Comments on: on learning communities

By: on learning communities - D’Arcy Norman dot net

on learning communities - D’Arcy Norman dot net — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:15:09 +0000

[...] on learning communities – D’Arcy Norman dot net: “” [...]

By: Fergus Mayhew

Fergus Mayhew — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:23:24 +0000

This seems like an excellent way of bridging the gap between online and face to face. I wonder if as time goes on the gap will shrink naturally … with increased bandwidth, and greater comfort with video conferencing, face-to-face may well merge with online, at least for geographically diverse communities.

By: Richard Schwier

Richard Schwier — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:07:22 +0000

I love the sound of this, D’Arcy. We’ve been doing research on features of formal virtual and blended learning communities for some time, and have just turned our attention to non-formal environments and self-directed learning. I know you aren’t interested in turning this into a research project, but I’ll be interested to see what you learn from the exercise.

Your approach to building these environments is consistent with what we’ve learned. One of our findings has been that communities can’t be forced — the affordances for them can be put in place, just as you are planning, and they can be given structure and encouragement, but additional things such as trust, awareness, identity and alignment come into play. The participants give them life–or they don’t. Don’t give up too early if the first one or two don’t click. If you want to check out any of our stuff, you can find some papers at our project website, but I hope this project spawns all kinds of new learning about professional communities. I’ll be watching with huge interest.

By: Cole

Cole — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:59:01 +0000

D … thanks for the nod! The Community Hubs seem to really be working. With that said, it is tough getting traction at the start and takes some real effort. I also think the idea of mashing up real meet ups and virtual stuff is critical. It also doesn’t hurt to mix in wiki spaces, daily posts, tweets for the community, and a podcast here or there. Leveraging all of the online social spaces allows us to hit a much broader range of our audience and that tends to lead to more active participation in real space.

Please know you can lean on us for any thoughts, help, insights, or really just anything at all! Keep us posted!

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:05:25 +0000

D’Arcy-
Are you familiar with http://confabb.com/ ?
I first ran across it when I spoke at Web Content 2007 in Chicago- it was started by Salim Ismail who was until recently the head of Brickhouse (the new projects group) at Yahoo.
Seems to have at least some of what you may be working on- and when combined with http://www.slideshare.net it can be pretty powerful.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:03:11 +0000

That’s exactly it, Richard. Trying to essentially prolong the intimate conference experience. I’m going to start with a guerrilla pilot, with just one or two learning communities hand picked by moi, and then open it up more once we’ve started to find our footing.

The online component will be a Drupal site with heavy usage of the organic groups module to create discussion forums for any groups that get created, as well as providing dashboards for keeping up with all relevant online activity. I’ll also put in an aggregation ability (although I’ll hide it at first) so people can blog off-site and have that stuff pulled into the context of the community.

By: Richard Kassissieh

Richard Kassissieh — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:58:10 +0000

We’re tiny compared to your effort, but I find similarities. Combining in-person with online professional development is similar to the new model for education conferences, even if the emphases are switched. Interact online, come to the conference, interact online some more, leave the conference, interact online. How are you planning to launch/announce the opportunity? What features will you build into the online component?

Richard

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:17:50 +0000

@David – sorry for the use of acronyms. I spelled it out in the blog post, but didn’t associate it with PD. Oops. Yeah, PD == Professional Development in this case.

I use the raw editor in WordPress, and Firefox 3’s spellchecker works fine there for me (FF3 on MacOSX).

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:14:14 +0000

“PD” ? Professional Development? Public Domain? Police Department? Please don’t use abbr. unless it’s really clear that abbr. = abbreviation.
BTW- Spell check in Word Press write post window apparently doesn’t work in Firefox 3 from my experience- you seeing the same thing D’Arcy? http://www.websitetology.com/?p=321
Thanks for cluing in those of us not in the loop on what PD is…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:36:14 +0000

Dean, luckily geography isn’t a factor here – we have 2,600 faculty and 2,700 staff mostly on one campus. One thing that I’ve noticed is that the vast majority of the PD efforts I’ve seen have been basically top-down, formal projects. Faculty come to workshops here at the TLC. They participate in certificate programs. etc… But after these events are over, they are largely on their own. I’m hoping to provide resources to help things keep going at a grassroots level – with faculty members (and staff, and students?) supporting and teaching each other. I have no idea how that’s going to look in a year or 2, but have some rough ideas I want to try to get it started.