On December 4^th 2008 the New York Times Online published an article on recent research that seems to show that happiness is contagious.  Belluck (2008) quotes Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis who conducted the study:

 

Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you.

Christakis (quoted in Belluck 2008) elaborates:

There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon. (Belluck 2008)

So if happiness is contagious can we catch it in an online learning context? The study suggests not, geographical proximity seems key; the happiness of near neighbours proved contagious while euphoric friends in a distant community had negligible impact.

However as the study was conducted on 4,739 people from 1983 to 2003 it is unlikely  that it has captured the impact of web2.0 technologies and in particular the online social networking phenomena which was only emergent at the end of this period.  Indeed Belluck (2008) touches on this:

Still, they said, it is not clear if increased communication via e-mail messages and Webcams may eventually lessen the distance effect. In a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling. “That shows that some of our findings are generalizable to the online world,” Dr. Christakis said. (Belluck 2008)

The release of these findings was for me a moment of serendipitous pleasure.  A student on Edinburgh University’s M.Sc. E-learning  programme I was beginning to look back on my Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning (IDEL08) coursework for inspiration on a final assignment topic.  As I reviewed readings, blog and discussion topics I was drawn to a comment made by my tutor on one of my blog posts.  In the post I had expressed the wave of emotion I felt viewing An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube (Wesch 2008) in particular the point where Wesch traced the spirit of self expression in this medium to Gary Brolsma’s now famous Numa-Numa dance which along with the StarWars kid became one of the most powerful internet memes to date.  I likened the euphoria I felt to a childhood memory of watching the Coca-Cola advertisement in the early 70’s - the medium different but the feeling of emotional connection very similar.  My tutor commented:

What I find intriguing about your post and our shared Numa-Coke experiences is how infectious joy can be.  Makes for an interesting counterpoint to the embodiment issue and lack of emotionality Dreyfus (2001) sees On The

Internet. (O'Shea, personal communication,  27 November 2008)

In my opinion this ‘infectious joy’ is the key to learning and in this web-essay I will explore whether the students on IDEL08 were able to overcome the ‘embodiment issue’ and engage in a joyful and emotional online educational experience.