Virtual communitites

Community traditionally has a connotation of a group of people who share a common set of different things. In your home community it may be a locale and as the text points out, physical resources. In a virtual community you still are sharing a set of something, be it goals ( to complete a program of study), beliefs, or interests. Shummar & Renniger indicates that virtual communities lack contextual boundaries that open ups imagination, identity deepening knowledge building. In my master's program we have had several online communities. Not all have led to a deeper sense of building knowledge. To be thrown into a virtual community with little orientation sometimes isolates the members. The knowledge obtained in this unit would have helped me personally understand the virtual community and possibly would have improved what I got out of it.