Reflection Notes

Workshop 1:

Types of Virtual Communities, Their Specifics and Evolution.

Outcomes

 

Issues Discuss

Issues that were brought up by the presentation group, VCE (Virtual Community Enterprise) are stated below:-

• Definition of Virtual Communities

• Timeline of the Evolution

• Types of Virtual Communities

• Their Specifics and Examples

• Future Trends of Virtual Communities

 

What was Learnt

The first presenter of the presentation, Daniel Lim, kicked off with a pretty interesting definition of the Virtual Communities, which goes "Community is like pornography, I don't know how to define it, but I sure know when I see it." This definition is was a blast, it was a pretty good start for VCE as it spiced up the whole online presentation experience for us and people started loosen up and interacting with each other. Later on, we came up with our own definition of virtual communities, which is "a group of people who shares a common interest online."

 

Next, we went to the Evolution Timeline of Virtual Communities, which was presented by Jennifer Tran. Daniel told us the that first virtual community is made up of the researchers of ARPANet due to its creation. And, the first mailing list was probably "SF-Lovers", which stands for "Science Fiction Lovers". Thus, Email evolved from it, which is now part of our everyday life. And then, List Servers came out, which is a type of mailing list that we subscribe to. In 1978. the first version of MUD (Multi User Dungeons) was born, which is now popularly known as Multi User Dimensions. MUD is a class of virtual reality experience accessible via the internet, usually for virtual reality games, such as Counter Strike. Finally, the Internet was born date the year pretty compatible with everyone's birth year - 1983. It was primary used as a communication network in the Cold War Project. In 1985, WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and Habitat was created, along came the IRC (Internet Relay Chat), MOO (MUD Object Oriented), Virtual Reality & VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language), Groupware and the 3D Virtual Worlds in the later stages. IRC created quite an argument among the students comparing IRC with the current popular ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger, as some of the students thinks that IRC pioneer period has passed, while others do not really agree with it.

 

Types of Virtual Communities was discussed next, which was grouped into 4 types - communities of transaction, communities of interest, communities of fantasy and communities of relationships. Daniel did told us that there were several ways of classifying communities, it is just dependable on the perception of the authors. This explains the reason why there were so many kinds of group that I found when I was doing preparation notes for Workshop 1. VCE did discuss with us about the topic about people developing true friendship through the internet, and people will be amazed on the figure on how many people getting married from it.

 

VCE listed a few Virtual Communities Technologies that exist nowadays, they were mailing list, real time chat, bulletin board / discussion forum, audio and video conferencing. And, the future trends of the virtual communities are developing towards mobile virtual communities, GPRS (General Packet Radio Services)),  Bluetooth, and Collaborative Virtual Workspaces.

 

The interesting discovery in this workshop presentation is that mobile communication is also a sort of virtual communities that we form unnoticeably. This means that nearly all of us are carrying a form of virtual communities communication gadget in our pockets everyday. Isn't that interesting???

 

Evaluation

 

I personally feel that VCE had did quite a good job at the presentation for being the first presentation group. Neither had I done an online presentation before, I believe that everyone doesn't really have a clear idea of what is it. After today, it gave me an impression of an online lecture feel that we had the other day. Participation and interactions from students are really important for the online presentation to be lively. Thanks to the outrageous definition of the virtual communities that was quoted by VCE, everyone was loosen up by then. You can tell that the whole class are very focus on the presentation as people was very quiet at a minute, and giggling the next. However, sometimes, students did get a bit too loosen up by driving off the track. But, VCE did a great job in drifting the students back to their topics, but there is still room for improvement.

 

The preparations and moderations of VCE were really good. I believe they done quite a thorough research before the presentation and brainstormed on the possible questions that students would brought up. They were also pretty keen in helping students that couldn't follow the presentations.

 

Overall, VCE had done a good job. However, there was one unforeseen circumstances that happened which is one of the slides that shown a graph on the purposes of virtual communities were too small to be read. Being the first presentation group, I do think this is a forgivable state as no one knows that the slide will turn up to be that small after uploading in the virtual classroom.

 

Lastly, I want to say - Bravo to VCE!!!

 

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