Cybergeography IRL

Though the internet is relatively new, the methods used to study it do not necessarily need to be entirely new. Drawing from the author\u27s experiences of doing cybergeography research, documented through the use of excerpts from a research journal, this article describes how traditional methods are adapted to understand the relationships between online and offline worlds and how people seek to use the internet to change their everyday landscapes. Research strategies include treating the study of online places as if they were material landscapes, analyzing characteristics of websites, visiting associated places, and in-person interviews with producers. The amount of qualitative data collected from sites and the time it takes to analyze this data are challenges associated with qualitative analysis of websites. Field work is still necessary in internet research. Site visits and interviews reveal details about cases that may not be visible online including infrastructures and identities. Limitations of visits and interviews include the inability to study global scale phenomena as well as ethics of anonymity and confidentiality. Triangulation among virtual landscapes, material places, and interviews helps to reveal a nuanced view of the way that the internet transforms everyday life

Service Learning and Building Community With the World Wide Web

The geography education literature touts the World Wide Web (Web) as a revolutionary educational tool, yet most accounts ignore its uses for public communication and creative expression. This article argues that students can be producers of content that is of service to local audiences. Drawing inspiration from the community networking movement, the article presents two examples of “Web-raising” service learning projects in which geography students created a Web site with and for local community organizations. Evaluations suggest that the Web raisings were significant learning experiences for both students and community participants, but that logistical factors and characteristics of the students and organizations affected the degree to which this learning took place

Building a Global Sense of Place: The Community Networking Movement in the United States

Community networks help build place-based community by offering individual citizens and organizations access to the Internet, the ability to post information online, and opportunities to discuss community affairs. Community networks are inspired by a dynamic vision of community that incorporates a global sense of place. A global sense of place is valuable because it helps to illuminate a place\u27s connections with the world and may therefore enable scale-jumping forms of activism. This article analyzes interviews with participants in four U.S. community networks to explore how networks combine a politics of mobility, a politics of access, and a politics of place to construct a global sense of place. The degree to which each network emphasizes mobility, access, and place varies. This variation has implications for both community activism and issues of diversity in community. Networks that fail to link mobility, access, and place may increase, rather than decrease, inequalities in access to electronic communications as well as to forms of political power

Visions of Community and Mobility: The Community Networking Movement in the USA

Different visions of community and mobility may influence the ability of community computer network organizations to promote social change. Community networks successfully generate instrumental mobility, the literal movement of information across space, but have difficulty creating successful online spaces that promote communicative mobility, the metaphorical movement of people towards common understandings of a shared situation. Interviews with community networking activists explore the ways that community networks generate instrumental mobility online as well as barriers that community networks face in creating online spaces for communicative mobility. Ironically, given their technological focus, community networks have little difficulty generating communicative mobility in face-to-face situations. Differentiating between instrumental and communicative mobility allows this research to move beyond a simple discussion of the geography of the conduits of communication to consider the geography of communication itself. It therefore contributes a more detailed understanding of the role of electronic communication in social and political change

Using PlacesOnLine in Instructional Activities

PlacesOnLine.org is a Web portal that provides easy access to high quality Web sites that focus on places from around the world. It is intended for use by a wide range of people, including professional geographers, teachers and students at all levels, and the general public. This article explores the potential uses of PlacesOnLine as an educational resource. Specifically, it provides examples of PlacesOnLine learning activities that can be used for teaching students at levels ranging from K-12 to college. The activities are designed to help students understand places using the World Wide Web and to explore how and why people represent places on the Web. They are also designed to help teachers get the most out of using the Web