In this blog post, I would like to reflect on the impact of online communities on my digital identity and cultivation of my digital presence.
Henri and Pudelko (2003) distinguish four different types of virtual communities: “communities of interest, goal‐oriented communities of interest, learners’ community, and community of practice” (as quoted in Veletsianos, 2016). Furthermore, as Veletsianos (2016) asserts, the networks are multi-faceted entities, comprised of individual networks, all based on individual relationships (p. 244). As such they are uneven, uncertain, diverse, borderless, and clustered (Dron & Andreson, 2014).
I find myself on the crossroad between all these different online communities, which integrate my personal and professional interests, my work-related communities, which include both my colleagues as well as students and my own educational communities. All of these communities integrate people from my past and present and are very dynamic and diverse in terms of their interaction, content, and contributions.
Participation in digital communities, as Veletsianos (2016) calls them, is determined by this new participatory culture, which “shifts the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement” (Jenkins, 2009, p. xiii). Contribution to these communities is defined by the participation and invites feedback, as well as contribution, thus producing “networked learners”, who “through participation in networks that reify their interactions, are almost always “prosumers”—people who both consume and produce network content” (Bruns, 2008, as cited in Dron & Andreson, 2014, p. 144). Therefore content creation and contribution to the networks are “pivotal in providing tools for knowledge construction and tools for sharing and expanding on that knowledge” (p. 144).
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