Joining the Community
Faceless classmates hovering in cyberspace reaching out to learn together--how do they get to know one another? Just as with the face-to-face classroom, you can visit your classmates outside of class to get to know more about them. In private emails, take the time to share personal information. What's the weather like? What are your kids up to? What's happening at school? If you wish, bring a personal style to your academic communications, too. Learn to express emotions--those smiley faces and frowns that bring intonation to text. Or use the <> to code asides such as <grin> or even <chagrin> to express emotion. In cyberspace you can take written communication in new directions.

Being a Critical Friend
As part of a learning community, you can contribute by being a critical friend to your teammates. A critical friend assumes you are smart, competent and have done your best. Within that context, they help you to be even better. In this course, the rubrics provide the basis for feedback between critical friends. The best help you can give someone is to read his or her work very carefully and rate it honestly, then make specific suggestions for how to improve the work.

"Critical friend" almost sounds like an oxymoron--a contradiction. How can a real friend be critical? In fact, honest feedback coming from friends may be the easiest to hear because you know they want you to succeed. You give them permission to be honest when you ask for feedback and you can choose whether or not to use what they tell you.

Below are some pointers for being a good critical friend.