ABSTRACT
The adoption of fun environments in computer-mediated communication (CMC) is being considered by many institutions worldwide to overcome the problems of isolation associated with distance education and training courses. M205-STILE (Students’ and Teachers’ Integrated Learning Environment) is one such project that used a CMC environment with 110 distance learning students and nine tutors throughout the UK and Europe. The participants were online with conferencing and WWW facilities for a period of 10 months from February to November 1995. The provision of these online facilities put the students in touch with other students and their tutor. In order to find out what essential characteristics make a CMC enjoyable, we monitored the students’ online activities and reactions within the environment. The data includes a case study.
This chapter reports on how remote and urban students used the online conferencing system to make friends and find like-minded colleagues to work with. Our results suggest that having fun and conveying a sense of humour are important factors in the formation of peer groups for online learning and therefore they are important factors in the design of interactive online environments for conferencing and WWW.
