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Perceptions of Identity and Expertise in Heavy Metal Fans within One Online Community of Practice

Identity is central to learning (Wenger, 1998), and identity in online forums can be represented verbally in posts and comments as well as non-verbally through choices such as username, user picture, and signature. How a forum user interacts with others based on their perceptions of another users’ identity and expertise impacts their experiences. This chapter examines informal learning experiences and behaviour based on the perceptions of others for three heavy metal fans within an online forum through a cyber-ethnographic study. This study explores participants’ interactions with both verbal and nonverbal content to form their perceptions of others, including perceptions of expertise. The participants controlled how they interacted with content and other users in a Web 2.0 environment, which impacted the shared construction of knowledge based on their perceptions of identity. Kathryn Urbaniak Concordia University, Canada DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5206-4.ch020