Whether computers can be of benefit to the learning process has been a topic of discussion in the realm of educational technology research since the 1950s (Weigel, 2002). Computer technology has promised to revolutionize both teaching and learning in higher education (Slack & Wise, 2005). With the popularization of the Internet in the early 1990s, programs dedicated to the democratization of information technology have assisted the general public to become members of electronic communities (Albernaz, 2002). Online communications were quickly adopted in education – course management systems have long been using bulletin boards and online forums to facilitate various types of interactions, including learner-learner, learner-teacher, teacher-teacher, teacher-content, and learner-content (Shaw & Venkatesh, 2005).
However, in the first decade of the 21st century, with the advent of Web 2.0, the shape of online electronic communities began to change drastically. Online social interactions have seen an exponential growth since the increased adoption of technologies such as wikis and blogs. In this new age of the Web, users are given the power to control what content is displayed on their personal websites, and visitors to these websites are able to provide commentary using media as varied as text, audio and video.
Since 2004, commercial social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have gained popularity across a variety of users, regardless of gender, culture, geographical regions and age. Facebook alone boasts more than 750 million active users worldwide (as of July 2011), and is ranked as the second most-visited site on the Internet after Google3. It is, therefore, rather disheartening to observe how theories of online learning have failed to take into account the paradigm shift we are seeing in the nature of social interactions through the Internet. Furthermore, existing theories have largely failed to account for the role online communities play in building and sustaining specialised forms of what Lave and Wenger (1991) have dubbed “communities of practice”—namely, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, or a profession.
Theoretical discussions of how the design of online interactions impact learning are scant, atbest (McGee, Carmean & Jafari, 2005; Venkatesh, Shaikh & Zuberi, 2010). Part of the problem, we contend, lies in the fact that the pedagogical bases for orchestrating online interactions are based on learning theories and instructional design models derived from face-to-face instruction. This over-reliance on classic theories of learning has led directly to a paucity of research investigating how online learning actually happens “in the wild” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This holds true both within the educational realm and externally, in the wider Web 2.0 community.
In this chapter, we investigate learning in online forums which are focused on a particularinterest, namely, heavy metal music. Even within this highly focused online community of metal fans, the data available for analysis is vast—individual forum members have often posted up to 20,000 times in as little as five years. We therefore decided to focus our analysis on a particular macro-level aspect of the forum: knowledge production processes. In order to understand these processes, we brought to bear a set of ideas about production that were originally espoused by John Dewey (1915). Dewey, in essence, thought that making production processes open and transparent was critical to helping citizens become more effective learners and agents. Applying these ideas to the forums, we theorized that relatively open knowledge production processes would help the heavy metal forum users become more savvy and engaged fans. As we will explain, this hypothesis held true to some extent. Yet our findings also indicated that the positive effects of open, transparent production processes can be mitigated by technocratic interactions between experts and novices.
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