Community gardens as third places

Repository of virtual places as community memory

This paper discusses the usage of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) as a repository of virtual places, serving as a community memory. Place is important for human memory and for social life of a learning community. Virtual places have the advantage of flexible creation and modification and therefore can be used for capturing and storing histories and activities in a learning community. ...

Iranian Languages as Gardens

The garden as a laboratory: the role of domestic gardens as places of scientific exploration in the long 18th century

Eighteenth-century gardens have traditionally been viewed as spaces designed for leisure, and as representations of political status, power and taste. In contrast, this paper will explore the concept that gardens in this period could be seen as dynamic spaces where scientific experiment and medical practice could occur. Two examples have been explored in the pilot study which has led to this pa...

Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places"

This article examines the form and function of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in terms of social engagement. Combining conclusions from media effects research informed by the communication effects literature with those from ethnographic research informed by a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning, we present a shared theoretical framework for understanding (a) the exten...

Electronic Networks of Practice as Third Places: Social Embeddedness, Membership Longevity and Contribution Quality

Electronic networks of practice have been investigated from learning and resource exchange perspectives using network analysis methods with connections derived from domain-specific relationships. By doing so, the literature has decentered interpersonal relationships in studies explaining the flow of knowledge throughout the network. I argue that through informal social interactions an individua...