Phase 1: Analysis and requirements gathering

• Who is the community?
• What are the needs of the community?
• Who will have ultimate responsibility for the community?
• Who will steward the community?
• What are the outcomes that will be achieved if the community is sucessful?
• What are the values of the community?
• What types of activites would the community members like to engage in?
• What are the guidelines for participating in the community?
• What types of technology will be used? An available network eg Ning Facebook or custom made. Cost v benefit.
• What technical support will be available?

Phase 2: Set-up

• Create an orientation area for new users eg user-guides, videos and community rules/guidelines
• Create content plan with key facilitator
• Build the technology
• Add content eg blogs and videos
• Create all materials required for engagement eg emails, faq’s, responses to difficult questions

Familiarisation

• Short training sessions on facilitating community
• Short training sessions on using the technology
• Initial monitoring of community alongside key facilitator

Engagement

• Publish information to personal networks eg Twitter, Website, Blogs
• Getting bloggers to write about the network

Ongoing Faciliation (Provided by Community Stewards)

• Providing stimulus content for the community eg writing blog posts and asking and answering community questions
• Scheduling synchronis meetings

Ongoing Maintenance

• Quarterly community health check including community dynamics and technology needs eg we would like to add a video-conference meeting
• Technology updates

This resource from Social Signal was helpful in putting together my checklist.

Can you think of anything I have left out?

I have been thinking about how I will measure my learning experiences in the community I am participating in for this subject.

Steven Downes gave a talk on The Applications of Social and Collaborative Technologies in Education where he discusses the factors for success in online communities. Mike Seyfang then responded in this post by posing an open question about the ability of institutions to adapt learning to suit the collaborative nature of the read/write web. This seemed like a good place to start thinking about a framework for measuring the learning in the EdTechTalk community.

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Easter gave me an opportunity to look at social learning in context. We have a house full of my family ranging in ages from 12 to 80. Learning from family is full of opportunity and challenge.

Experience

There were many examples of older people in our family helping younger members complete tasks. My Grandma helping my cousin with a sewing project (pictured), my Mum helping me make the potatoe bake, my Mum and my Aunt helping me understand the impact of Web2.0 on families and classrooms.

• You know their experience, this makes it easier to apply their ‘teaching’ to your own situation Continue reading →

I’m not sure how you can get Rick rolled more than once in your life. It’s basically where you open a link and you’re web browser pops open with Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give you up and you can’t get rid of the noise until you’ve closed about a billion close windows each with a song lyric instead of ‘Are you sure you want to close?’. Anyway getting Rick rolled sucks but… it’s pretty interesting that your computer can make you perform a physical behaviour.

I can’t wait until we get something like ‘Interactive FlashTube’ where you can actually click on Paris Hilton’s clothes to remove them. Or watch a choose your own adventure video. Or put instructional videos online with questions throughout.

Learning by building

Over the past 10 years we have been slowly building an online world that reflects more closely the real world. This has helped us develop the first rumblings of a supported and different way of learning, sharing and building things online. We’ve uncovered the first little square of understanding how to utilize these tools and this little piece of understanding is for some people growing into a fuller understanding of how to ‘be online‘ and a quickly growing broader awareness of the potential of the tools available. This groundswell is laying the groundwork for a shift in the societal way of ‘being’ and possibly jumps forward in innovation.

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