Category: into the woods

On Friday, I visited the archives on my campus. We have an interesting archive because we have both a special collection of books and plenty of books on the history of Wichita Falls.

While I had visited the special collection before – and was quite impressed with first editions of classics – I had never visited the archives on Wichita Falls, so it was cool to see how many books existed on our history. There were at least three or four different rooms that included books or boxes of things from one wall to the next.

The archivist who helped me out gave me a few books to look at. I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for at all, but there was an interesting story in one of the books.

It talked about a runaway elephant from the Ringling Brothers Circus that came to town in 1900 and ended up trampling someone in town. Because of this, the townspeople were going to kill it but they didn’t have any weapons that would kill such big game.

The funniest part of the story turned out to be the part that’s fake.

Rumor said a garbage man needed a roof for his house, so he skinned the elephant and made a roof out of the skin. But a heavy rain and warm sunshine shrunk the skin.

Just like that story, I had no clue what I would find in the archives, and I similarly didn’t know much of the history of Wichita Falls. It was interesting to spend an afternoon in the archives, learning more about my college and its town.

-Lane

Our community for this course is unique in that it is decentralized from any one campus. We are able to maintain order through digital connection, so far mostly through Zoom calls, email, hypothes.is, and Slack. We meet on Mondays and Wednesdays for an hour and fifteen minutes and discuss progress on readings and our projects. This is the structure or framework within which it is possible to have a community.

In terms of feeling a sense of “community” within the group, group dynamics are important to consider. I still feel like I don’t really know the students from other campuses. I know their names but have not connected with them on a personal level. This would be true for “in-person” classmates in a large lecture class. As an English major, though, I’m used to discussion-based classes in which I get a strong sense of the personalities of classmates.

On the other hand, Maureen and I are close friends. We were roommates last semester. I feel a strong connection with her, and part of my motivation for the class comes from wanting to build a strong project with her. This is maybe what brings the strongest sense of community to the course for me.

I’m glad Dr. Schleef is physically present at UMW. Otherwise I think it would be easy to feel detached from the course. There’s a sense of accountability from having a UMW professor teaching the course, a knowledge that my performance and input will be remembered past the end of the semester. These are my reflections on our community so far.

I was at first unsure of the question, but now that I know it’s about the online community in our COPLAC class, I have to say that for me, personally, I think that, although we don’t meet personally and in a real classroom, the class still functions just as a regular class would. I like that we can annotate on the online articles and see each others thoughts about the subject and the readings.

Because the class started a few weeks ago, I think that I haven’t been able to connect our community to the community that Rheingold spoke of. Perhaps in a few weeks, I will feel that there are more similarities and I will be able to see any problems that are close to the same in The Virtual Community.

Until then, I would say that our community is successful in that we are all working towards the same goal.

However, I will say that I hadn’t ever really connected with the other classmates until Monday, when we had a group breakout session where we got to really talk to each other. I got to talk with Dana and Savannah and that was the first time that I thought, “Hey, they’re students just like me.”

After that, I think the online community within the class has become more personal to me. Suddenly, the other students in the class are people that I can interact with and talk to, and that has made the online community more of a community.

It’s interesting when you see people for two days of every week. It’s even more interesting when you actually start talking to those people, when you actually bond over the project at hand, over the readings and discussion.

I think the online community is slowly building – but I also think the community in COPLAC is getting closer each week. I’m looking forward to talking more with the students involved and building on the relationship that has been created.

-Lane