Wenger's Social Theory of Learning Is Right But We Should Talk to Strangers

In the post before I slid into some near-apocalyptic rant where kids only talk online to other people who are exactly like them, and give up on random conversations. Although I see that on buses and trains already, where many people are having conversations over phones or e-mail (but the only people talking are asking for change), Penn State is a friendly environment and must be one of the most socially connected big towns in America. And a lot of that super-cohesiveness is because we're all one big community of learning.The University itself is an overall one, as are each of the colleges and individual departments, and geographically State College (and maybe a little of Bellefonte) is a pretty distinct community. Wenger also mentions the extra-curricular communities like clubs, committees, churches, meeting places like bars or coffee shops, pretty much anywhere where some similarities and some continued social interactions occur. Yeah, these communities support learning and establish identities even if they weren't meant to, and the fact that there are so many possible communities makes PSU such a great 10-mile-wide place to be inside of.Now, there are some folks who grew up in State College or nearby, went from K-12 to a Bachelor's degree here, then still lived in the area. Would we say they've lived in a wider community compared to an average person that only lived in one non-college town their whole life? Sure... but maybe less than someone who's lived in many other places in their lives. There are some folks who have stayed almost entirely in their departments from freshman year to their Ph.D., so who knows how large their community is?In other words, I bet there are plenty of people at Penn State who are active in as few communities as a third-generation farmer in North Dakota or a 23-year-old who lives and breaths World of Warcraft. The fact that one "introvert" is using disruptive technologies shouldn't matter, the lack of communal variety and social learning is the same for all three. After reading Turke's chapter I wanted to make fun of online role-players for never seeing the light of day, but after reading Wenger's chapter I realized I wasn't seeing the light of day either, sitting in a campus building writing to other academians; is it better to sit here writing this than log on and uncover a Halberd of Strongaard with 400 gold?Or is it better to talk to someone new on the bus and see what world they're from...