Online Communities :: essays research papers

I. IntroductionYork 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 Yorks website is entertainment and media publication. It has a good write up 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 spick-and-span 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 Yorks 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 mis characterd the other students properties and tried to withdraw their work and ideas that they have published on the website (yorku.ca). These disadvantages appears to the surface always with the existence of a new web technology. Yorks 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-spot main reasons.II. Online communities backgroundCommunity 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 def inition 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 make 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 sharjah and Dubai can also be used to connect computers together at a distance, and you dont have to be an engineer to do it (rheingold.