ABSTRACT
American educational policy and practice continually invoke this term to conjure support for schools and to foster a sense of collective responsibility for what happens in them. For example: The move away from the dominant ethic of bureaucracy and competitive individualism and toward more democratic values of support, diversity, and community is most possible within a political climate of shared responsibility and trust. Projects aiming to create learning communities, therefore, attend to establishing new political relations among teachers, administrators, parents, students, and community members. The chapter introduces three sets of conditions that are part of the dynamic of creating and identifying a community: mediating conditions, political conditions, and conditions of space and place. It then uses these three sets of conditions to examine the sorts of communities the Internet seems to be fostering, and their meaning as educational communities.
