Wes Shumar

Hybrid Worlds: Social Cyberspace, Imagination and Identity

Biography
Wesley Shumar is a cultural anthropologist at Drexel University whose research focuses on higher education, virtual community, ethnographic evaluation in education, the semiotics of mass culture, and the self in relation to contemporary personal and political issues of identity and globalization. He has worked as an ethnographer at the Math Forum, a virtual math education community and resource center, for the last five years. Currently he is the Principal Investigator for the Online Mentoring Project, an NSF funded project. The project is using the Math Forum’s Problem of the Week (PoW) to create an online mentoring environment for pre-service teachers. Dr. Shumar is author of College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education, Falmer Press, 1997 and co-editor of Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace, published by Cambridge University Press.

Position Paper
My work has been primarily involved with the study of online educational communities and particularly most of my work has been with The Math Forum, an NSF funded digital library and one of the premier online communities for math education. My research at The Math Forum has focused on teacher communities and the ways teachers use The Math Forum to extend their face-to-face networks creating hybrid groups that overlap between physical space and virtual space. In this work I have suggested that teachers’ imagination of community is transformed through their work online and with it their potential for learning (through informal means of professional development) and their sense of professional identity and efficacy (Shumar & Renninger 2002). Through this work Ann Renninger and I have developed a methodology for studying online educational communities that involves triangulation across several types of data, i.e., participant observation, in-depth interviews, online questionnaires, and logfile analysis.

From the work with The Math Forum I have suggested that digital libraries like The Math Forum are a new form of resource that we have begun to call interactive digital libraries. These interactive digital libraries involve social activity and uses that go way beyond the normal, use, re-use, search and browse functions assumed by many in the digital library world. The Math Forum has been a pioneer in leveraging these new activities by doing things like building collections out of traces of interaction between users, encouraging individuals to become lead participants in the community, developing hybrid activities that involve face-to-face interactions combined with virtual interactions, creating workshops and special events to take lead teachers and developers and help build out collections, etc. Recently I have begun to work with other digital libraries and online communities to expand the base of this research done at The Math Forum.

My work secondarily has moved to designing systems for learning. I am the PI of the Online Mentoring Project, an NSF funded project that has been developing curriculum for pre-service teachers to have a “pre-field” experience. Teachers learn to mentor students in the online mentoring environment and then they mentor live some of The Math Forum’s Problem of the Week students (an online challenge problem service where kids submit answers to math problems and then get a mentored reply online). This online mentoring environment is designed to be used in a face-to-face math education class. I am also co-pi on the Virtual Math Teams project a project that is studying and designing online collaborative problem solving environments for math. Finally I have been working with some of my students to develop project to employ social annotation tools such as the AURA project at Microsoft Research.

Back to Social Computing Symposium 2005