  Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online
fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites
are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is
taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. In order to understand and
analyze in more detail how learning might be occurring, we conducted an
in-depth nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fanfiction
communities, including participant observation and fanfiction author
interviews. Our observations led to the development of a theory we term
distributed mentoring, which we present in detail in this paper. Distributed
mentoring exemplifies one instance of how networked technology affords new
extensions of behaviors that were previously bounded by time and space.
Distributed mentoring holds potential for application beyond the spontaneous
mentoring observed in this investigation and may help students receive diverse,
thoughtful feedback in formal learning environments as well.
