[Air-l] Online group dynamics

[gdtaylor]

Jo,

You might want to take a look at research that is being conducted with respect 
to group dynamics in online courses.

First off, you might want to check out the archives of the DEOS-L listserver. 
This listserver is administered by Penn State University and creates a forum 
for those who are interested in distance education to share ideas and 
information with others. You can locate the archives by doing an Internet 
search on the phrase "DEOS-L." This is a very active listserver and there has 
been any number of discussions in the past year or so with respect to group 
dynamics within the context of collaborative learning environments.

The ERIC database is also great resource for locating literature on online 
group dynamics. The trick to locating literature in this database is to 
knowing the terminology to use when conducting searches. Online learning 
resources can be located by doing searches on online learning, e-learning, 
web-based learning, computer-mediated learning, distance learning, and 
independent learning. Don't quote me on this as these phrases are being typed 
from memory as opposed to a list. :-)

The Internet is also an excellent resource. You can locate literature by doing 
a search of the Internet using similar phrasing to that which you would use on 
the ERIC database. There are any number of journals that are being made 
available electronically with articles that might be of interest to you. Be 
sure to check out the Sloan Foundation Asynchronous Learning Network journal, 
which is accessible through the Internet. You might also want to take a look 
at the Journal of the Association for History and Computing which is also 
available on the Internet.

Hope this information is useful to you. If you would like to chat more about 
this area of research, send me an email message.

Gail Taylor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Grad student / Human Resource Education
gdtaylor at uiuc.edu