Historical Aspects of Online Communities

Aspects of the history of online communities that are important to me are patterns, lessons learned, and best practices. In addition to learning reflective, theoretical, and analytical research on the subjects, I would also like have more examples of what worked and didn't worked. I would like to see curriculum and activity examples from a variety of online instructors across disciplines and age groups. I find that a lot of the research seems to be very abstract, it doesn't really give examples how and what they did. It is difficult as a new instructor to have to always be "creative", acting alone in trying to put it into practice. I think that this is where using social networking inside and outside to discuss actual implementation may be a better option than going to research.