The Internet is perhaps the fastest growing, most frequently traversed, and least understood macro sociocultural context of education. Currently there is a great deal of enthusiasm for the use of the Internet in creating learning communities. How are we to understand these communities, participation within them, and their potentials for learning? This presentation takes as its starting point Lave and Wenger's (1991) <

Results articulation of a "community of practice," or situated learning theory which permits us to move beyond the idea of community as a fixed sociological and geographical construct and toward conceiving community as a set of relations. We seek to examine the connections between communities of practice and technology by discussing the core issues behind the notion of community and learning in online environments. While we still use the term "community," we realize that it may not be appropriate for the kind of interactions and relationships that exist online, but that it may have its uses in a kind of different sense - one that emphasizes the various degrees of community membership and the blurry lines that make up the community boundaries.

An important extension of situated learning theory for Internet-based communities is to consider the spaces in which participants interact. If we are to understand communities as a "set of relations among persons, activity, and world" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 98) than both the spaces of this "world" and the spaces of the relations themselves beg consideration. The Internet is sometimes imagined euphorically as a dimension beyond space, a "middle landscape," "frontier" or "third space" (Oldenburg, 1991; Rheingold 1993; Healy, 1997) that moves well beyond the dimensions of lived, material space. Furthermore, others consider Internet communities as a possible return to more nostalgic ideals of community that are grounded in geographical and face-to face relations. (Doheny-Farina, 1996; Schuler 1996). Yet it is productive for the study of Internet community and learning possibilities to consider the particular kinds of social-material spaces that the Internet constructs, including the increasingly fuzzy conceptions of public and private space. Rather than polarizing these constructions with respect to traditional classroom learning spaces or imagining them as entirely new environments, analyzing these spaces sociohistorically permits us to better consider how they might both reproduce traditional community/learning spaces and at the same time produce "new" spaces.

Our goals in this paper are twofold. First, we theorize online learning through situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), both using and questioning this framework as means for understanding online community practice. To what degree might the community of practice approach be useful for online learning communities? Secondly, we more directly challenge and extend community of practice theory through postmodern theories of space. Through this critique and theory-building we contribute to an understanding of learning and community that is more "situated" within the context(s) of the Internet.

Community of Practice and the Internet

The work of Lave and Wenger provides a unique way to understand communities and their relationship to learning, mapping nicely onto the way in which the physical and social potentials of electronic networks are considered. Lave and Wenger reason from the perspective and standpoint of apprenticeship communities where community members have to learn the skills and language of the particular occupation, such as sailors, butchers or midwives. The research they discuss highlights the way that new apprentices come to be old-timers in the community and the ways that identity is shaped and formed as a process of learning the language and culture of the community. This work, in what has often been referred to as "situated learning," involves a community of practice where learning is intimately connected to desires, feelings, beliefs, identities, memberships and social interactions. Situated learning implies an active engagement with the world where identities and community memberships are constantly shifting and changing, each maintaining and balancing the other. Thus, situatedness in a community is much more that just a description of where (abstracted) learning takes place; situatedness is a description of how learning takes place--learning is the expected outcome of being situated in a particular context or location.

The idea of situated learning is a critique of traditional notions of learning as cognitive activity, deliberately structured and linked to teaching activity, and recasts learning as social practice that must be understood through the ever-present relationships between participants, activity, and environment. An implied critique of formal schooling in this work is that peripheral and informal environments for learning may be more productive. Traditional forms of learning as found in most schools where students sit in rows for an exact amount of time each day listening to a lecture or working on worksheets fail to recognize the unique and multi-faceted opportunities for learning that exist in situations where taking a test or completing homework is not the main agenda. That is, if learning is viewed as becoming a community member and learning the talk of the community, it should be understood not as a special case of teaching, but as a relation to whatever learning context, community, and activity is present for the learner.

Beyond Metaphor: Community as Spatialized Practice and the Internet

The model of participation in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) is itself a highly spatialized model, with assumptions about the movement of participants from "peripheral" to more "full" participation. How are such spatialized distinctions constructed and recognized within online communities, where the practices, identities, and relations among participants cannot be entirely mapped onto the workshops of craft apprenticeship studied within anthropological work? Further, rather than conceiving of communities of practice as singular or monocontextual, how does a polycontextual (Engestrom, Engestrom, & Karkkainen, 1995) view of community participation, where rapid movements between on and offline environments and communities, enable or constrain participation and learning? How is this form of learning, which reconfigures spatialized and temporal participation, distinct from craft apprenticeship, and what types of community and individual identities might we expect it to produce?

Other issues and questions become foregrounded for online environments through postmodern theories of space (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1989) and are particularly apt for the analysis of Internet learning communities. First, if we articulate learning as the "historical production, transformation, and change of persons" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 51), we claim at the same time that the social relations of production are both "space-forming" and "space-contingent" (Soja, 1989, p. 81). What spaces are formed through the social-material dialectic of community practice on the Internet? How do these spaces open or constrain participation?

Spatialization and Boundaries: Communities of Difference on the Internet?

To speak of spatialized practice is also to speak of boundaries, more or less durable, among individuals and communities. An important limitation to the community of practice model is that while it emphasizes shared objectives, common problems, increasing participation, and collective knowledge construction, in practice researchers and theorists are much less clear about difference among members, goals, practices, and intersecting social groups. Other scholarship articulates the idea of communities of difference, where difference is imagined as a resource for a particular kind of community (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1994; Fine, Weis, & Powell, 1997; Rhoads, 1997; Young, 1997). However, there are few illustrations of such communities, including how difference is both a tool and obstacle within them, and how they develop through the experience of difference as a type of common practice. There are fewer still such models in on-line communities of learning, where difference is often expressed as either a threat to community or as an information resource (e.g., between students and distant experts). An important goal of this presentation is to examine difference and its relation to online community boundaries and practices.

Significance for Theory-Building and Research

One of the persistent problems in discussions of learning-community relations is that meanings of "community" are multi-voiced, and often "trade" on distant meanings. Thus, the idea of community of practice, within educational research and elsewhere, often begins to trade on the meanings of democratic communities, communitarianism, communities of difference, or other formulations of community. An important contribution of this paper is to specify a particular meaning of community (community of practice) and to analyze its relation to the Internet in terms of spatial metaphors. Through this move we hope to model a carefully articulated spatial theory of community-learning-Internet relations that emphasizes difference as a core concept. Further, the expansion and critique of the community of practice model through postmodern theory is a timely and significant move toward understanding not only how Internet communities are currently structured for participation and learning, but how they might be envisioned and re-configured as the Internet develops. In particular, a potential and problematic central to our analysis is the vision of the Internet as not merely "connecting" people of difference, but bringing them together into new forms of community through reconfigured social-material contexts without an overt emphasis on boundaries or exclusion.

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