Copyright ©Tatar 2006
The challenges of maintaining attentional engagement and emotional regulation are greater in distance work than in face-to-face, but easier to ignore because the disattention of participants is either invisible or sometimes the cause for pride---as when people claim to be able to multi-task without realizing how each particular task is suffering. A socio-technical system that can actually manage some of these issues should be understood and lauded.
Tapped In, an online community for Teacher Professional Development is a really interesting system in part because the nearly synchronous, low stakes group chats (After School Online sessions) help teachers maintain connection with one another while they learn. To discover this, my colleagues, Jim Grey and Judy Fusco, and I drew first on sociocultural theory, but then, to move into more depth, had to forge a new way of looking at online community. In our "core sample" technique, we combine available in-depth data with heavily documented circumstances of collection. This is analogous to getting geological core samples from strategically chosen places and examining the layers.
In particular, we were interested in casting light on the details of interaction in enough depth to distinguish between what appear to be latent socio-motivational variables in online systems. Lots of people claim to have community, lots of people claim to have learning. Some even claim to have a learning community. Yet people, invisibly, flee these communities in droves. When community works, however, the success is also largely invisible from a macroscopic perspective. Learning is, after all, primarily a private experience. Furthermore, the success looks natural, not the result of years of finely honed craftsmanship and much thought. When distance communication/education works, it works in the details of the private experiences of individuals.
I have a few papers on this topic, which can be found on my Publications page.