted that scientific knowledge is createdout of oral discussions between individuals before it iscodified in its final form—“ideas in physics are discussed. . . tried out and known to the inner circle of physicists . . .long before they are published in papers and books” (Hag-strom, 1965, p. 48). This phenomenon of the “invisiblecollege” has been documented in the sciences (Crane, 1972;Price & Beaver, 1966; among many others) and in the

humanities (Weedman, 1993). Lewis Coser (1970) assertsthat few intellectuals can produce their work in solitude;“they need the give and take of debate and discussion withtheir peers in order to develop their ideas” (pp. 3–4). Theneed for testing ideas against others’ thinking, for expand-ing one’s own thinking through agreeing or disagreeingwith others, is not limited to individuals whose jobs asscientists or scholars are most often associated with thecreation of knowledge; Gombrich (1966) and Becker (1982)have documented the influence of social interactions in theworld of art, and a study of the communication patterns ofprofessionals (Weedman, 1992) demonstrated that they tryout ideas about their work before acting on them. DonaldSchon (1987) in his study of how professionals conducttheir work describes the ways in which “reflective practi-tioners” rehearse problem solutions on sketchpads or inconversations rather than inventing them on the spot withclients.

Students also rehearse and experiment with ideas as partof the educational process. Bucher and Stelling (1977)found that students in medicine, psychiatry, and biochem-istry, when they were brought together physically by thelocation and work schedules of labs and offices, found eachother rich educational resources; students shared strategiesfor working with their supervisors, discussed literature andtheory, described their patients, and considered therapeuticstrategies. One of the study’s respondents expressed theimportance of the peer group: “the most important informa-tion you get is from co-residents or residents 1 year or 2ahead of you” (p. 112). However, students who lackedphysical proximity to one another did not develop theserelationships.

It seems clear that for social and economic reasons,students in the 21st century will be increasingly physicallyseparated from both their professors and other students. AsNoam (1996) describes, this is a reversal of the patterns ofeducation with which we have been most familiar, in whichstudents gather around scholars for their education. Scholars

Received October 12, 1998; revised April 1, 1999; accepted April 1,1999.

© 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 50(10):907–928, 1999 CCC 0002-8231/99/100907-22

increasingly are going electronically to students—and notnecessarily to classrooms of students brought together toreceive an audio or video transmission, but to students in thesolitude of their own homes or offices working at comput-ers. This shift away from physical proximity will likely haveeffects on the educational process. Research shows thatobjective learning outcomes are not affected by the deliverymode. But we need research (and experience) to ascertainhow important community is to students’ intellectual work,and how it may arise in new technological spaces.

Many faculty members have expressed concern about theincreasing incorporation of distance education by universi-ties because they fear that a loss of intellectual communitywill result, with adverse effects on the educational process.We have thought of the residential experience as central tothe development of ways of thinking, problem solution,exposure to a breadth of ideas and traditions, and an intel-lectual (and perhaps personal) maturation.

As physical proximity decreases, electronic communica-tion channels are looked to for providing intellectual prox-imity. Computer conferencing software is particularly use-ful because it avoids some (though not all) of the overloadof comparable listserv software and reflectors; rather thanhaving messages just arrive in one’s mailbox, the user logsinto a conference and can choose particular threads ofconversation to read, ignore others, mark some postings forfuture reference, archive some or all of the activity, etc.

Although electronic mail and conferencing systems havebeen studied for 2 decades in the discipline of communica-tion, their educational uses are only beginning to receivesystematic research attention. This study is designed toextend our knowledge of how these media may be used tocreate intellectual proximity among students. It examines aconference that was set up by students in a graduate schoolwith voluntary participation. Although this was not a dis-tance education program, the research findings suggest ar-eas of significance in distributed environments. The studyexamines the extent of voluntary use, the students’ percep-tion of the conference as a communication environment, theconference’s ability to extend the size of a student’s intel-lectual community, its usefulness for intellectual work, andthe differences between students who post entries and thosewho lurk in the conference. Professional socialization the-ory and research is used as the basis for the analysis of theintellectual work in which the students were engaged. Pro-fessional socialization has been extensively studied as asocial process involving the transmission of values, atti-tudes, and implicit norms; it thus provides a rich basis forevaluating the use of technology for social/intellectual pur-poses. This article is a companion to “Knowledge and Voicein Professional Socialization” (Weedman 1998b).

Literature Review

Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989, p. 40) note that“within a culture, ideas are exchanged and modified andbelief systems developed and appropriated through conver-

sation and narratives, so these must be promoted . . . [Con-versation and narrative] provide access to much of thedistributed knowledge of the social matrix . . . So learningenvironments must allow narratives to circulate and ‘warstories’ to be added to the collective wisdom of the com-munity.” It is this function that we must provide for indistance education—and, for that matter, in face-to-faceeducation.

The literature review first examines research on the so-cial dimension of distance education to determine whatsupport there may be for claims that distance education isdeficient in community. Following an overview of researchon the ability of computer mediated communication tosupport social relations, the use of CMC specifically inhigher education is reviewed, focusing on the relationship ofmedium to learning outcomes, reflective thinking, and de-velopment of community. The final section of the literaturereview summarizes theory and empirical research on pro-fessional socialization, which provided the basis for theanalysis of the conference content in this study.

Research in Distance Education

Noam (1996) argues that “the strength of the futurephysical university [as virtual universities are created] liesless in pure information and more in college as community”(p. 9). Segal (1996), in a letter to the editor of theChronicleof Higher Education, quotes even the director of the newvirtual Education Network of Maine as saying that “thecampus experience is wonderful.. . . It offers more—espe-cially culturally and socially—than an ‘electronic campus’could.” Lester (1993) found that art educators felt it wouldbe possible to carry out art education at a distance, butbelieved that face-to-face communication would be neces-sary for the development of artistic and perceptual under-standings. Besser and Bonn (1996) argue that much of theeducational experience revolves around membership in anintellectual community within which students support oneanother, and that students taught primarily through distanceeducation will find it difficult to build community anddifficult to build collaborative relationships.

The research literature has begun to address these con-cerns, although most of the work to date has been carriedout in environments where the instructor was remote but thestudents were together during class sessions.

Stanford (1997) and Barron (1987) asked students en-rolled in video classrooms at one or more sites with aremote instructor about their sense of community. Stan-ford’s results showed interactive video classrooms “a closesecond” to face-to-face interaction in sense of community.Barron’s results are somewhat less positive, with 44% ofstudents in a class taught through interactive televisionrating the variable “persons gotten to know” as worse thanin on-campus classes, 36% rating unity or groupness worse,but 44% rating “peer support group” as better than oncampus.

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Haythornthwaite (1998) studied social networks in agraduate school course in which students did not share alocation during most of the class, examining five commu-nication functions: collaborative work, giving and receivingadvice, socializing, and emotional support. She found thatrequired collaborative work on group projects appeared toact as a foundation for the other types of communication.The media required for course work (Web-board and IRC)were the media most frequently used, but the students withthe highest communication levels employed a wider varietyof media. Three-fourths of the students reported that theyfelt like part of the class for most or all of the course,slightly more than half felt the class worked together mostor all of the time, and slightly less than half felt the classincluded social interaction.

Holland (1996) reports that course evaluations showed thatstudents found working electronically (e-mail, CUSeeMe,shared web pages) in cross-site group projects to be “about thesame” as working on projects with face-to-face students (arating of 3.3 on a scale which ran from 1, “the worst groupproject ever experienced,” to 5, “significantly better than othergroup project experiences”). The course was a graduate-levelprofessional school class taught jointly by two faculty mem-bers at different universities, with students on both campuses.

Clark (1989) reports that the distance education formatcreated an unexpected benefit for intellectual exchange:students in a video classroom reported that their learningwas facilitated by the ability to turn their microphones offand talk to one another while the instructor was speaking—they were able to clarify and discuss points among them-selves, a behavior that would be considered rude and dis-ruptive in a face-to-face classroom.

Research in Computer-Mediated Communication

Research on computer-mediated communication beganin the 1970s, and continues through the 1990s. This work isnewly relevant (although rarely cited), as educators considerthese media as technologies for teaching and learning.

Claims regarding the effectiveness of communicationthrough electronic media have ranged from the assertionthat they are appropriate only for the narrowest and moststraightforward transmission of specific factual informationto the anticipation that they will democratize the world bycreating more egalitarian relationships that are not influ-enced by visual status cues such as dress, title, sex, race, ordisability.

Some of the earliest research was carried out by Valleeand Johansen, who conducted extensive field studies of theeffectiveness of computer conferences in supporting task-related and affective interactions, and of users’ sense ofpersonal contact with other participants (Vallee & Johansen,1974; Vallee, Johansen, Lipinski, Spangler, & Wilson,1978). Their studies showed computer conferences to pro-vide moderate to good levels of social awareness and sup-port for the social dimensions of work. In 1981, Rice andCase found university administrators using a newly installed

e-mail system to consider it appropriate for staying in touch,exchanging opinions, and generating ideas, but not appro-priate for tasks requiring more social interaction or socialintimacy; these attitudes had not changed when measured asecond time 2 to 5 months later. Rice and Case did find,however, that those who used the e-mail system mostheavily found it most “substitutable” for face-to-face com-munication.

The early experimental studies reported quite differentresults from the field studies; as Reid et al. (1997) havenoted, they interpreted their data as showing lack of suffi-cient cues and social presence to support complex socialinteractions. Several authors (Lea & Spears, 1991; Walther,1994; Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994; Weedman, 1991)have since argued that lack of social presence is not inherentin the medium, but rather was an artefact of the methodol-ogy: the studies were carried out with zero-history groups ofundergraduate students, performing tasks that were imposedby the experimenters and had no inherent significance forthe participants. Cathcart and Gumpert (1983) argue that thecontent of communication media is both a reflection and aprojection of interpersonal behaviors, and that the mediumitself is only one of a variety of influences.

Wellman et al. (1996), in theAnnual Review of Sociol-ogy, summarized recent research on computer-mediatedcommunication and telecommuting. They found that indi-viduals tend to be more willing to engage with strangers online than they are in face-to-face situations, tending to truststrangers they meet through this medium “much as peoplegave rides to hitchhikers in the flowerchild days of the1960s” (p. 223). They note that computer-supported socialnetworks provide social exemplars to large numbers ofpassive observers as well as to active participants; each actis seen by the entire group, and thus aggregates to supportthe norms of the group. The architecture of the Net seems tosupport two trends in the structure of virtual communities:multiple partial communities emerge in the narrowly fo-cused newsgroups and chat lines, and then the partial com-munities are sometimes aggregated into broader, more in-clusive communities. Computer-mediated communicationthus enables individuals to create connections with largenumbers of people. The research indicates that both strongand weak ties develop on line, and that computer-supportedsocial networks are especially suited to maintaining inter-mediate-strength ties between people who cannot see eachother frequently. The authors conclude that computer-sup-ported social networks and telework are providing a basisfor “the revival of neighborhood life. Just as before theIndustrial Revolution, home and workplace are being inte-grated” (p. 232).

Computer-Mediated Communication in Higher Education

Three aspects of the use of electronic media in highereducation will be discussed: outcomes (usually measured bygrades, or instructor’s perception), the medium’s ability tosupport or encourage reflective thinking, and the emergence

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of community. Eleven studies of the use of conferences (orthe related media of bulletin boards, listservs, and e-mail) inhigher education are reviewed here. In eight of the studies,electronic communication was used to supplement face-to-face interaction in various ways; in three, courses wereconducted entirely through electronic media.

Learning Outcomes

As with research on distance education, those studies thatassess learning outcomes find no difference from grades ina face-to-face classroom, or higher outcomes in the virtualclassrooms, and they often report higher satisfaction in thevirtual environment. There has been, however, little atten-tion to the possible influence of a novelty effect, in whichstudents’ perceptions of the learning environment are af-fected by the feeling of participating in a special program.Some educators (e.g., Davie & Wells, 1991) believe that thewritten format of CMC gives selective advantage to stu-dents who read and write well, but Hiltz (1993) found thatmath SAT scores showed moderately strong correlationswith student success and that verbal SAT scores had nocorrelation to success. Math SAT scores also correlated withthe amount of time students spent on line, and their feelingsof being involved in the course, and students anxious aboutthe technology at the beginning of class were more negativeabout the experience at the end of class. Although Hiltz doesnot discuss this possibility, it seems possible that the stu-dents without high math SATs found computer technologymore unfamiliar or uncomfortable initially, and might havereported different experiences had their usage been longeror more comprehensive than the course of one semester.Hiltz’s quasi-experimental study was conducted in under-graduate classes with matched face-to-face and on-line sec-tions, and in additional mixed-mode classes that employedboth media. Grades were comparable in courses using andcourses not using the Virtual Classroom software. Her sta-tistical analysis indicated that “variables in outcomes [bothgrades and student perceptions] were much more affectedby differences in student characteristics, course character-istics, and the institutional environment, than by mode ofcourse delivery” (p. 87). One of the crucial student charac-teristics was age and experience; the higher the academiclevel of the students, the better their overall rating of thevirtual course.

Hiltz and Wellman (1997) found that mastery of coursematerial in Virtual Classrooms equaled or exceeded that intraditional classrooms, and that students reported the VirtualClassroom to be superior on two dimensions—access tofaculty and overall quality of the educational experience.The software and course structure were designed to enablestudents to submit their assignments electronically so thatthey could be read by other class members (a teachingtechnique independent of medium); 55% of the studentsasserted that they felt more motivated to be diligent in theirassignments because other students would be reading them.

Ninety percent said that they felt the opportunity to readother students’ assignments was useful.

Schriber (1996) reports that students in an undergraduatehistory seminar that used an e-mail discussion list for sub-mitting project proposals, thesis statements, and summariesof their work felt they had learned more than in a traditionalclass, and the instructor felt that she was able to give betterfeedback because she had additional insight into students’thinking from reading the list.

Reflective Thinking

Elizabeth Burge (1994) studied two masters degreecourses in education that were conducted entirely throughthe medium of a computer conference. Her research utilizedinterviews with students and instructors in the courses. Shefound that students felt they had engaged in more reflectivethinking than they would have in a visual classroom; theasynchronous format allowed more time for thinking issuesthrough, and the ability to edit their postings led to bettercrafted expressions of their ideas. Some students reportedfeeling more connected or engaged with their peers’ think-ing. In general, students felt that they had engaged in activeand constructive thinking rather than the absorption oftransmitted knowledge. Davie and Wells (1991), providingguidelines and suggestions for using computer-mediatedcommunication, point out that the permanent record avail-able in a conference also allows students to return to earlierpostings, to “rethink a position or pull together a thread ofconversation” (p.21). Graziadei (1996), who taught a fresh-man biology class using a variety of media including anelectronic conference, also felt that students often mademore thoughtful responses and engaged in reflective learn-ing through the conference medium, and that the sense ofaudience increased student motivation to express originalideas rather than repeating the ideas of the instructor. New-man, Johnson, Webb, and Cochrane (1997), who used post-experience questionnaires and content analysis of confer-ence transcripts to evaluate critical thinking in undergradu-ate seminars taught with and without discussions in acomputer conference, found similar amounts of criticalthinking in face-to-face and computer conference discus-sions, and that “overall depth of critical thinking . . . washigher when learning took place on the computer confer-encing system” (p. 492). Day, Crump, and Rickly (1996),however, found in synchronous discussions that “to an evengreater extent than asynchronous conferences,” there was “atendency toward superficiality, indulgence, and encompass-ing inclusivity” (p. 304).

Community

Several authors have addressed the community-buildingaspects of computer-mediated instruction. Day, Crump, andRickly (1996) reported that students found this to be themost important dimension of CMC in the course, and notedthat students continued to use the IRC and MU*s after the


course was over. Davie and Wells (1991) express the opin-ion that CMC is superior to either audio or video confer-encing in permitting personal relationships to developamong students in a class. Hiltz and Wellman (1997), how-ever, found that in face-to-face classrooms, more than 50%of the students reported developing new friendships in class,whereas in the matched virtual classrooms only 33% re-ported doing so.

Conventional wisdom asserts that asynchronous mediaprovide greater participation equity. Davie and Wells(1991), for instance, assert that “One of the greatest fallaciesrelating to face-to-face instruction is the idea that a many-to-many interaction between students occurs simply be-cause many students are present and a few are talking. Incontrast, the true many-to-many capability is one of themost frequently cited characteristics of a CMC classroom. . . all students have an equal opportunity to contribute onan individual and group level” (p. 18). Equal opportunity toparticipate, however, does not ensure equal participation inelectronic environments any more than it does in face toface environments. Selfe and Meyer (1991) found that pat-terns of conversational dominance by men and high-statusindividuals did not change in a computer-mediated confer-ence used by faculty and software developers.

Davis and Brewer (1997) examined electronic confer-ences as discourse communities through an analysis ofconferences used for discussion in their classes for Englishmajors and minors at two universities between 1989 and1993. They studied the conference as a cultural frameworkwithin which students developed linguistic conventions andappropriated discourse strategies from one another. Theiranalyses focused on the legitimation of claims, shifts be-tween guarded and self-disclosing modes, forms of directand indirect address, and repetition and emulation. Thelatter findings are most relevant to the concerns of thisstudy.

They found that a discourse community did emerge inthe course of each class. Shared rhetorical conventionsemerged; for instance, students shifted from complimentarycloses such as “more later” to the conference norm, whichwas to end a posting with a summary of the argument ordiscussion. Word games, which played with the tacit rulesof the discourse community, were themselves evidence ofthe emergence of such norms.

Although overload can be a significant problem withcomputer-mediated communication (Burge, 1994; Day etal., 1996; Hiltz & Wellman, 1997), Davis and Brewer’sfindings suggest that “the repetitive, rambling, discursive,recursive features of electronic conference writing may ac-tually serve the purpose of creating community” (p. 34).These are strategies for signaling connections in a commu-nication environment in which the turn-taking and adja-cency pairs of spoken conversation are absent. Studentsused intertextual references, quotations, emulation of pat-terns such as rhetorical questions, and a claim-warrant formof argument to link their entries to previous entries. Repe-tition, then, rather than being mere self-indulgence, was a

linguistic convention used to create cohesion in exchangesthat were asynchronous.

The value of community to students should not be takenas an unquestioned assumption. Collis (1993) reports in astudy of industrial engineers that they valued the educa-tional content of distance independent courses but wereuninterested in participation in a virtual community, eventhough it would have allowed more frequent and spontane-ous interaction than their occasional face-to-face profes-sional conferences. Schmidt-Posner, Danielson, and Posner(1991) describe an administrative attempt to implement ane-mail system among part-time MBA students to promote astronger sense of community among students, faculty, andadministration, and to increase student attachment/commit-ment to the institution. Student use was very low; only 15%of the students opened accounts, and only half of those everlogged on. A variety of publicity and incentive measureswas ineffective in increasing use. The authors concludedthat “this product met a need that did not exist” (p. 18).These results, coupled with those of Collis, suggest thatstudent desire for community is not always present, or itmay be being met adequately in ways of which faculty areunaware.

Professional Socialization

Much of what educators hope to accomplish beyondteaching facts may be included in the concept of socializa-tion. Professional socialization is a form of adult transition,the acquisition of a role and identity as a member of arecognized occupational group. It is an example of sociallearning, as values, attitudes, beliefs, language, norms—aculture—are absorbed.

The literature of professional socialization is broad andnot well integrated. The theory comes primarily from thediscipline of sociology, while most of the empirical researchhas been carried out by faculty in professional schools. Thetwo bodies of work make very different assertions about theoutcomes of the professional school experience. Few of theempirical studies cite one another’s findings, and the links totheory are also surprisingly sparse. This section of theliterature review will pull together this scattered literatureand summarize the findings. A more detailed discussionmay be found in Weedman (1998b).

The literature can be categorized into five major areas;theory has addressed all five, while empirical studies havefocused on the last two.

Area I, the oldest and the one most frequently cited, isbased on the sociological definition of professions as uniqueoccupations. Work by Parsons (1939), Goode (1969), andGreenwood (1961) identified features that characterizedprofessions: their reason for being is rooted in service, theyare based on a specialized body of knowledge, they regulateentry to the field through advanced education and occupa-tional associations, practitioners are recognized as havingexpertise and authority based on specialized knowledge,and they have formal codes for ethical conduct. Work in this


area has focused on the idea that socialization transmits thevalues and ways of working that make professions unique.

Area II looks at the social life of professions—symbolicdimensions and shared understandings. There are norms oftask performance, a view of an acknowledged role in soci-ety, insider jokes, and a reference group looked to by othermembers of the profession (Gallegos, 1972; Roos, 1972).

A third strand of the literature addresses the knowledgebase of the professions and the desirable content of prepa-ration for practice (Katz & Harnett, 1976; Mayhew & Ford,1974). Discussions of formal educational requirements in-clude theory, practice, the need for creativity, and a scien-tific concern for contribution to the growth of the profes-sional knowledge base.

The largest amount of interaction between the theoreticaland empirical literatures is in Area IV, the influence ofspecific educational setting on socialization. A body oftheory has grown up concerning the process of socializa-tion—the importance of role models, the influence of peergroups, and the school itself as a socializing agent (Bragg,1976; Wentworth, 1980). The more inclusive the schoolexperience, the more thorough the socialization processshould be. A fellowship of suffering may arise amongstudents, and where stresses are high, students may socializethemselves more to their role as students than to their futureroles as professionals.

The final group of theoretical works has a strong psy-chodynamic component. It examines the ways in whichstudents in professional schools come to see themselves asmembers of a profession rather than as aspirants to it.Students become aware of differences between consumers’and insiders’ views of the profession, and shift to theviewpoint of insiders. This group of works sees students asadults in transition, engaged in a shift in fundamental per-sonal identity, and reconciliation of various aspects of theself with a new conception of self (Singer, 1982; Went-worth, 1980).

Empirical research carried out within the professionaldisciplines includes studies of students in schools of medi-cine, nursing, social work, teaching, psychiatry and clinicalpsychology, law, dentistry, community health education,biochemistry, music, and art. It has been heavily influencedby the publication ofBoys in White, a study of medicalschool carried out in the 1960s. Becker et al. (1961) de-scribed a process where medical students became focusedsolely on success in school, and socialized themselves totheir role as subordinates in the educational organizationrather than to their role as future professional practitioners.Whereas the theoretical literature describes a process of richsignificance in the formation of adult identity, the researchliterature indicates the following: (1) attitudes and values donot change or change away from professional ideals (Cryns,1977; Enoch, 1989; Judah, 1979); (2) the peer group eitheroverwhelms professional culture and sets guidelines forstudent behavior, or has little influence beyond emotionalsupport (Olesen & Whittaker, 1968; Watts, 1987); (3) stu-dents do not learn to be professionals, they learn to be

students (Olesen & Whittaker, 1968; Stein, 1986); and (4)formation of professional identity is influenced by exposureto practitioners and the opportunity for clinical experience,not by classroom experiences (Kadushin, 1969), and doesnot fully take place until after graduation (Heck, 1995).

Thus, the theory of professional socialization shows arich process, involving many dimensions of an individual’spersonality and social experience, while research has shownstudents to be highjacked by the immediate, focused on thecurrent student role rather than the future professional role.

The Study

The literature reviewed indicates that there is a danger indistributed educational environments of providing insuffi-cient support for the kinds of informal, exploratory conver-sations among peers that are important to intellectual work.Most of the studies to date have been carried out in videoenvironments, which bring students physically together tobe linked to the instructor’s remote site. Field studies oftext-based electronic communication show that these mediahave been used effectively to create bonds of both casualsocial exchange and deeper community. Studies of the useof these media in higher education indicate that they areeffective for teaching/learning, for critical thinking, and forthe development of at least some dimensions of community.The media evince characteristics of both oral and writtenlanguage, allowing both off-the-cuff social exchange andmore reflective rereading of others’ postings and editing ofone’s own.

This study addresses text-based electronic media as pos-sible environments for the dimensions of professional edu-cation that are not linked to instructor-guided learning. Itexplores the casual, spontaneous conversations studentshave outside the classroom, conversations that may be theanalog of the informal communication studied in scientists,scholars, artists, and professionals of various kinds. Profes-sional socialization is used as an analytical frame for theintellectual work in which students are engaged. The con-versations studied occurred within a computer-mediatedconference that a group of students initiated and maintainedseparate from classroom and administrative structures. Thestudy uses analysis of perception data gathered from thestudents and content analysis of 19 months of conferencetranscripts.

The concern of this study is with the potential of text-based electronic media to be used in creating community forstudents not in physical proximity to one another. Althoughit uses a conference conducted by students who did share acampus, the research explores the extent to which confer-ence use created intellectual proximity beyond the face toface. The following research questions guided the investi-gation.

(1) How frequently did students use the conference?(2) How did students perceive the conference as a commu-

nication environment?—(a) Did it seem more similar to


print or to oral communication? (b) What was theirperception of audience? (c) Were students aware ofnorms of discourse, a characteristic style of conferencecommunication?

(3) What was the relationship of the conference communityto the students’ face-to-face community?—(a) Did itcreate relationships that did not exist otherwise? (b) Didconference relationships differ from face-to-face rela-tionships?

(4) What role did the conference play in the professionalschool experience?—(a) Why did students use the con-ference? (b) What topics were discussed? (c) Did theconference reflect the fact that students were preparingfor future careers? (d) Did student conversations aboutthe profession reflect sociological theory about social-ization, or did they reflect the dominance of the imme-diate student role? (e) Did students respond to a broador a narrow range of the topics introduced into theconference?

(5) Are lurkers different?—(a) Did they use the conferenceless frequently than those students who posted entries?(b) Did they use the conference for different reasons?(c) Was their perception of the conference environmentdifferent? (d) Was the relationship between the confer-ence community and the face-to-face community dif-ferent than for students who posted entries?

The conference environment examined here differs in animportant way from those studied in other higher educationresearch; it was initiated and maintained by students. It wasnot a part of any course and there was no agenda or set ofexpectations. It was begun in a graduate professional schoolin 1987 by students who wanted to gain familiarity with themedium and use it to improve communication within theschool. The average age of the students was 29. Data weregathered twice—in 1987, after the conference had been inexistence for about 9 months, and again 2 years later in1989. The computing environment was similar to that oftoday—many conferences and distribution lists existed oncampus, and students were accustomed to using e-mail toextend their contact with faculty and other students. The twodifferences lie in speed (300 baud modems were the norm)and the fact that most students used campus computer labsrather than working from home. The importance of thismedium for the students should thus be considered in thecontext of an environment where usage was more difficultthan it is for most students in 1999.

This study used both quantitative and qualitative meth-ods. Student perceptions of the medium were assessedthrough a questionnaire, and content analysis of the confer-ence transcripts was conducted. The transcripts included allconference entries for two 9-month periods in 1987 and1989.

Questionnaires were mailed to all individuals registeredas participants in the conference on the dates on which thetranscripts were printed. In 1987, 9 months after the con-ference was initiated, 40.5% of the school’s student bodyhad registered as participants, 117 students. These 117students received questionnaires; 60 students returned them,

a 51.3% response ratio. (Seven faculty members, 2 staffmembers, and 18 professionals working in nearby commu-nities also subscribed to the conference, but are not includedin this analysis of student use. See Weedman (1991) for ananalysis of the entire data set.)

In 1989, 16 months later, 55.3% of the student body wasregistered, 145 individuals. Seventy-five of these studentsreturned the questionnaire, a 52.8% response rate. (Fivefaculty, 3 staff, and 22 professionals subscribed during thisperiod, but are not included in this analysis.)

The total, then, was 135 responses, of which 133 wereusable.

Transcripts of conference content were collected twice,during a 10-month period in 1987 and a 9-month period in1989.

The total number of postings during the two periods was4599 in the two 9-month periods. The coding dictionary foranalyzing conference content was derived from the theoret-ical and empirical literatures of professional socializationdiscussed in the previous section. Sixty works were re-viewed (for a complete list, see Weedman, 1998b), and a listwas compiled of all topics addressed in these works, pre-serving the wording of the original. These topics were thencombined where necessary to eliminate redundancies. Thisprocess resulted in a list of 114 distinct items. The itemswere then classified into 20 broader categories, which werein turn grouped into five major areas of focus. The dictio-nary thus was created as an aggregation and synthesis ofclaims about professional socialization from sociologicaltheory and empirical research conducted in various profes-sions. One item was added, which arose within the confer-ence but had not been discussed in the scholarly literature;this was contemporary news events that had implications forthe profession. The addition of this item raised the total to115. For the portion of the conference that was not con-cerned with the profession or the educational/socializationprocess, topics were derived from the conference content.Eight such topics were identified. Appendix A contains thecoding dictionary.

Each posting was coded as one response, whether it wasthree words or three screens in length. Entries were codedaccording to their explicit topic, not by the aspect of thesocialization process that they might exemplify. Each entryin the conference was coded first for the item that bestdescribed it, and then for additional topics into which it fell.Analysis is based on the percentages of cases – that is,percentages of the total of 6,746 codings. An intercoderreliability check showed a 95% agreement in assigning theentries to the topics.

Results

Use of the Conference

A total of 4,599 individual postings were submittedduring the 18 months of the study period. This works out to


an average of 256 postings each month, or 64 each week; 9each day.

The questionnaire asked students how often they signedon to the conference. Half of them reported that they signedon at least once a week, and a fourth signed on four timesa week or more. Twelve percent signed on once or twice amonth, and a fourth of the students signed on less than oncea month. The importance of frequent usage is increased bythe fact that the majority of students had to do all theircomputing on campus; only 26.5% worked at home viamodem.

The survey instrument addressed the question of whetherstudents were prevented from using the conference as muchas they would like to by various factors. Sixty-three stu-dents, 47.4%, reported that they used the conference lessthan they would like to; 42.9% reported that they used itabout as much as they would like to; and 4.5% reported thatthey used the conference more than they would like to (orfelt they should). Reasons for using the conference less thanthey would have liked included: lack of time (82.8% of thestudents reporting less than desirable usage), lack of aconvenient place for access (22.9%), lack of computingfunds (17.7%), and various other constraints, of which thetwo most frequent were the daunting volume of postings(three people, or 5%) and the fact that students commuted tocampus, which probably is equivalent to lack of time (fourstudents, or 6.4%). Respondents could indicate more thanone reason, so the percentages sum to more than 100.

Of the six students who reported using the conferencemore often than they felt was desirable, two said they usedit as procrastination from studying, two said that curiosityabout contents led them to keep reading after they felt theyshould sign off, and four felt that the time it took to read wasinordinate.

Perceptions of the Conference Environment

Variables related to the conference as a communicationenvironment addressed its similarity to face-to-face or printmedia, its nature as a group or an individual medium, andthe development of a distinctive style or norms for expres-sion.

Although a computer conference is a text-based medium,students perceived the conference as being more like face-to-face conversations than print media. The questionnairepresented a list of media, asking “which of the followingseems to you to be most similar to using the conference(check only one)?” Sixty-one (45.8%) checked one of thefollowing: conversations before and after class, attendingclass, meeting of a club, or sitting in a lounge or lunchroomtalking with people who wander in; the most frequentlychosen comparison was that to a lounge or lunchroom. Theprint media comparisons were to reading professional liter-ature and reading the student newsletter; 9.7% of the re-spondents chose one of these options, most frequently thestudent newsletter. Forty-three students (32.4%) said noth-ing else was similar to using the conference. Twelve stu-

dents checked more than one of the comparisons or none atall.

A conference is a group medium, yet each posting is anindividual act, often in direct response to another individu-al’s posting. Two questions were asked addressing the par-ticipants’ sense of audience.

The first asked participants about the degree to whichtheir perception of audience was of an individual or thegroup as a whole (see Table 1). Of the 120 students whoresponded to this question, roughly 22% were most con-scious of directing their posting to a specific individual;another 12% were equally conscious of the individual towhom they were responding and of the group as a whole;66% thought of the audience for their postings as the entiregroup.

The second question asked whether respondents had asense of interacting more frequently with some individualsthan with others within the conference. Seventeen percent ofthe respondents (21 of the 122 who responded to thisquestion) could identify some people with whom they in-teracted more frequently than they did with others; 83% didnot.

One aspect of community is the development of norms ofexpression. The survey instrument asked respondentswhether they found that there was a particular style ofwriting that had developed in the conference. One hundredfifteen students responded to this question; 68 (59%) wereaware of a distinctive style, while 41% were not.

The 62 respondents who were able to describe the styleof the conference, however, had varying perceptions. Themost frequent descriptions were coded into the category“casual, humorous”—40 of the total of 88 descriptive com-ments. The other five categories of description were formal,thoughtful (14 comments), condescending, cliquish (14),sloppy, verbose (10), concise (9), and guarded (1).

TABLE 1. Sense of audience.

Number %

Think of posting as going to one individual 3 2.5Posting directed to one person; aware of

others but others are inconsequential8 6.7

Very aware that many people will bereading, but write because I want oneparticular person to receive that posting

15 12.5

TOTAL: AUDIENCE AS PRIMARILYINDIVIDUAL

26 21.7

Response directed primarily to one personbut other conference usersequallyimportant

14 11.7

Awareness of writing to be read by allconference users much stronger thansense of responding to one individual

58 48.3

Postings directed to conference usersgenerally

22 18.3

TOTAL: AUDIENCE AS PRIMARILYGROUP

89 78.3

n 5 120.


Those respondents who identified a style were asked if itwas a pleasant or unpleasant feature of the conference.Fifty-two percent replied that it was pleasant, 48% that itwas unpleasant.

Relationship of Conference Community to theFace-to-Face Community

Four sets of variables were used to assess the extent towhich the conference replicated or extended the face-to-facecommunity of students. The first addressed overlap in peo-ple students knew in the two communities; the secondaddressed the nature of their interactions; the third con-cerned other school forums in which students interacted;and the fourth the extent to which students talked about theconference outside the conference itself.

The conference considerably extended the students’ in-teractions with others. Seventy percent of the respondents(91) agreed with the statement that “The conference givesme a chance to interact with people I would not have muchor any contact with otherwise.” The questionnaire askedstudents to estimate, “of all the people whose names arefamiliar to you from the conference,” the percentage whom

they would recognize by sight, whom they talked to inperson occasionally, and whom they talked to frequently.Approximately three-fourths of the respondents would rec-ognize 50% or fewer of the people whose names they knewfrom the conference; nearly half would recognize 25% orfewer. Approximately half talked occasionally with 25% orfewer of the people familiar from the conference. Half saidthey talked frequently with none of the people familiar fromthe conference. (See Fig. 1 and Table 2 for complete data.)

Not only did the conference permit communication witha wider range of people, for many students it providedinteractions that were different from those which took placeface-to-face (Table 2). Forty-four percent of the students(57) agreed with the statement that in addition to allowinginteractions with new people, “the conference gives me achance to interact with people I would see anyway, but inways that would not occur otherwise.” Only 20—15%—agreed with the statement “the conference gives me achance to interact with people I would see anyway, and ourinteraction is pretty much the same as it is away from theconference.” Because the three possibilities— different peo-ple, same people but different interactions, and same peoplewith the same interactions—were not mutually exclusive,agreeing with the statement that the conference allowed thesame kinds of interactions with the same people did notmean that it did not also allow interactions of a differentkind or with different individuals.

Sixty-seven (56.8%) of the students said that the confer-ence had changed their knowledge about or relationshipwith other students. The majority of the comments on thisvariable were positive—45 people said they got to knowmore about other participants or to see other facets of theirpersonalities, and four said the conference let them knowwho among the students they would like to meet. Sevenrespondents, however, indicated that their interactions haddecreased their respect for other students.

Another indication of the relationship between the con-ference and other dimensions of student life is the extent towhich conference discussions carry over outside the confer-ence. Forty-eight percent of the students said they hadtalked with nonparticipants occasionally about things thathad been in the conference, and an additional 5% said theydid so often. Forty-nine percent talked to other participants

FIG. 1. “Of the people whose names are familiar to you from theconference, how many do you . . . ”

TABLE 2. New people and different interactions within the conference.

Applies* Does not apply

“The conference gives me a chance to interact with people I would not have muchor any contact with otherwise.”

9170.0%

3930.0%

“The conference gives me a chance to interact with people I would see anyway,but in ways that would not occur otherwise.”

5743.8%

7356.2%

“The conference gives me a chance to interact with people I would see anyway,and our interactions is pretty much the same as it is away from the conference.”

2015.4%

110846%

n 5 130.* Respondents were requested to check all statements that applied.


about conference topics occasionally, with an additional11% doing so often.

Other School activities were available to the students,both formal and informal. Convocations brought speakersof national reputation to the school, and three nationalassociations maintained student chapters on campus. Therewere Friday afternoon Happy Hours organized by studentsat a local restaurant, and occasional potlucks and parties.Sixty-two percent of the respondents attended the convoca-tions, 76% belonged to one of the professional organizationstudent chapters, 36% attended the Happy Hours, and44.4% attended the parties. The most frequent reason forattending convocations and belonging to the associationswas the value of what could be learned, of keeping up withthe field. The most frequent reason for attending HappyHour and the parties was the chance for social interaction.The most frequent reason for nonparticipation for all activ-ities was lack of time (see Table 3).

What Role Did the Conference Play in the ProfessionalSchool Experience?

The questionnaire asked students why they used theconference. Students were given a list of possible reasonsand asked to rate them as major, fairly important, minor, ornot important reasons for use. The overwhelming reason foruse of the conference was that it let students feel in touchwith the school; half checked this as a major reason, and87.7% as either a major or fairly important reason. Notifi-cation of dates and events was second, with 78.5% of thestudents indicating it was a major or fairly important reason.“Intellectual stimulation—exchange of ideas, philosophies,knowledge” was third with 66.9% of the students citing thisas important; and “Chance to discuss professional ideas,concerns, and information” was fourth with 64.4%. “Socialexchange—chance to talk informally about a variety ofthings” also was important for more than 50% of the stu-dents. (See Table 4 for complete data.)

TABLE 3. Participation in other school activities.

Participated Did not participateMost common reason for

participationMost common reasonfor nonparticipation

Convocations 8362.4%

5037.6%

Meet and learn fromprofessionals (45, 34.6%)

Time (40, 33.1%)

National Association #1, student chapter 7858.6%

5541.4%

To keep up with theprofession (14, 10.7%)

Time (7, 5.3%)


10478.2%


10578.9%

Friday afternoon Happy Hour 3627.1%

9772.9%

Social interaction(23, 17.8%)

Time (52, 40.0%)

Parties 5944.4%

7455.6%

Social interaction(31, 23.8%)

Time (32, 24.1%)

n 5 130.

TABLE 4. Reasons for using the conference.

MajorFairly

importantSum of Major andFairly important Minor

Notimportant

Feeling in touch with the school 50.8% 36.9% 87.7% 4.6% 7.7%Notification of dates and events 46.2% 32.3% 78.5% 10.8% 10.8%Intellectual stimulation 31.5% 35.4% 66.9% 23.8% 9.2%Discuss professional ideas, concerns,

information22.5% 41.9% 64.4% 17.8% 17.8%

Social exchange—chance to talkinformally about a variety of things

23.8% 32.3% 56.1% 24.6% 19.2%

Place to ask for information aboutevents, dates, assignments, etc.

9.2% 22.3% 31.5% 34.6% 33.8%

Study break 8.5% 16.2% 24.7% 29.2% 46.2%BS-ing 3.1% 14.7% 17.8% 27.9% 54.3%Work for change in the school 3.1% 14.6% 17.7% 34.6% 47.7%Express frustrations about the school 3.8% 11.5% 15.3% 37.7% 46.9%

n 5 130.


Analysis of the conference content supports the studentreports of the importance of the conference for social con-nection and intellectual/professional exchange. Seventy-fivepercent of the conference content concerned the professionfor which the graduate students were preparing and theirprofessional school experience; 25% was social in nature,embodying group maintenance behaviors such as joke-tell-ing, word play, discussion of current events unrelated to theschool or profession, invitations to parties, etc. A completediscussion of the content analysis is available elsewhere(Weedman, 1998b); the discussion here will summarize theanalysis in terms of its significance for understanding therole of the conference in the educational process.

As discussed in the Method section, a coding dictionarywas devised on the basis of the research and scholarship onprofessional socialization. One hundred fifteen claims aboutprofessional socialization were identified and grouped into20 categories, which were further grouped into five majorareas. This discussion will focus on the five areas: I, dis-tinctive characteristics of the professions; II, the work of theprofession; III, professional education; IV, the specific ed-ucational setting; and V, the formation of professional iden-tity. A sixth major area is comprised of those topics thatwere not related to the profession or the professional school.Three variables will be considered: volume of entries (rep-resented by number of individual cases—all codings of theentries), number of students posting in each area, and num-ber of postings by each student.

The first impression of the data is of the wide distributionof topics within the conference. Of the 115 possible topicsidentified from the 60 works of research and scholarship inthe field, 95 were discussed by the students. Postings fellwithin all 20 of the broader categories, and therefore ofcourse within all five of the major areas. Appendix A, thecoding dictionary, shows the number of entries and percent-age of content for all topics.

The most frequently discussed area, Area IV, was thecurrent school environment. Somewhat more than a fourthof the cases—2020 of the 6746—fell into this area. Thediscussions ranged from identification of software resourceson campus to complaints about workload to speculations asto whether faculty ever read their course evaluations.

The second most frequently discussed area was Area II,the nature of work in the profession. Students compared therequirements and expectations in various work environ-ments, debated the importance of a professional appearanceto effective performance of duties, and explored the cultureof the profession through passing along insider jokes, de-scribing old-fashioned technologies, and engaging in wordplay with the jargon characteristic of the field. This areacomprised 18.1% of the content of the conference, 1192cases.

Third in popularity for discussion were those character-istics that sociologists consider to be distinctive of profes-sions as occupations, Area I. The students were not discuss-ing the sociology of professions; rather, those aspects thatsociologists have found important were also important tostudents as they considered their future careers. Nearly 12%of the cases—731—were in this area. Most frequently dis-cussed were relationships with clients (4.2%) and the exis-tence of a specialized body of knowledge that was unique totheir profession (4.2%). Service as the reason for a profes-sion’s existence, the concept of professional autonomy, andcodes of ethics each received slightly more than 1% of thecases (1% is 66 entries). (Service and ethics are both closelyrelated to the relationship with clients, which was a highlyposted category; however, entries were coded into the ser-vice and ethics categories only when those subject wereexplicitly mentioned.)

The nature of professional education itself, Area III,received 599 postings, 8.8% of the cases. These conversa-tions concerned the difference between professional educa-tion and paraprofessional training, knowledge from otherdisciplines or fields that was important for professionals tohave, and (the least frequent of all the categories, with sevenpostings, or 0.1% of the total cases) research and the con-tribution to the growth of professional knowledge.

The fifth area in terms of volume was Area V, theconcept of professional identity; it received 551 postings,accounting for 8.5% of the cases. This area included theprocess of change from an outsider to an insider identity, theawareness of the acquisition of a professional identity, rea-sons for attraction to the field, and the concrete transitions ofjob-hunting, accepting positions, and moving.

TABLE 5. Distribution of postings, by topic and by number of respondents.*

Percentage of content(number of postings)

Percentage of postersposting to this category

(number of posters)

I. Distinctive characteristics 11.7 (731) 56.5 (39)II. The work of the profession 18.1 (1,192) 73.9 (51)III. Professional education 8.8 (599) 66.6 (46)IV. Specific educational setting 29.6 (2,020) 85.5 (59)V. Professional identity 8.0 (551) 65.2 (45)Non-professional 24.6 (1,663) 71.0 (49)

n 5 6,756 n 5 69

* Calculated only for the students who posted in any category; the 64 students who were lurkersare not included in this analysis.


The final area consists of those items that were notrelated to the profession or professional preparation. Theseconstituted a fourth of the conference cases, 1663 postings.Into this category were coded a long item of favorite quo-tations, sports news, several word-play items, discussions ofgood places to eat, and contemporary social issues andevents.

Perhaps even more interesting than the breadth of topicsdiscussed was the number of students discussing each one.Rather than students clustering around one or two areas ofdiscussion, all of the areas were addressed by at least half ofthe students (see Table 5). Nearly half the students posted toall five professional discussion areas (42.0%); 13.0% postedto four of them; 15.9% to three; 10.1% to 7, and 17.4% toonly one area. Twenty of the students posted only to theprofessional areas; one posted only to the nonprofessionaltopics. The area receiving the broadest student attention wasthe local school environment (85.5% of the students postedto these topics), followed by the work of the profession(73.9%), professional education in general (66.6%), profes-sional identity (65.2%), and the characteristics of profes-sions (56.5%). The nonprofessional topics received postingsfrom 71.0% of the students.

Table 6 shows the postings to the major areas, with themean and median numbers of postings per student. Thehighest number of postings in an area by a single person was105, in the area of specific educational setting. This area, notsurprisingly, also had the highest mean and median numberof postings by respondents; 11.9 and 5.0. The means for allareas are much higher than the medians, because in eachcase there were a few students who posted much morefrequently than the others. 5.68 was the average of themeans for the five categories; the average of the medians

was 2. The nonprofessional area had a mean number ofpostings per student of 6.9, with a median of 2.0.

The discussion patterns thus show that most studentsdiscussed most topics; students attended to the full range ofthe conference.

Are There Differences in Perception of the Conferencebetween Those Who Post Entries andThose Who Are Lurkers?

Sixty-nine of the respondents had posted entries to theconference that were included in the content analysis duringthe data gathering period; 63 had not.

Four sets of variables were examined to determine howdifferent the experience of lurkers in the conference mightbe from those who posted items (referred to as “posters”).The first was frequency of use. The second concerned thereasons for using the conference. The third set of variableshad to do with perceptions of the conference environment,and the fourth was the relationship between the conferencecommunity and the face-to-face community. Lurkers’ andposters’ responses to these questionnaire items were com-pared using the chi-squared statistic.

There was a statistically significant difference betweenlurkers and posters in how frequently they reported that theylogged in to the conference (p , 0.01). Nearly 40% of thelurkers used the conference at least once a week (10% usedit four times a week or more); more than 80% of the postersused the conference at least once a week (see Table 7 for thecomplete data).

Lurkers and posters were very similar in their reasons forusing the conference. More than half of both groups indi-cated that the following reasons (given here from most

TABLE 6. Number of respondents* posting to conference subjects/categories.

Number of peopleposting 0 times

Highest number ofpostings by 1 person

Mean number ofpostings byrespondents

Median number ofpostings byrespondents

I. Distinctive characteristics 30 35 3.7 1.0II. The work of the profession 18 35 5.5 2.0III. Professional education 23 31 4.7 1.0IV. Specific educational setting 10 105 11.9 5.0V. Professional identity 24 17 2.6 1.0Non-professional 20 50 6.9 2.0

n 5 69.* Calculated only for the students who posted in any category; the 64 students who were lurkers are not included in this analysis.

TABLE 7. Comparison* of posters and lurkers: Frequency of conference use.

Less thanonce a month

About once amonth

About twice amonth

About once aweek

About twice aweek

Four times aweek or more

Posters 8.7% (6) 4.3% (3) 4.3% (3) 15.9% (11) 23.2% (16) 43.5% (30) n 5 69Lurkers 43.7% (28) 4.7% (3) 10.9% (7) 12.5% (8) 15.6% (10) 9.4% (6) n 5 64

* The difference between posters and lurkers is significant:x2(6, n 5 133) 5 35.56,p , 0.01.


frequent to least frequent) were important or of major im-portance in their conference use: feeling in touch with theschool and what is going on; notification of important datesand events; chance to discuss professional ideas, concerns,information; intellectual stimulation (exchange of ideas,philosophies, knowledge); and social exchange (chance totalk informally about a variety of things). Both groupsindicated that these were the most important reasons forusing the conference, but the trend was stronger for theposters than for lurkers on three of the items—feeling intouch (p , 0.01), professional discussion (p , 0.01), andsocial exchange (p , 0.05) (see Table 8 for a completebreakdown of the data).

Lurkers and posters did not differ in their perceptions of theconference environment. Their responses to the questionnaireitem asking “which of the following seems to you to be mostsimilar to using the conference” favored face to face rather thanprint media as the most apt comparison, with a lounge orlunchroom as the most frequent choice. There was no signif-icant difference in their sense of audience; both groups feltmore aware of the entire group than of any individual as therecipient of their postings. Slightly more than half of bothlurkers and posters said that they were aware of a distinctivestyle of expression that was used within the conference, andboth were roughly evenly divided on whether they found thestyle pleasant or unpleasant.

Lurkers did not differ from posters in the percentage ofconference users whom they would recognize by sight, with

whom they talked occasionally, or with whom they talkedfrequently. Both groups agreed that the conference gavethem “a chance to interact with people I would not havemuch or any contact with otherwise,” although a signifi-cantly larger percentage of the posters agreed (81% forposters, 58% for lurkers;p , 0.01). More than 3/4 of bothgroups disagreed with the statement “the conference givesme a chance to interact with people I would see anyway, andour interaction is pretty much the same as it is away fromthe conference;” in this case, it was the lurkers who dis-agreed with the greatest frequency (94% compared to 76%;p , 0.01).

The greatest difference between lurkers and posters wasin their reaction to the statement “the conference gives mea chance to interact with people I would see anyway, but inways that would not occur otherwise.” The majority oflurkers disagreed with this statement, whereas the majorityof posters agreed with it (p , 0.05).

There was no difference between the two groups in theirfrequency of participation in other school activities—two ofthe three student chapters of national associations, convoca-tions, and happy hours—except that posters were more likelythan lurkers to be members of one of the three national asso-ciations (p , 0.05) and to go to parties (p , 0.01).

There was a significant difference (p , 0.01) in fre-quency and direction of response to the question “Hasparticipation in the conference changed your knowledgeabout or relationship with any other students?” Fifty-seven

TABLE 8. Comparison of posters and lurkers: Reasons for use of the conference.

Reasons for use rated important by half or more of respondents

Posters Lurkers Difference between posters and lurkers significant?

Feeling in touch with theschool and what’s going on

91.3% 83.6% Yesx2(3,n5130)512.88,p,0.01

Notification of dates and events 79.7% 78.0% Nox2(3,n5130)52.45,p50.48

Chance to discuss professionalideas, concerns, information

73.9% 53.3% Yesx2(3,n5129)515.46,p,0.01

Intellectualstimulation—exchange ofideas, philosophies,knowledge

68.1% 65.6% Nox2(3,n5130)57.04,p50.07

Social exchange—chance totalk informally about avariety of things

62.3% 49.2% Yesx2(3,n5130)58.98,p,0.05

Reasons for use rated important by less than half of respondents

Posters Lurkers Difference between posters and lurkers significant?

Opportunity to get something changed within the school 21.7% 13.1% Nox2(3, n 5 130) 5 3.51,p 5 0.32

Study break 31.9% 16.4% Nox2(3, n 5 130) 5 6.75,p 5 0.08

BS-ing 24.6% 10.0% Nox2(3, n 5 129) 5 6.94,p 5 0.07

top;rowEntering items to ask for specific information about events,assignments, etc.

28.9% 34.5% Yesx2(3, n 5 130) 5 10.21,p , 0.02

n 5 130.


percent of the lurkers answered no to that question, while78% of the posters answered yes.

There was also a significant difference (p , 0.01) infrequency and direction in agreement with the statement “IfI didn’t use the conference frequently I would not knowwhat was going on at the school.” Seventy-four percent ofposters agreed or strongly agreed with that statement, whileonly 43% of the lurkers did so.

Summary and Discussion

Informal, exploratory, nonbinding conversation is essen-tial to intellectual work. Research in the sciences, humani-ties, arts, and professions demonstrates that for many peo-ple, the opportunity to try out ideas among peers is centralto the process of problem solving and developing newapproaches. In education, this trying-on of ideas often takesplace outside the classroom; indeed, Brown and Duguid(1993) assert that the most important learning students dohappens outside the instructor’s reach. In “Stolen Knowl-edge,” they explore the ways that students appropriate newunderstandings without the instructor’s knowledge or con-sent. In “Burglar’s Tools” (1998a), I have made the argu-ment that for learning in distributed environments to besuccessful, students will have to find new ways to carry outthis theft, and that it is critical to provide the tools for doingso.

This research explores the suitability of text-based elec-tronic media for the kinds of idea testing and appropriationthat have until now taken place mainly face to face inhallways or over coffee. If they are to serve as burglar’stools for graduate students, they must support the informal,spontaneous, often random conversations that allow stu-dents to try on ideas and attitudes without the commitmentor consequences inherent in teacher-directed spaces.

Professional socialization was selected as a form of in-tellectual work that has a strong personal component; be-yond learning facts and techniques, it affects the student’sself-definition. Questionnaires and content analysis wereused to determine how students perceived the conference asa communication environment, the conference’s ability toextend community beyond face-to-face relationships, andthe uses to which the students put the conference. Lurkersand posters were compared on several questionnaire items,to see whether the conference served similar purposes forthose who read the items but did not enter their ownthoughts.

This study does not establish what effect these casualconversations have in the educational and socialization pro-cesses. Rather, it examines 18 months of such conversationsmade visible by the medium through which they wereconducted. The fact that they were conducted at all, and atsome inconvenience because three-fourths of the studentshad to work in public computer labs on campus, indicatesthat at least for these students those conversations hadimportance. The students using the conference overwhelm-ingly indicated that their reasons for use were to feel in

touch and for intellectual and professional stimulation. Thissupports the contention that informal, exploratory conver-sations can be important to students engaged in intellectualgrowth.

Bucher and Stelling (1977) found that the existence ofsuch casual but highly significant conversations was depen-dent upon physical proximity; the results of this researchsuggest that the intellectual proximity created by an asyn-chronous medium may also serve. The results cannot beautomatically generalized to some of the more isolatingeducational delivery modes because the students studiedhere did participate in the life of a shared campus. However,the fact that the students knew relatively few of the otherconference users suggests that the potential is there.

Research in distance education, although it has not ad-dressed the extent to which students think a sense of com-munity is important, does indicate they find distance-inde-pendent delivery modes deficient in community, though notcripplingly so. Studies of computer-mediated communica-tion strengthen the evidence that electronic conferences canbe highly effective for exchange that has a strong socialcomponent. Research on computer-mediated communica-tion in higher education confirms that it is effective forindividual learning, reflective thinking, group learning, andthe development of a semester-long classroom community.This research extends that research to include informal,“stolen” dimensions of education described above.

The conference was voluntary; roughly half of theschool’s student body found it valuable to participate in.Frequency of use ranged from less than once a month toevery day; the mode of frequency of use was four times perweek; the mean, once a week. The participants were dividedfairly evenly between those who entered items and thosewho only read the conference.

Studies of informal communication and the growth ofknowledge have focused on face-to-face communication(see Weedman (1994) for a parallel study of listserv com-munication); it is possible that the risk-taking, idea-testingnature of such communication is dependent upon character-istics of face-to-face interaction. Conversations that takeplace as electronic text reflect characteristics of both oraland written discourse. This blend of properties allows care-ful discussion, based on multiple readings of others’ post-ings and editing of one’s own, and also allows quick,off-the-top-of-the-head entries capturing thoughts as theyoccur. Student perceptions of the conference reflected thesemixed characteristics—some preferred analogies to oral me-dia and some to print, some were highly aware of audienceas individual and others of the group, some found theinteractions to be informal and others formal. The predom-inant perceptions were of an informal conversational group,but those who experienced it as formal or individual formedsizable minorities (about 20% in each case). This lack ofconsensus in perception did not seem to constrain the pur-poses the conference served; the students were able to use itfor community, although shared understandings had notemerged and stabilized. The differences in the students’


descriptions of their experience of the conference may sim-ply reflect the fact that conventions of talking and thinkingabout computer-mediated communication had not yet sta-bilized in 1987 and 1989; it may also indicate that individ-ual differences in behaviors and expectations affect percep-tion (Cathcart & Gumpert, 1983).

The lack of consensus in description did not constrain thedevelopment of group norms. Nearly 60% of the studentsreported that they felt a distinctive conference “style” haddeveloped, although their descriptions of the style varied, andabout as many found the style unpleasant as found it appealing.Davis and Brewer suggest that electronic discourse may be anemergent register, a “special verbal style . . . adopted in andparticularized to specific social situations” (p. 157). Manyobservers have expressed concern about the repetitious, expan-sive, rambling, discursive nature of conversations via elec-tronic media (Burge, 1994; Day et al., 1996; Hiltz & Wellman,1997); Davis and Brewer argue that this very recursivenessmay itself foster community. The majority of conference userscharacterized the emergent style as casual and humorous, sug-gesting a positive answer to the question underlying this re-search of whether conferences are appropriate for students’informal, exploratory thinking out loud.

Students’ reasons for using the conference reflected afeeling that it created community; roughly 90% of thestudents used it for feeling in touch with the school. Theconference extended their social and intellectual relation-ships. Respondents indicated that the conference broughtthem into communication with new people and created newinteractions with known people. Half of the students saidthat they did not know face to face 75% or more of thepeople they knew from the conference. More than half saidthat the conference had changed their knowledge about orrelationship with other students. The conference was signif-icant enough to the students that more than half of partici-pants had talked about conference conversations with non-participants.

Analysis of the content of these conversations suggeststhat the conference supported and extended intellectualwork. It also suggests that the discussion of professionalissues is an important part of the socialization process.Approximately half of the conference content was devotedto the profession, with another quarter focused on the schoolpreparing them for the profession, and a quarter beinggenerally social in nature. As in any group, some peopletalked more than others, but participation was quite broad:three-fourths of the students who posted entries contributedto three, four, or all five of the broad topic areas.

The evidence is, then, that electronic conferences may bequite useful in providing community when students lackphysical proximity. The results discussed thus far, however,are generalized for all conference participants. Analysis ofthe responses of posters and lurkers in the conference sug-gest that lurkers may find the conference less useful thanposters. Despite the fact that lurkers like posters listed astheir major reason for use of the conference feeling in touchwith the school, the lurkers disagreed, while posters agreed,

with the statement that without it they would not know whatwas going on at the school. They were less likely to feel thatthe conference had changed their knowledge of or relation-ship with any other students. And although some lurkerslogged on as frequently as posters, most read the conferenceless frequently.

It is certainly true that students are not all equally en-gaged in the classroom, and not all experience any sort ofintellectual community on campus. No single communica-tion medium, and no combination of media, is likely toengage everyone. Nor is this desirable; many students maymake best use of the university experience by remainingunengaged, or by being engaged elsewhere. Thus, the dif-ferences between electronic posters and lurkers may be nodifferent from the patterns of engagement and disengage-ment in face-to-face environments.

Not everyone will wish to participate in a voluntaryconference. Hiltz’s (1993) research indicates that studentswho were negative or apprehensive about the technology atthe beginning of a virtual class did not change their attitudesin the course of one semester, and she found that studentswith higher Math SAT scores enjoyed the environmentmore than others. She also found that positive evaluations ofan on-line classroom correlated with increased educationallevel and age. This study did not compare nonparticipants inthe conference with participants, so no conclusions can bedrawn. Hiltz’s work may suggest some of the variables thatinfluence participation. Further research in this area isneeded.

The intellectual work in which students in higher educa-tion are engaged is important and complex. Studies ofintellectual work in other areas make a powerful argumentfor the importance of talking to thinking; research in avariety of disciplines and professions shows that the socialactivities of articulating, exploring, testing, and refiningideas against the ideas of others in a casual and collegialmanner is for many people a fundamental requirement forexpanding one’s personal knowledge base. As technologymakes it increasingly possible for students to have theconvenience and economic savings of working in physicaland temporal isolation, it may be of vital importance to havecommunication channels for creating community available.This is a responsibility of university administrators andfaculty. The conference studied here also reminds us thatstudents assume responsibility for their own educations, andthat they can be expected to take over any technologieswe—or they—introduce, and use them in pursuing theirgoals.

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Conversation and community: The potential of electronic conferences for creating intellectual proximity in distributed learning environments