Panic setting in…

This week I believe has been the toughest so far. We seem to have lost a group member along the way (?) and with the deadline looming panic is slowly but surely setting in. Having been granted a look at last year’s group projects I have to admit didn’t reduce the panic. Most of their finished websites, if not all of them, were in my opinion very well designed. Considering that we have only swiftly worried about the design of our wiki page this didn’t help. It was good however to get an idea of what is expected of us in terms of written style, as well as quantity and quality of information. Whether we will meet these expectations is another question.

On a more positive note, it was great to be given time to work on our group project in class on Monday. This allowed us to determine a third virtual community as a case study for our group project, namely Freecycle. It was also helpful to be able to consult Nigel in order to eliminate any remaining unclarities with regard to the group project.

I’ve also finally decided to stop reading and start writing. I found that, while interesting and undoubtedly relevant, it is difficult to incorporate all the information I have collected on virtual communities into our project. There just seems to be so much to say about virtual communities that I’m somewhat afraid we won’t be able to do the project justice. For one, there is still plenty of material available on the subject matter that I haven’t had the chance to look at (yet).

In general I also noticed that there is little academic material on social networking sites per se, possibly because they are relatively new phenomena. Overall, out of all the texts I’ve read I found Howard Rheingold’s (2000) revised edition of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier most useful in regard to this project. I also think that David Bell’s (2001) essay Community and Cyberculture in his book An Introduction to Cybercultures provides a fantastically comprehensive account of the different understandings of community within the field. Unfortunately, Bell’s work is one of many I have read that have found no place in my first written draft on social networking sites.

We have scheduled a group meeting before class this Monday to discuss and edit the work we have done so far. I’m also still unhappy with the design of our web page as already mentioned above. Hopefully we can resolve this problem on Monday as well as start exchanging ideas about images and videos we might want to include.

With two weeks to go I’m still hoping I’ll get a chance to analyse the group dynamics in relation to Belbin and Tuckman’s work as originally intended but time is running out…