Distributed Mentoringin online fan fiction communities

Why do young people participate in online fan fiction communities?How and what do young people learn through involvement in fan fiction communities?What role does mentoring play in participants' learning, and what does this mentoring look like?

Research questions

Research sites

Research stagesIn-depth interviews with 28 fan fiction authors. Five months of participant observations of fan fiction discussion forums and story reviews.Thematic analysis of 4,500 reader reviews coded from 262 fan fiction stories.

Key characteristicsAggregation Small amounts of advice, which would not be considered mentoring on their own, form a complete mentoring experience.Accretion Respondents build upon previous responses to provide cumulatively sophisticated feedback.Acceleration Active debate among respondents encourages branching into specialized fields of knowledge.Abundance The low interaction cost required to post forum responses or story reviews results in large amounts of feedback for authors.Availability Feedback is persistently visible to the larger community, allowing authors and readers to learn from conversations long after the original exchange.Asynchronicity Respondents can participate from any location, at any time.Affect Positive emotional and supportive aspects of feedback provide crucial motivation for writers.

A new form of mentoring facilitated by networked publics that is inspired by Edwin Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition. In distributed mentoring, individuals are mentored by the community at large, and small pieces of advice from numerous sources combine to form a complete mentoring experience that participants value.

Why does it matter?Fan fiction is immensely popular, evident in the more than five million fan fiction stories housed on FanFiction.net.The educational and emotional benefits that authors derive from distributed mentoring are one key to understanding why so many young people participate actively in writing fan fiction.Distributed mentoring has the potential to be applied in formal educational contexts to encourage peer-based learning.

Fanfiction was what got me into writing in the first place. I’m planning on majoring in creative writing and

more than anything else, fanfiction and the fanfiction community has informed my writing style and ability, and my reviewing/editing abilities. Workshopping with a larger

community, which might be an alien experience for many entering my

department, is almost a daily routine for me by now.

I write fanfiction because you can get immediate feedback

from an active fandom. I have to play my part as well, and give back

to the community.

I've received thousands of positive reviews and some

truly wonderful letters and messages from people who have been genuinely touched by my writing, and it's been a massive

confidence boost that helped me get through university without

quitting and still helps me today if I'm feeling

down.

Quotes from fan fiction authors

Distributed Mentoring

This is great! I look forward to

reading the sequel.

Pretty good overall. You have a remarkably

interesting plot taking pieces from many different sources. I approve

of the fact that you ditched canon dozens of chapters ago and don't

seem even remotely inclined to return to it in the slightest. It's always nice to see a writer

taking the path less traveled.

This was a wonderful story,

great job!

I'm sure it's obnoxious, but I feel the need to point out that Slytherin's seeker

in Harry's first year was Terence Higgs, not Marcus

Flint. Flint was always a chaser.

That chapter ending was weird,

ambition, then ravenclaw? While the hat did outline the houses, that decision

really came out of left field.

Great Story! :) Update Soon!

:)

Quotes from reader reviews

Scientific Collaboration & Creativity Lab

What is it?

Julie Campbell1, Katie Davis2, Abigail Evans2, Sarah Evans3, David Randall2, and Cecilia Aragon1

{juliemu, kdavis78, abievans, sarahe, dpr47, aragon}@uw.edu1Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, 2Information School, 3College of Education, University of Washington