Stephen Downes

This essay discussing online learning communities leaves me dissatisfied, but it has agood list of references. The core of the paper is the proposal of a theoretical framework for studying online communities. The first step in an analysis of a problem space, such frameworks amount to a division of the topic into smaller domains of enquiry. This could be a preliminary to a larger work, but the authors don't go there. I think that what leaves me most dissatisfied, though, is the one-dimensional nature of the discussion. The work cites academic publications exclusively, which makes it a couple of years out of date and excludes important authors such as Turkle, Figallo, Hegel and Armstrong, and Kim.