Thousands of Positive Reviews: Distributed Mentoring in Online Fan Communities
This addresses the problem of understanding and potentially enhancing learning opportunities for young people in informal online settings, with implications for formal education, though it is incremental in building on existing theories of online learning.
The study investigated informal learning in online fanfiction communities through a nine-month ethnographic investigation, leading to the development of the theory of distributed mentoring, which describes how networked technology enables mentoring behaviors beyond traditional time and space constraints.
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.