Research On The Group Cohesion Of Virtual Community

With the rapid development of community technology and community sophisticated applications, the Internet is gradually entering the community times. As of September 2009, there are 3.061 million independent websites (CNNIC) in China, a considerable number of which has an independent community. There are various forms of virtual space existing in people's lives, and communitization is a trend of Internet in the future. A successful virtual community can't do without high group cohesion of its "residents", hence, it is a problem how to improve the group cohesion of virtual communities in front of all the community managers. Group cohesion is the level that group members are mutually attraction and are willing to stay in the group. Most current studies of group cohesion are confined to reality, and is not yet in-depth studied of the virtual world. Research on the development of virtual community cohesion has very importantly realistic significance and theoretical value.In this paper, the author tried to sum up measures to measure group cohesion of virtual community by studying a large number of literatures. Firstly, researching into the development and changes of users'group cohesion process about an educational technology professional community——"the Home of Educational Technology" Secondly, the author would learn the successful experience to guide a new virtual community's design and development, improve group cohesion of the new virtual community by using multiple methods, and also measure group cohesion of the new community. Finally, the author tried to summarize some strategies and recommendations for improving virtual community's group cohesion of education technology.The following three aspects have been studied in this paper:Firstly, referring to the real world measurement of group cohesion, according to the characteristics of virtual community, the author tried to conclude the virtual community group cohesion measures. Secondly, based on the research of the development and changes of the educational technology virtual community group cohesion, the author summed up some strategies and recommendations to improve group cohesion of virtual community.Finally, analysing the needs of the students whose speciality is educational technology in Shanghai Normal University and will take the educational practice, we designed and developed a normal practice assistant platform, and tested the strategies which we got from "the Home of Educational Techonology" to improve group cohesion. The author tried to sum up the strategies that can help to improve virtual community groups cohesion in the end.