Introduction:

In my previous articles for Reefkeeping Magazine, I detailed some observations on live rock hitchhikers, specifically Nudibranchs and Cirolanid isopods. While writing those articles I began to think about a picture bigger than just a single article about a hitchhiker. I started wondering what hobbyists could do to advance the hobby beyond its current state. How could concerned hobbyists help advance the level of knowledge in the hobby to the benefit of all hobbyists?

I am currently a doctoral student at the University of Houston, and I have been examining how communities function and how education takes place online. I started to realize that there are a lot of similarities between what I read in the literature and what is taking place in the saltwater aquarium community. But, what is the saltwater aquarium community? For the purposes of this article I will define it as follows:

The saltwater aquarium community is a collection of hobbyists who are trying to learn from each other and find ways to improve their aquariums, the health of the organisms under their care and the nature of the hobby itself.

This definition may appear limited, as it does not include retailers, wholesalers, importers, exporters, public aquariums, and others, but I am focusing on just the hobbyists for two reasons:

1. I have little experience with any of the other groups listed above; I cannot even claim to be a novice in my understanding of those groups. Remember, as good aquarium educators, we should not attempt to address topics with which we do not have sufficient personal experience.

2. The educational topics I will present in this article are most commonly used to define informal volunteer communities, which fit nicely with the definition.

Communities of Practice

As I was performing a literature search, I realized that the saltwater community has many things in common with a term in educational literature: Communities of Practice, or COP. This should not be confused with the "Tang Police" or "Tang Cops" that lurk on most discussion forums. Wenger et al (2002) defined COP as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis."

While COPs take on a variety of forms, they all share a basic structure. First, they all have a domain of knowledge; in our case it is the saltwater aquarium hobby. Second, they all have a community of people who care about this topic. Third, they all have a shared practice that they are developing to be effective in their domain.

However, COPs, especially distributed communities of practice, or COPs that rely mostly on online instead of face-to-face communication, encounter a number of issues. Table 1 combines some of the problems listed in Wenger et al (2002) with some issues facing the saltwater aquarium COP.

Joining the Saltwater Aquarium COP

Lave and Wenger (1991) introduced a term central to the idea of COP: legitimate peripheral participation. Legitimate peripheral participation is the process of defining ways of belonging to a community of practice or, put another way, it is the slow process by which a new learner in the community learns to participate as a useful member of that community. For the saltwater aquarium COP, this is the process of a member new to an online forum learning the rules of interacting and belonging to that forum.

"Legitimate" refers to the social control of that community's resources. A good example of this is the history of logging onto saltwater aquarium discussion forums. In the 1990s it was much more common than it is now for a person to be able to log onto a discussion forum and interact with the community by posting comments as a "guest," leaving no way to track that person. This led to a lot of personal attacks and abuse on the forums, which is a common phenomenon in anonymous environments (Suler & Phillips, 1998; Douglas & McGarty, 2002; Suler, 2004). Now most discussion forums require you to register before you can post.

The process of requiring a logon to the forum allows legitimate participation on the forum. With this change in social control, users can now be banned for inappropriate behavior, otherwise known as illegitimate participation. It should be noted that Lave and Wenger (1991) believe there is no such thing as illegitimate participation, and that any participation will help a person learn how to become part of that community. I disagree with this point, as personal attacks and other inappropriate behavior do not seem like legitimate participation to me.

Many members of the saltwater community can be considered legitimate peripheral participants. Those who rarely or never participate are called "lurkers". While it is often said that "lurkers" make up the majority of users on saltwater discussion forums, I found no references that have attempted to quantify them. So I decided to conduct a poll on some aquarium discussion forums to see if I could get a feel for the percentage of lurkers in our community.

Forum Characteristics

I chose to conduct my poll on a total of eight discussion forums with a variety of characteristics, to see if there would be any differences in the responses to the poll. Table 2 lists some of those characteristics for each discussion forum polled.

Poll Question #1

Of the threads that you read, what percentage do you actually post a reply to? The entire poll can be found below in Appendix 3 and the results of the poll are listed in Table 3.

Of the poll's respondents, 43%-92% reported they respond to 30% or less of the threads they read. It is interesting to note that of the foreign websites polled, the percentage of users in the 30% or less categories was 43%, 55%, 65% and 92%, while the four American websites had 73%, 85%, 88% and 90% of the respondents in the 30% or less category.

One thing that surprised me was the low percentage of registered users responding to the polls. Both polls I conducted were open for two weeks. This may have limited the number of people responding, but in all forums polled less than 2.8% of the registered users actually voted in the poll (see Appendix 4 for more details). Considering that the majority of the users polled respond to 30% or less of the threads that they read, and that less than 3% of the users registered for each website actually responded to the poll, the results seem to indicate that lurkers do make up a large percentage of the saltwater community online. I then started wondering how many saltwater discussion forums are actually used by the people responding to my polls, so I decided to post another poll on the same forums listed above.

Poll Question #2

How many aquarium discussion forums do you participate in at least once a month?  The entire poll can be found below in Appendix 3.

What can we tell from this poll? Of those polled, no more than 10% of the hobbyists visit more than five websites each month, and 55-85% of the respondents visit three or fewer websites per month. These data seem to support the idea that a large community of practice will fragment into local or regional communities to counteract the size of a larger overall community (Wenger et al, 2002).

I compiled a list of all the websites listed in the respondents' top three websites, and have listed them alphabetically in Appendix 1.  This small set of respondents resulted in a list of over 50 websites that are frequently visited and that have at least 300 registered users. I was unaware of about 35 of these websites, and I've been active in the online community for over two years. If these results are indicative of the rest of the community, then they suggest that the online saltwater aquarium COP is highly fragmented, so reaching a large percentage of the reefkeeping community will be difficult. These polls do have some limitations, which I have listed in Appendix 2.

Recommendations for the Saltwater Aquarium COP

So what have we learned from COPs and this polling data? How can it help the saltwater aquarium COP? Given the indications of a high number of lurkers and a fragmented saltwater aquarium COP, I think it is very important as aquarium educators to:

1. Be very careful with how we present information online. The vast majority of the learners you reach will only read your material, instead of interacting with you.

2. If we feel we have good information to share with the COP, it should be posted in as many places as possible to reach the fragmented community.

3. Discussion threads are typically buried rapidly in large discussion forums. I suggest that if we have good information for the COP, we attempt to get that information published in an online or print hobbyist magazine, which tend to be more permanent and have a wider audience than individual discussion threads or forums. Your information may also benefit from being peer-reviewed or edited for content, hopefully by experts, so that you are not spreading misinformation in the hobby.

Introduction to Aquarium Research

As I have worked on my degree, I have been presented with many methods and opinions on how to conduct educational research. Often these methods and opinions are contradictory (can anyone think of another community whose methods and opinions are contradictory?), but there are some commonalities amongst the advice:

1. Search the literature to identify a hole in the research and define your research question.
2. Design a way to use proven methodology to research that question.
3. Conduct your research using appropriate instruments to collect data.
4. Interpret your results concisely and report them to a peer-reviewed publication.
5. If your results are published, learn from the resulting discussion how to improve your research.
6. Do not take critical comments of your work as a personal attack; rather, treat them for what they are; ways to improve your work.

I searched the online aquarium publications and found no articles related to trying to quantify the percentage of "lurkers" and the community's fragmentation. I then used an accepted method of gathering data (online polls) and conducted my limited research, sometimes called a pilot study. I tried to report my results clearly and I await any discussions that take place in my author forum. I have also looked at my methods and results and realized many ways I could improve upon them in a follow-up study. Hopefully, I will have time in the future to conduct a more in-depth study on the saltwater COP.

Aquarium research by the average hobbyist could benefit from following the above six steps. Several additional tips are provided in the article Writing for the Ornamental Aquatics Industry by Steven Pro. In my list of suggested readings at the end of this article, I have listed some articles covering a wide range of what could be called aquarium research.

Some of these are long-term observations, another is an excellent experimental design and yet another is a description of steps taken during the recovery of a sick animal. These articles are examples of efforts that add to our hobby's body of knowledge. It should be noted that studies that do not use a rigorous experimental design and manipulation of a variable should not be called aquarium research. They are still important, but should be called aquarium observations instead.

Changing a Shared Practice: Isolating and Identifying Live Rock Hitchhikers

Bandura (197