Advantage Of Online Communities For College Students example essay topic

I. Introduction York university in Canada once created a web site called York University Student Center Online. This web site concern about the student activities on campus and outside. First lunched in 2001, the aim of York's website is entertainment and media publication. It has a good reputation among other Canadian universities' websites. The web site archives many of the student activities since its launch till today. Some of the website activities are holding online orientations for new students, weekly newsletter about student clubs and organizations, collecting donations, web register for events and concerts, online discussion with professors.

The article York University Student Center Online says that lots of York's students has got active in the university from behind their computers screens only. These students where in some day in the past the typical character of the passive students. The articles also claims that many crimes came about from behind the website. Students misused the other students properties and tried to steal their work and ideas that they have published on the website (york. ca). These disadvantages appears to the surface always with the existence of a new web technology.

York's website is an example of what so called an online community for college students. This new form of a web site can also be applied at AUS. Although an online community for AUS students may have some disadvantages, it is beneficial for four main reasons. II.

Online communities background Community is an odd and rich term in the world of Internet public life. Like many key conception of the social sciences, it has specific and rigid meaning for scholars, and broader connotation when it is used in the information technology language. According to Christian Crumlish, an online community or virtual community "is a group whose members are connected by means of information technologies, typically the Internet" (Crumlish, p. 142). By this definition of the online community, the Internet is the term behind the internationally connected computers that link the people all around the world into online discussions by using the great CMC (Computer-Mediated Communications) technology. This general definition fulfills all the possible activities that can be done in an online community. Howard Rheingold in his book The Virtual Community claims that the important thing to keep in mind is that the worldwide interconnected telecommunication network that we use to make telephone calls in shariah and Dubai can also be used to connect computers together at a distance, and you don't have to be an engineer to do it (. com).

That gives us a hint on how online communities on the Internet started and how it got all this reputation. There is a wide range of applications that online communities are being used for. People in weekends log in to the internet to chat, surf, or send e-cards to their friends. Other people join or build online communities on the internet for similar motivations, to be in touch with friends. Whether the purpose of building an online community is personal or public, these online communities are used to meet people for entertainment, business, planning and organizing, or to discuss different issues. E-learning is a type of online communities that targets the people who can not afford studying abroad.

Also with E-learning, academic institution like universities can have online courses similar to those the offline ones. Sue Boetcher talks about other types of online communities that are specialized for business. She claims that businessmen use the internet to build their working team, work on projects with their colleges, and solve the problems they might face with the help of their partners (. com). Another type of online communities is introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book The Virtual Community which is the civil society.

Rheingold says that the civil society is a "web of informal relationships that exist independently of government institutions or business organizations, [which] is the social adhesive necessary to hold divergent communities of interest together into democratic societies" (. com). College online communities is a very fresh entry to the online community world. The idea of that media can be used to build a community is quit old, hence the online communities that are being used by college students have started with the existence of the Internet. Lassen Grave says that the college online communities has first appeared in the United States in mid 90's, in the middle of the necessitate for network mediated groups that help the students to contact with other students in the same university. These college online communities has played same the role of the living room in a house. The student rest and relax in them away from the books pressures (Graves, p. 5).

Jenny Preece talks in her book Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability about the sociability on the internet and how online communities for college students can in the future achieve one of the goals Preece proposed. Universal access or global access is a prospective criteria of any online community that is under development. Statistics says that the amount of people who uses the internet double every 52 days. This huge growth of the users of the Internet raise a big question mark to hour heads, can all these people access the internet. The digital technology is impacting cultural mixtures, environmental concerns, and standard of living around the world. To grantee a universal access to online communities, the electronic dividers must be eliminated first.

Preece think that doing so is an ultimate goal for the future. Researches in the fields of language and technology will be necessary to inform national and international agencies so that they can deploy resources appropriately (Preece, p. 441).. Disadvantages and arguments against online communities for college students The topic of using online communities for college students has been attacked by many critics who claim that building an online community for college students has more disadvantages over its advantages. A disadvantage is that the students themselves may become addicted by the time they use these online communities. When evaluating York's online community, the article York University Student Center Online says that about 32 percent of the students used to set behind the screens chatting more than four hours per day (york. ca).

Sue Boetcher argues that the students on the Internet who are chatting with other students are being socially isolated in early ages of their practical life. Boetcher also claims that there are "tens of thousands of college students spending their time and government-sponsored resources to chase virtual dragons" (. com). Rheingold argues that some users on the online communities have hidden agendas (. com). These users are usually appear as exactly as the inverse to what they are really do. They have ill-conceived motivations to participate in such communities, therefore, they take the advantage of flexible identity that the Internet furnish them and this always the start of a new crime.

Abusing other people systems or cracking encrypted messages posses a problem: will students misuse an online community for their college, especially in an environment where there are no properties rights are saved. Some critics may claim that holding an online community for students is unfair with the presence of ignoring the professors and the staff members. Instructors are used to step down from their stages, and to play the role of coaches and co-participants who can display ignorance as well as knowledge. Social relationships may be multivalent, as when students are supposed to collaborate, but are also graded individually, and thus competitively. Lessen Graves discusses argues on the approaches of developing learning communities which rely on carefully planned stages of activity for encouraging the participation of professors in college online communities. Graves claims that college online community can not ignore the professors, where at the same time students can not ignore that they are monitored in their discussions inside such communities (Graves, p. 174).

Privacy might turn out to be the most important term all over the Internet, as an aid to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each new web tool become to the surface. Online communities are built up on the Internet, the Internet is happening to all people all around the world with different goals and personalities. Howard Rheingold argues that the Internet is increasingly becoming a multicultural forum, the only multicultural forum of any scope. Therefore, to focus on developments in the privacy is wise because that is where the web began and where many technical and social innovations emerged such as the online communities. Ethical issues crisis is in how to protect the users' privacy. For example, how to notify users about the encystation's of the traffic.

It also emphasize on how the users' data and participations are shown to other users and how to ensure privacy and build a relationship of trust. Rheingold argues that lacking the privacy restrictions on online communities may end up to a war. This war is provoked from the high concentration of people with the same desires (. com). IV. Advantages of online communities for college students Beside all the above disadvantages of online communities, there are four main advantages students can get behind a well-oriented online community in a university like AUS. The first main advantage is communications.

Online communities are very efficient when they are used as a mean of communication. A college online community can act as the media that promote for the student activities and events held by the students. In such an online community students can tell, advertise, write, recognize, publish content to inform other students about a the activity that are happening or will happen on campus. This also works the other way around, the same students who submitted their work to the web can review, search, and surf hundreds and hundreds of content submitted by other AUS students. On online communities the communication goes in the text-based style. The benefit of text-based communication is that written communication are more likely to be reflective than the spoken interaction.

Berge Boole r says that "The very act of assembling one's thoughts and articulating them in writing for a conference audience appears to involve deeper cognitive processing". (Berge, p. 10). On the other hand, college online communities when they play the role as communication media they serve the student in two ways. The first way is that they keep the student in touch with his / her partners and professors outside the class room. Such an online community will substantially help the students who work on projects to discuss with their partners about their work.

They can even discuss with the professors about the class material. These students can get answers to simple questions directly from their professors in a more efficient way than consulting in the regular office hours. The second way is that these college online communities work 3. In the summer holiday students tend to go back to their homes, but an online community would definitely work to get the student know about their friends news. Another advantage of Online communities for college students is that they create a good environment for, debating decision making, and problem solving. Debating usually take place in an electronic message boards or chat rooms.

Freshmen students usually debate about the problems they face in campus. While doing so, other students who have better experience with such problems may help them to go over theses problems. The text-base style make these procedure goes smoothly. In addition, college online community helps the students to make decision. Our examination of the advantages on college online community shows that a it has value as an online resource for students. It is easier to provide communication infrastructure for creating groups of students talking and talking decisions than it is to build a conference room to perform the same groups.

Thus, the college online community may benefit from the addition of bounded groups that involve greater ability to take decision, stimulate trust, and are complemented by offline activities, thereby enabling the online community to support a wider variety of works and activities. Entertainment is the main objective of most college online communities. Students in college always face a trade off between studying and joining the students unions. Online communities can give the students a decent amount of amuse away from the tensions of studying. In addition, the same students can have their activities and enjoyable experience with the help of rich features that online communities have like message boards, chat rooms, picture galleries, e-journals, online gaming... etc. Preece says that when dealing with online communities we deal with the keyboard and the monitor screen, we don't interact with real people.

Here goes the role of imagination. We human feel the sense of people from interacting with their work on the Internet, and with imagination come the pleasure (Preece, p. 254). While many student portray online communities as caring arrangements in which to share experiences and thoughts and learn new ideas and practices, participation in such communities can involve risk and thus require trust between the students. Students who share good information danger earning a lower grade than if they did not share when they are graded in a competitive environment. Students who ask for help may be seen as incapable (although that may also be a mark of pride in some schools for some topics).

In college online communities, professors who share experiences of bothered teaching, and even of collapse, risk being viewed as incompetent by their peers. Those who propose a novel idea risk the opportunity of being seen as strange. We say that students and professors are more willing to take risks in college online communities that develop a high level of trust. There are several ways to characterize trust, and one of these is as a measure of risk. For example, Mayer define trust as "the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party" (Mayer, p. 32). Trust can develop over time, as people respond in sharing information, demonstrate respect for one another, are careful in maintaining certain information as confidential, and so on.

Each of these steps involves a certain measure of risk, and when that risk is rewarded, trust is more likely to develop. V. AUS An online community for AUS student has ambitious goals in encouraging the students to launch their creative energies and also supporting them in their academic life at AUS. To fulfill these goals, the online community must be capable of supporting a high level of integration between the offline side which is the student activities on campus and the online side which is the AUS online community. The impact of a prospective online community for AUS students is where it is a social divider between the two different sides. What's going on with online community is not fundamentally different from what is going on with community in the physical world.

Hence the most weakness of online community is in the relation between the two sides of equation, online or offline. When looking deeply at the present of the situation of the online communities for college students and comparing with the past, we can notice that these societies around the world no matter where it is have made a quantum leap in creating a virtual environment for the student to practice their talents.