Stephen Downes

Way back in the early days of the web, there was this thing called a 'web tour'. It stemmed from the idea that while a website would typically be an ordered liust of pages, a 'tour' could offer readers an alternative route through the pages or a subset of the pages. Later, the idea if a 'web tour' migrated to synchronous online sessions, where a session leader might lead participants through a series of sites. Today we can think of a 'tour' as any presentation of a series of web sites, pages or resources. So, through the mechanism of a 'tour', we might conduct a 'virtual tour' of a city, by viewing graphics, videos or animations, or equally, a tour of some subject, like bagels of Scientology. In this post, Nancy White sets up the concept of a virtual tour of online communities, setting up the planning and conduct of the tour. See also the (much more substantial) follow-up post, vitural tours of online communities as learning journeys.