Online communities

Joao has an interesting post about online communities.  There is a link to some mind maps on the subject.  One I particularly liked, “A community is a group of individuals who…”, can be found here.

As I prepare to teach anothe semester of an online course on critical thinking, I am very interested in building community.  Last semester I had a group of isolated students.  They didn’t like learning online.  They were taking the course because it was a requirement, not because they wanted to.  Most of them never invested in the course or in each other.  This semester I really want it to be better.

According to Joao and his mind map,

A community is a group of individuals who:

• have a stronger sense of identity
• have common interests
• have frequent/regular interaction
• are able to transcend their differences
• share common characteristics
• share experiences
• share a sense of altruism
• share a sense of reciprocity
• share a sense of beneficence
• aim to achieve goals for their common good
• enjoy a successful shared experience
• work for the good of the group and each other

My students have have all of those qualities in a general sense in their physical lives.  They all live in the same country, under the same conditions.  They are almost all altruistic and believe in working for the good of others.They believe in the value of diversity. But in an online class, they have none of these characteristics.  This is something I have to spend some time thinking about and working on.  If I want my class to be a short-term online community, if I want students to invest in the class in that way, I hve to do the work to make it happen.  The question is how.

More on community

Miguel wrote about community today. I commented over there, but his post made me think about this issue again and in a different way, so I decided to bring my part of the conversation back over here.

First of all, I agree with Miguel that there is danger in only doing this for myself. I have given up on lots of projects over the more than 5 decades of my life. Many of them were great ideas and good causes, but I just couldn’t sustain interest in them in the face of all the stuff that life brings. Blogging, for me, is different, though. Blogging feeds me and helps to keep me going. I may be sporadic, but I cannot now envision not blogging. I have been doing it for more than 3 years – a fact that amazes me!

When he comments on my post, though, he says:

Again, there is a perception that the edublogosphere isn’t a community, or that such a community, if it exists, isn’t worthy of existing if it’s focus is going to change. This disillusionment is natural.

I really don’t agree with this part of Miguel’s post. At least it doesn’t reflect how I feel about the edublogosphere. I think that we are a community of sorts, and I am glad of it. And I certainly do not object to it changing. What I object to is the perception that I have to do what everyone else does and be where they are if I want to be part of it.

I think that we are a lot like a brick and mortar community. We don’t all go to the same coffee shop. Some people don’t even drink coffee. But we run into each other at the grocery store or at the library. It doesn’t matter where I see you; what matters is that we care about each other enough to speak to each other and, at least sometimes, exchange our thoughts and ideas.

Maybe what I am part of isn’t “the edublogosphere” that everyone talks about. I honestly don’t know. But, I read lots of blogs every day. I value the discussion. I participate probably not as much as I should, but I take part. I try to take what I learn here and apply it to my own life and work situation. I try to be a responsible member of this community. Whatever it is.

Are we a community?

Bud’s post in response to Doug’s post was one I was glad to read. Bud’s point, which he made back in November, too, is that there is no such thing as “the edublogosphere” but rather that there are lots of us out here doing what we do — whatever that is. He said in November and quoted again now:

Mostly, the assumption that’s troubling me so much is that there’s one group (community – whatever) out there that exists for educational conversation via electronic media, and that we should all try to engage and involve everyone in that one (fallacious) group so that we’re all friends and reading and commenting each other. And that we’ll all agree on where that group should go, when they should meet, and what we’ll all do when we get there. Or that we ever agreed in the first place.Ain’t going to happen. Not now, not ever. Never did happen, in fact. We all construct our blogrolls, our Twitter friends, or our other social networking relationships for our benefit and to meet our own unique needs. That leads some folks to add everyone as a friend. Others, no one. And whichever way you want to go is fine for you – but please don’t require that I or anyone else goes with your system to meet our own needs.

I think that there is possibly a community of those “A-List” edubloggers whom everyone wants to read. Or most everyone, anyway. But there is no way I will ever be part of that community. I don’t even want to be part of that community, really.

I am interested in what I am interested in. I read what I want to read where I want to read it. I am not in love with Twitter and probably never will be — but you never know!

Blogging, for me, is as much about reflection as it is about exchanging ideas. I will stay here, read the blogs I read and add a few more from time to time and be happy. If I am not part of the “community”, that’s OK. I am doing this for me.

Building an online community with my students

We have been asked to consider how we might build an online community from a collection of student blogs. This is perhaps the most important task we have been given in this course. It is the reason we have spent almost 6 weeks learning about podcasts and how to post pictures in our blogs.

The questions given as part of the task are good ones. Let’s see if the same can be said of my answers!

– How can I persuade students to post to their blogs regularly?

As with almost anything that I ask my students to do – literature circles, journaling, sustained silent reading – I have to participate with them as an equal. If they see me enthusiastically engaged in the activity, they almost always get on board themselves. So my example will be a big motivator.

Of course, students must have real things to blog about. I think that the assignments must be authentic. I haven’t quite figured out what that will look like in all my classes, but I am thinking seriously about it. I like the idea of reading and commenting on the readings in a blog, as Anne Davis has her students doing. Then there is Barbara Ganley’s writing class blog. She has students posting their writing and responding to each other’s posts. I do something like this already with my advanced writing students, so I think this will be an easy transition for us all to make.There is no guarantee, however, that students complete these assigned tasks.

- How can I encourage lurkers to participate?

Lurkers are some of my favorite people. Until recently I was always a lurker, and I still am in many situations. We need specific tasks and lots of encouragment. Success in this area will depend largely on the sense of community established. Of course, blogging could be a requirement, but that doesn’t seem like the best way to tackle the problem. And even if it is a requirement and lurkers blog, it may not mean they do anything substantive. So I think the community will have to be appealing and supportive. It may mean that I, as the teacher, have to find out what the reasons for lurking are and address the issue on a case-by-case basis.

- How can I encourage my students to read and post to blogs other than their classmates?

Here again, my first reaction is probably that it would have to be built into the course requirements.

A logical way for me to encourage students to do this would be to have them set up an aggregator and do a search on the theme of the course. An example of this is that in the spring semester, one of the themes we use is the death penalty. A simple search on Bloglines links to all kinds of references to the death penalty. So if students used Bloglines and were exposed to blogs on the topic they were researching, I think they would be likely to read them. Commenting on them would take more effort because I think they would worry about their English. But by the advanced level, maybe not so much. Of course, all this would have to be taught; skill would have to be developed over time. That is why I would like to start long before students reach the advanced level, giving them time to work into all of this.

- How can I encourage people from outside the classroom to post on student blogs?

I guess I would try what Anne Davis did: post a request on my blog. Now, that means that I would have to have a blog that is interesting enough to have readers. So that is good encouragement for me to keep my blog up.

– How can I encourage students to post and respond to comments to their classmates’ blogs?

This comes down to the feeling of community in my classroom. If my students care about each other, they will be more likely to want to read each other’s posts. What worries me more than getting them to read and comment is getting them to make substantive comments. The tendency would most likely to amke the kind of innane comments we all do from time to time – “Good point!”, “I like your ideas”, “I agree”, etc. I am, not sure yet how I would do this. In part, I think I would assign specific questions for the comments to address. Maybe the comments could be focused one time on explaining why the reader agrees or disagrees with the post and another time on how reliable the source seems to be, for example. Another time it could pose a question about the post. Something like that anyway. I obviously would have to modify the tasks based on the proficiency of the student and the topic under discussion.

- How can I keep the interest going when the novelty has worn off?

There are two things to keep in mind here, I think. One is to establish the habit. That takes time, but not all that much time. I have my students now journal every day. They expect that. They enjoy it, too. I hope that by the end of the semester, they will decide to continue journaling. I would expect the same to be true once I start my students blogging. Habit must be established. I think that would require a lot of blogging in the beginning. And fun blogging, too. But once the value of blogging has become clear to the students and once he has developed the habit of blogging, it will carry him through some of the plateaus and valleys in his interest. Another part of this would be getting students to regularly read blogs because they would provide encouragement and example as well as fodder for students’ blogs.

I also think that you have to be careful not to have students do the same basic blog every week. Give them some variety. That’s what Anne Davis has done with her Teachers & Technology class blog.

Ont thing that I noticed, though, looking at her students’ blogs, is that there are very few comments. I don’t know if this is by design or my accident. Or is that just what would naturally happen unless commenting were a course requirement.

- How can I design a course that will both build community and encourage continuing participation beyond the limits of the course?

I am afraid I don’t have a clue about this one yet. I can see it helping to build community, but that isn’t really a problem I have with my classes now. I have very small classes and we establish community fairly early on. But it all seems to disappear once the students leave the ESL program.

It might be nice to set up a blog for the ESL program that could serve as an orientation for new students. Huh! I like that idea! A wiki might actually work better, but I think I am sticking with blogs right now. This is something that I could do now in the middle of the semester. It could help to acquaint the current students to blogging and set up the beginnings of the program orientation blog. I could also ask former students to join and post their comments and reflections on the program as well as their advice for new students. I am going to work on that this weekend!

Wow! This has been a fruitful post! Writing as Thinking, as my friend Melanie reminds me. She has a blog at Blogger, too, called They Have Their Own Thoughts. It is about her experiences teaching in the New Orleans public schools. Check it out!

What makes communities successful

The Australian Flexible Learning Community has a great post entitled “Learning in Communities”. I like a lot of what I read there. I like the people they quote, like Howard Rheingold.

The section that I would like to mention here is entitled “What makes a community successful?” The authors cite eight attributes .

The first strikes me as being most important: a community has to be about something. That makes the community authentic. If the community has no real focus, it can’t be sustained. If the focus is not really of interest to the participants but is imposed from the outside, I don’t think it will work, either. This seems like it might be part of the problem when students don’t want to blog. We have to find a way to make students take ownership. And we have to really want them to take ownership.

Second, the authors believe that the members must feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves. This is facilitated by interaction among the members. I wonder if the type of interaction, the type of messages shared by members matters. In my recent experience with another online course, there was a lot of interaction, many messages shared. But I never felt I was part of it. For me, anyway, the type of message made a big difference. I wanted to discuss the topic differently than the others, it seems. Judging from the reduced number of messages as the course progressed, I don’t think I was alone.

The third attribute is that content and communication must be integrated. This means, as I understand it, that the discussion remain focused. I actually think this was the problem with the other course. I don’t want to say discussion was hijacked, but it didn’t seem to be widely applicable. And it didn’t always seem on-topic.

The fourth is that participants’ contributions must be appreciated. I think that is one of the many things that made the community created by this course so successful. Our early posts were always acknowledged and commented on. Commenting on the blogs was a group assignment that first week. The facilitators continued commenting throughout the course. Our questions were answered as soon as they were asked. Because of their example and the way the course was designed, I think most of us felt that sense of community.

As a fifth attribute is that a community needs ongoing communications if it is to continue. They say that communication must be a primary objective of the community as opposed to a sideline. Because this course was about blogging, it would have been hard to leave communication out of it. Here again, I have to refer to the other course I was in. The communication was not necessary. It wasn’t really required. Communication consisted of answers to assigned questions and reports of activitied undertaken. In other words, there wasn’t much real communication.

The authors offer the fact that a successful community empowers its members as the sixth point. The go on to talk about the special value of this in learning communities and explain that it is done by means of organizers giving participants the resources and information they need to “build their own learning”. Here again, the organizers of this course deserve high marks. We were given access to the knowledge, to the resources, to the “experts”. We made our own learning and, as a result, that learning is real and solid. And ours.

The seventh attribute is that a learning community must have an educational orientation. What happens within a learning community must have a pedagogical purpose. In a classroom community, there must be a gradual progression to more and more complex discussion. This is something we have really seen in this course, I think. The organizers set it up so we could get our basic introductions and such out of the way before the course actually began. Then we becan with just learning to do the basics – and all the questions that came along with that. As we have moved through the weeks, we have learned to so more complicated tasks and we have started looking at the theory, the principles underlying blogging. That is where we find outselves this week — looking at the core issues involved rather than the surface niceties.

Lastly, the authors state that a community must have a sense of history if it is to be successful. We have to know that this isn’t all going to end this coming Sunday. The authors say that as part of this history there should be a class archive. This is what we have been doing with the wiki all along.

Based on the characteristics of a successful community outlined in the article, I would have to say that this is, indeed, a successful one. I am grateful to have been a part of it. The challenge is to take what we have learned here about blogging and about communities and put it into practice in our own situations.

Community of Practice

The slides on Community of Practice we were asked to look at this week brought up a couple key points, as far as I am concerned. The first of these is the idea of passion. The first quote from Wenger talked about “groups informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise.” I think that we have been developing a community of practice here because of our passion. At the beginning there was not much shared expertise, but our interest turned into passion and that passion allowed us to each develop some expertise that we could share with others. But I think passion was the key.

Next was the quote from Brown that described communities of practice as “peers in the execution of real work”. This is another very important aspect of what we have done. From the beginning of the course, we have had very real tasks to perform, the results of which were out there for everyone to see. In our struggle to perform those tasks, we had “a real need to know what each other knows”. As I compare this experience to the one I have had with another course like this, I see the value in the real work to help us develop this community of practice. The tasks we had with the other course weren’t real ones. And the passion with which I started the course soon faded.

So I must say that I am exptremely grateful to Bee and Aaron and Graham for designing the course they way they did. And I am equally grateful to everyone in the course for the time and effort each person put in on it. I have learned a lot from so many people!