Thousands of Positive Reviews

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.

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

“…-and use or remediate it to produce related but often widely divergent media. Dedicated fans take the time to maintain wikis, administrate online forums and message boards [14], and mentor novice fans [21].…”

Crowd Guilds

“…The Shepherd system [10] allows workers to exchange synchronous feedback with requesters. Crowd guilds scale up this notion of distributed feedback [6] to make peer assessment and collective reputation management a core feature of a crowdsourcing platform.…”

“…The advice and feedback provided in peer assessment can facilitate distributed mentorship [6]. Self and peer assessment can train reviewers to become better at the craft themselves [30,1,10], and feedback from those with more expertise improves result quality [10,39].…”

Mosaic

“…For example, a community might host contests or challenges where participating users create work based on the same theme, or provide social features such as messaging and forums that allow users to collaborate in co-producing work. In addition, an online creative community giving feedback to each other can, in aggregate, provide positive mentoring experiences distinct from traditional offline mentoring [13]. The interactions that users engage in on these communities may differ depending on whether users consider themselves professionals or hobbyists [35].…”