Thousands of Positive Reviews: Distributed Mentoring in Online Fan Communities
Abstract
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. In order to understand and analyze in more detail how learning might be occurring, we conducted an in-depth nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fanfiction communities, including participant observation and fanfiction author interviews. Our observations led to the development of a theory we term distributed mentoring, which we present in detail in this paper. Distributed mentoring exemplifies one instance of how networked technology affords new extensions of behaviors that were previously bounded by time and space. Distributed mentoring holds potential for application beyond the spontaneous mentoring observed in this investigation and may help students receive diverse, thoughtful feedback in formal learning environments as well.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1510.01425,
title = {Thousands of Positive Reviews: Distributed Mentoring in Online Fan Communities},
author = {Julie Ann Campbell and Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis and Sarah Evans and Abigail Evans and David P. Randall},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.01425},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
14 pages, to be published in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2016