The Anatomy of the Knowledge Community of a Colege Student

     As a student at FSU I have a very broad and diverse knowledge community. If I had to describe what it’s like I would say that it’s a combination between a blog and an internet search engine. There are elements of both that make it into the system that college students use to search for, gather and interpret the knowledge.

     As a blog my knowledge community is very vast. Each topic page is a new idea that I post to the community. Every comment thereafter is someone in my community responding to the topic. People I have never met or spoken to before will post what they believe about the topic. Soon there are multiple comments from a  variety of sources, my peers, professors and graduate students, laid out on the community page. People read through the previous posts then comment on what they think or believe or even just their own interpretation of an idea. At the end though it has been seen that each person who participated has changed, each of them has added onto, taken away from or rethought what they believed the topic to mean. After looking at the post and posting or commenting the first time the person may speak to others who will go and contribute their ideas or the person’s ideas may have change after discussing the topic with friends and family and return to the community to share their new thoughts. This is how ideas evolve, and change in my knowledge community through shared thoughts of participants even participants that I might not have direct contact with. It’s a mobile changing community set up like a web blog.

     My knowledge community as a student is also like an internet search engine. The search page like the question that is presented to the community as a whole and the pages that pop up with different options the people who step forward to offer their interpretations and answers to the presented question. The links represent the process of picking a person or multiple persons to hear the information from. Just like a search engine the first person you can get the information from is not the best person, so it’s best to look at multiple peoples answers to get the best one. The information may be presented by other students, professors or any number of others. When I need information on a topic or when I’m not sure what a word means I can search the minds of my peers. Asking students in my classes or major or the professors of my department is the search engine used to get information.

     As can be seen as a college student I my knowledge community is set up as a digital community. Elements from both blogging and search engines are present in its makeup and it makes it easier to find the information I or other students like me may need.