• 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?

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.

Brian Copolla describes the difference between cooperative and collaborative learning as differentiated by things like autonomy, locus of control and authority. He makes a distinction between the types of knowledge that each is good for. Cooperative for ‘basic knowledge where clear definitions exist’ and collaborative for ‘conditional knowledge… such as the edges of a debate’. My thoughts are that most learning sits somewhere along a continuum between having strong teacher control or cooperative towards collaborative where the learner has most of the control. Within any community it may be helpful to have a mix of elements that promote one or the other in order to achieve the greatest overall result.  This mix will change overtime as both the community and the learners needs change.

The purpose of the community and the needs of the learners may also be a factor in determining the mix of control. For example if the purpose of the community is to prepare for a particular assessment task the environment and interactions would be different a learning experience using a community to figure out how to update my Itunes software. Additionally the readiness of the learner needs to be considered. For example if you have a community that is heavily based on reading lots of blogs and analysing the content then maybe it is important to scaffold the learning to include a more structured introduction to the technologies used.

In his talk Downes discusses some other factors important to collaborative learning such as diversity of learners, technology, openness and connectivity. I think of each of these as dials that can be turned by creating different types of experiences to balance cooperation and collaboration to the benefit of individual learners and the community as a whole.

For me it’s a journey that mixes experience (particularly of the people) with adventure (my own learning decision along the way).

As I analyse my own experience in the community the questions I’ll be considering are:

• How are the community members organised? Does this support learning?
• How diverse is the discussion within the community? Does this add to the overall depth of learning?
• If a discussion is important to me how easy is it to start a conversation? Who participates?
• How easily can I apply the learning gained in the community?
• How have I participated in discussions that I wouldn’t normally engage in? Have I experienced additional learning because of this?
• Does the technology facilitate the learning experiences? How?
• Do the relationships within the community facilitate the learning experiences? How?

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
• You trust they have your best interests at heart so you feel freer to object and question
• You often get views that you normally wouldn’t listen to but which still help you clarify your own views or adopt new views

The church

I’m not particularly religious but I do attend church with my family. This Easter the church put on a very engaging mass with a dramatisation of a young child asking an older person questions about the meaning of Easter.

• They set clear guidelines about the ideal way to participate – attend mass regularly and follow the scripture
• They are explicit about the purpose – follow the church’s teachings and you’re life will be richer
• They keep reiterating the key messages
• They use stories and imagery to help individuals see the relevance to their own situations

The challenges

It was good to step away from the computer and see that there is rich learning occurring everywhere. However it also highlighted the challenges of learning together.

• Sometimes it is the most challenging situations where you learn the most – this isn’t always comfortable. (This must be one of the hardest aspects to deal with in an online environment.)
• It takes a long time or a very specific purpose to build a community who trust and respect each other.

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.

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.

Particularly over the past year we seem to be jumping forward a little faster than before. The web is starting to feel more usable, more human and we are taking notice. Faster connection speeds and breakthroughs in technology are key contributors to this. For many people it is possible to use their computers or phones to make a video call. For lots and lots of people it is now possible to post your knowledge, processes, procedures, stories, videos and software for free and get instant feedback from a variety of channels.

In the article Working and Playing on the Web Brown, clearly articulates why the web is a great place for learning. You can talk to other people and it records your conversation so you and others can read them reflect on them and build upon them. Good ingredients for learning. Rich learning experiences are created. The traditional roles of practitioner, student and teacher can often be blurred. Students can create knowledge that can be used by other students as the subject matter for example this video can be created by a student, analysed by other students, assessed by a teacher, viewed by an industry expert or government official, other view points can be added to the discussion and so on… until… we need to discuss something else.

Although this evolving, iterative development of our knowledge both in terms of society and individual learning is clearly a rational progression for our society it will take hard work to establish. Collaboration isn’t just a learning technique it’s a very productive way of life and learning. But it’s organic and it requires a different skill set to be successful, it requires you to trust in yourself and others. It takes a long time to establish those relationships. I think that’s where we are right now. Re-establishing the rules for our relationships online and offline. Parent/teacher, student/parent, friend/friend and all the other permutations. Bringing things closer together and sometimes further apart. It’s all part of the learning experience finding out what’s valuable.

Working online reflects good pedagogy

Most learning occurs little by little by interacting with a number of different people and experiences. Peers, textbooks, teachers, practitioners all provide a different piece of the puzzle to help me learn what I need to know. Sometimes it’s spontaneous, you leap forward with one interaction. Having more choice over how will learn usually means having a greater chance of success. The Web is giving us more and more options for learning.

Using both different types of media and the combined intelligence of many means that I can tailor the learning to suit my learning need at the time.
• Not sure where to start – I might strike up a chat with someone I know who has experience in the field and who can give me a few pointers
• Learning something completely new – I might choose to watch an instructional video
• Learning to help me solve a specific problem – I might choose to use a forum and type the question into my web browser
• Trying to create a meaningful world view of how to apply digital literacy in the classroom I might read an article from an experienced practitioner

Five years ago when I was classroom teaching there was a real focus on reflective pedagogy – both learners and students reflecting on their learning at every opportunity. One of the limitations at the time was that it was difficult to share your reflective practice with other teachers. There may have been group sessions to discuss practice, but often the time was limited or it was difficult to find another person who was really interested or needed to share in the lessons learned. The web solves some of those problems, we can participate in reflective practice by living it. Using a class or teaching blogs and websites we are more easily able to connect with teachers who are having similiar experiences and learn from them. Additionally the ease of use of the tools make it easier for those with a passing interest or different perspective to contribute to the learning. For example as a teacher I can view a post on a technology forum and use that information to learn to do something new in my classroom. Or not. I have more choice. Providing a broader and more tailored learning experience.

What are the limitations?

Completing these readings did get me thinking that with all these rich learning experiences and people feeding into the pot of knowledge that knowledge is becoming obsolete so quickly that it isn’t really useful anymore to teach or document ‘one version of the truth’. That is a big perceptual shift. George Seimens discussed this in his blog “One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete.’ To me this means a couple of challenging new concepts to ‘building understanding’:

• It’s important for me to build a thread of understanding over time an watch as other people and myself build our knowledge
• For students and teachers it is becoming increasingly important to focus on the skills to be able to watch those threads of knowledge being built and torn down and rebuilt with insight, critical literacy and a questioning mind

I think so far we’ve been building the things we need to move into a more collaborative phase of development. Infrastructure, skills, relationships. I’ve had many discussions with people about the way for example an intranet doesn’t work, about why we don’t keep things up to date, about why we aren’t teaching student how to ‘be’ online. I feel that this is all preparation for the real work, working on new ways of working and being so that we can be comfortable and productive in these collaborative environments online. People in so many fields are having really meaningful conversations about what it means to collaborate. Who to trust? Who to share with? What are the guidelines for doing this? Asking these questions is just as much a part of the open participative web as participating in the forum.

But we can’t expect to ask this of teachers, mentors, ceo’s and leaders without giving something back. I’m not sure what that is yet but perhaps it’s about those with understanding going that little step further – inviting those with less experience into the communities you belong to. Take their hand. Show them it’s not just metal and plastic but there are people in there. Give them a reason to be part of the conversation. Help the communities become more well rounded, more informative, more authentic.