Excerpt of an article published in the Journal of Public Service and Outreach. (Summer 1997). Volume 2, Number 2.

In the Australian Aboriginal Creation Myths, the creation story is written like a book in the earth's topography in the form of Songlines, tracks that extend in all directions across the entire continent of Australia, giving pattern and meaning to life. These tracks - or Songlines - connect localities with each other and with mythic episodes from the Dreamtime, the time of creation, associated with them. Rocks, streams, water holes, mineral deposits, and other natural landmarks all illustrate mythic stories dating back to the Dreamtime; together they are like beads on a necklace of interconnecting strands: the Songlines. No local group of Aborigines 'owns' a complete mythic Songline: each group 'owns' only a section of these pathways and each group shares with other groups the responsibility for carrying out the ritual singing necessary to preserve the Songlines in their entirety. Thus the 'Songlines' are a network of communication, cooperation, and cultural exchange among people separated by immense distances. By means of ritual singing, Australian Aborigines invoke and honor the mythic map of the Songlines, with all its meaningful landmarks, as they travel across the terrain (Chatwin, 1987; Hall, 1992). Today the concept of Songlines provides a useful metaphor for examining the Internet, which is a vast new cyber-territory that connects information, ideas, products, services, people, and virtual communities - including virtual learning communities.

Stephanie Pace Marshall (1997) urges that in the twenty-first century, we must create ecological learning communities that are "built upon a foundation of connection, coherence, mutually created meaning and purpose, dynamic relationships, and the evolutionary nature of the human experience itself." Similarly, Kenneth Dowlin (1997), the first librarian of the twenty first century, suggests that the key themes we face in cyberspace are community, communication, collaboration. Oddly enough, these are the same themes that are central to the Aboriginal culture - along with stories, which are embodied in the Songlines.

As we seek to take advantage of the Internet, we need to think in terms of mapping relationships, not merely destinations. Trails - Songlines - are reference points, like the sun and the stars, that help us find ourselves and each other, that help us to understand both the new and the familiar. Trails provide a configuration to support relationships. Trails connect places. They provide us with thematic and conceptual connections. And they provide us with human connections.

Community, communication, collaboration. The Internet is a new medium of communication; actually it offers a rich panoply of communication options (text, audio, video, animation, graphics, virtual reality). This new medium offers a wealth of opportunity for collaboration. And this new medium of communication is providing cyber-routes for a wealth of community building - virtual communities dispersed around a university campus or across the globe.

This paper will describe several different virtual learning communities that have emerged or are in the planning stages...