Constructing a new mode of Education under the background of network virtual com

Abstract. The growing network have impact on the current mode of education. The network virtual community has a great appeal to students, we should study and use. We should construct a new education model under the background of network virtual community: breakthrough from the dominant mode of network education to the recessive education network model, and combine the real motivation and virtual incentive to establish a new education incentive mechanism under the new mode of education.

With the rapid development of information technology, the Internet with its unique charm, colorful contents, massive information and speed of propagation, quickly penetrate into every field of the life of college students, has opened up a new way of learning and life for modern college students.

Online interaction will have a long-term effect on the evolution of language and education. In this paper, I will develop an approach to online language variation and change through analysis of log files of OICQ. The analysis reveals highly structured linguistic variants they use according to the network tie strength, which somewhat have a potential influence on language use in real life.

Key words: virtual community, language variation, social network relations，universities，new mode of education

Introduction

Virtual Community

The modern society expose to the Internet is a process of the internetization of social structure and the socialization of network, which all together brings qualitative change to the real society, therefore, virtual community, a new form of society and communication mode emerges as the times require.

Compared to real communities, the contacts in virtual communities lack of real social interactions. Even though, it has similar functions of feeling sharing and information transmission, which disconfirms the traditional mode of information transfer from center to the periphery and establish a grass roots coupling. In this system, everyone from center and periphery have equal rights to put forward their opinions. The emergence of this virtual homeland indicates that a new Social Institution and Electronic Commons have been made. In this community, people obtain a virtual ID and start role-playing.

For lack of the real in-person face-to-face interactions, netizens of virtual community rely their daily activities on written language, including chatting, exchanging ideas, consulting, publishing writings, uploading and downloading, etc. Cyberspace is language based. Take MOO (MUDs Object Oriented) as an example: in MOO, the text-based virtual environment, the citizens of this virtual community have the possibility of defining their own space by creating new objects and associating behaviors to them with Design commands.

Network language

With the development of network and the increase of information, a new language pattern comes into being based on the traditional language pattern.

Both popular wisdom and professional scholarship in a range of academic disciplines make a diversity of predictions about how the Internet will shape our lives and our language. If we are to understand truly how the Internet might shape our language, then it is essential that we seek to understand how different varieties of language are used on the Internet. In sociolinguistics, social network relations—the variety and frequency of contacts among people in a society—are recognized as the principal vehicle of language change. People in regular contact with one another tend to share more linguistic features, and tend to borrow more features of each other’s language varieties, even in situations where those varieties are of different languages. Likewise, people who have less contact with one another tend to share fewer linguistic features with one another. Thus, to answer questions about how the Internet might affect the language that we use, we need to ask how it affects social contact among individuals, and what kinds of linguistic features that contact transmits to users.

There is also an urgent need to study language contact on the Internet; the rapid expansion of the Internet, and changes in the technology and the ways it is used make the Internet a very dynamic social force. Moreover, where sociolinguistics is concerned, theories of language contact and change developed through off line observations can be tested and refined through exploiting the rich data mad available by persistent, digital text. Prior to the existence of the Internet, sociolinguists had to rely on crude approximations of frequency of contact to construct social networks. With the potential to log digital texts, a researcher can now compile a comprehensive corpus of interactions taking place among a selected group of people on any mode of computer-mediated communication, and from that record be able to identify recurrent producers and recipients of messages; in this way, a very detailed understanding of the frequency and nature of contact among members of a group can be constructed. Taken together with the fact that certain groups of people interact almost solely online in virtual communities, these developments mean that the relation of social network to language change can be studied more closely than ever before.

Social Networks, language and OICQ

To investigate how the linguistic practices of OICQ channels are established and propagated requires that the researcher study both the network of participants’ social interactions and the relationship of those social patterns to the distribution of linguistic variables such as those described in examples above. This approach is that of social network studies in sociolinguistics. In prior social network studies, the linguistic variables tend to be more thoroughly studied than the social network relations. This is because it is relatively easy to collect representative examples of a participant’s speech in an interview, whereas directly studying social contacts requires knowledge of all the participants’ interactions with one another. What sociolinguists tend to do is to analyze network relationships using other information, such as the mutual naming of friends. With online interaction, the social network analysis can be based on a record of interaction contained in a log of online conversation. In this way, only the linguistically relevant social contacts can be studied. At the same time, the textual log of interaction allows the frequency of interaction to be used directly in studying the spread of linguistic variables.

Strong and Weak Ties

Sociolinguistic theory generally recognizes that social network ties vary in quality. On one hand, there are strong ties typical of relationships among family and close friends, characterized by frequent interaction, association in more than one social capacity (e.g. two people being both siblings and business partners), and territorially based groups (e.g. neighborhood gangs). On the other hand, there are weak ties typical of relationships among casual acquaintances, characterized by less frequent and more transient contact, not anchored to any territory. These different types of network ties are associated with different norms for the use of linguistic variables. Individuals at the center of networks with predominantly strong ties tend to use more non-standard, vernacular linguistic variants. People at the periphery of the same networks, with fewer of the same strong ties tend to use fewer vernacular variants. Strong ties thus tend to enforce non-standard, vernacular linguistic norms. Conversely, people who have predominantly weak ties tend to have higher incidence of variants associated with the recognized standard variety. Linguistic changes in the direction of the standard variety are propagated through weak network ties, while changes diverging from the standard variety in the direction of vernacular, non-standard varieties are propagated through strong network ties. Indirect methods of studying social network ties, such as mutual naming, mostly reveal strong-tie relationships, leaving weak-tie relationships that are harder to study. With on-line interaction, a researcher can obtain a persistent log of participants’ conversational interaction, and thus measure the frequency of interaction directly; frequency alone can identify strong and weak network ties.

Social Network and Virtual Community

Strong and weak network ties can potentially describe any sort of social interaction; if we use these notions to describe the social contacts made through OICQ, then we can make predictions about the influence of OICQ on language change. Given that OICQ participation is transient and constantly changing, and given that the participants on an OICQ channel tend not to be territorially localized, we might expect the social network relationships expressed on OICQ to be dominated by weak ties, and therefore to promote changes in the direction of the prestige variety. But OICQ does permit the development of strong ties in a different way, leading some to describe OICQ channels as virtual communities. Regular OICQ participants often become veritable addicts, spending several hours per day on OICQ, frequenting a small number of channels and having sustained interactions with other, similar, online addicts. This activity is much like the one that urban youth engage in that leads to territorial strong tie networks. While the OICQ social networks formed this way are not territorial in the literal sense, they can have territorial interpretations, where the territory is a particular channel or set of channels. This territoriality is expressed through built-in structural asymmetries among users inherent in the OICQ medium.

On OICQ, ordinary users and new users (newbies), lack the powers of the channel operators (OPs) who are among other things, empowered to exclude people from the channel. The first person to join a channel on OICQ crates the channel and becomes its first operator. An operator may grant operator privileges (also called OPs) to any other they choose. Thus, operators collectively and cooperatively define the boundaries of the social interaction on the channel. Sometimes operators accomplish this with the aid of computer programs known as bots. Bots connects to OICQ channel much as normal users do, and are typically granted ops by their creators. When a bot is opped, it may in turn automatically grant ops to channel participants (especially the bot’s owner) whose names and passwords are stored in a database, or automatically execute actions that the owner and other operators may desire, such as kicking and banning other participants, or de-opping certain operators (usually in preparation for kicking and banning them). In this way, a two-tiered social system is maintained such that members of the upper tier (operators and especially bot owner) have mire or less guaranteed privileges on the channel. Members of the lower tier (the non-operators, ordinary users and newbies) are always at the mercy of the operators, whose actions range from benevolent to capricious. At times there is social conflict among different operators, and OP-wars can result, where different factions of operators struggle to impose control over the channel. All these patterns of social differentiation have concrete implications for the tie strength experienced by different participants on a channel. Operators will tend to be regular participants with strong ties to one another and perhaps others. Other participants’ rights and privileges are acquired through social contact with operators, so their positions on the channel will vary according to the strength of their ties with different operators.

New mode of education

Combine the practical motivation and virtual incentive, establish a new education incentive mechanism under the new mode of education.

As we all know, the incentive is one of the important means of education, is one of the effective methods to guide students’ behaviors, and it is one of the motivations for students to gain self-confidence and to establish goals. For a long time, the generally used incentives are the material and spiritual or an official on the reward, such as the honorary title of scholarship, etc.. These specific incentives indeed played a big role. On the Internet, in the virtual world, without the true identity of a person, there is also a useful incentive measures.

Computer network and the emergence of the Internet, which makes human education technology by audio-visual technology to the rapid development of multimedia technology, computer technology and network based on information technology. New educational technology will produce the strong shock and impact to the traditional education concept, education, education evaluation standard. This is the information technology as the support, take the student as the center of the campus, no walls, open education mode. It will become century education, autonomy, lifelong development goals, the basic model and the basic way.

Conclusion

The computer network has a negative influence on students. But, in management, we cannot adopt stern measures to inhibit students from using the Internet. Under the presence of networking we should establish a new student education model by making full use of the advantages of the Internet virtual community. This new model calls for a breakthrough from the explicit Internet education model to the implicit internet education model, the better combination of educational concepts and network technology, and the education incentive mechanism featuring the integration of real incentive and virtual incentive.

References

1.R. A. Hudson, Socialinguistics, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2000

2.Xie zeming, Network sociology, China Economy Publishing House, 2002, 5