Group items tagged

Purpose/Outcome What is the desired outcome for the group? What is the INTENT? Purpose/Outcome # What is the purpose and desired outcome for the group? What is the INTENT? Does it have a mission or a vision that you can communicate to potential members? # Are the benefits measurable and visible to members and potential members? Are the benefits focused on the individual member? The group? # Is the outcome determined by the organizer? Group members? Both? # If the group is part of a larger organization, is it consistent with organizational goals and culture? # Is the group's purpose something that can only be done/accomplished online? Will it replace something offline? Or is it some combination?

When times are tough, institutions are under more competitive pressure than ever to do well for their students. Unfortunately this is the precise time when cash is in short supply, faculty workloads may have increased, and development/support staff and budgets are often slashed. For institutions that want to do a more effective job of competing and meeting external demands for quality, it's time for a more frugal approach to innovation. One approach to frugal innovation: help faculty share low-cost, low-risk, easy-to-explain improvements in teaching and learning with each other.  That's really two ideas, and they go well together: Faculty helping each other improve their courses (with a slight assist from staff to help them get together) Low Threshold Activities and Applications (LTAs) -- small steps toward improvement -- that each faculty member can grasp quite quickly and try safely, easily, and inexpensively and that promise real rewards if successful, e.g.  better learning, time-savings.  (For on LTAs, click here.)  "Frugal": These kinds of improvements are a good fit for peer-to-peer assistance because LTAs can be communicated quickly and easily: e.g., in: a casual conversation among faculty, a 5-15 minute workshop scheduled as an agenda item in a departmental meeting and led by a faculty member, a page-long description written by a faculty member and appearing on the web or in a newsletter, an eClip (brief video clip online that explains how to do something or why it's worth doing), or just a few sentences in an email or on a web page.

JISC Collections mission is to support UK education and research by delivering affordable, relevant and sustainable online content. Funded by JISC, JISC Collections provides its members with a catalogue of free and subscription-based online resources such as e-journals, e-books, full text databases, digital images, online film, and geospatial data. Core to the service provided by JISC Collections is the quality evaluation of online resources, the expert negotiation process and the efficient national licensing undertaken for each online resource. JISC Collections always strives to widen accessibility to online resources, save its members time and money and to evolve licensing in line with members needs and the digital environment.

UChannel presents public affairs events from academic institutions all over the world. Here you can see the full-length presentations of faculty, policy-makers, and researchers who have been invited by member universities to discuss the problems of the world -- and how to solve them. These events are put online as a public service, brought to you by the institutions who support UChannel. The UChannel consortium is led by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The other Charter Members are: - Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) - Middlebury College's Rohatyn Center for International Affairs - The LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. These lectures are distributed under the Creative Commons "Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives" Deed.

"Social Media Guidelines Social media tools have allowed people and organizations to go beyond the physical boundaries of location, language, culture, and other limitations to connect and collaborate in powerful ways. We strongly encourage the Feinberg School of Medicine community - faculty, staff, researchers, students and alumni groups - to engage, build a network of like-minded scholars, stay connected, share information, and help us promote the medical school's goals and vision. Social media technologies, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, are primarily communication tools. They create opportunities for us to take part in global conversations and reach out to the broadest possible audience. Your professional activities online and off-line reflect both on you and our organization. Therefore, it is important that any members of the Feinberg community engaging in online dialogue are informed of established guiding principles and available tools. The Office of Communications provides the following guiding principles to raise awareness of current best practices and help members of the Feinberg community participate within social media channels. For additional employee code of conduct information, please refer to the Faculty handbook (pdf) and the Staff handbook (pdf). "

Understanding Member Roles and Behaviors We all know that humans will be, well, humans. Just as in offline community spaces, there are a range of behaviors that community hosts will encounter. These mirror offline behaviors, but manifest differently in the text only environment. Without the non-verbal cues, we can misinterpret a person's actions online. Likewise, one voice can be very loud. Good stuff really is great, and difficult stuff can be awful. It helps to understand some of the roles that members take on so you can anticipate and appropriately respond to different situations.

Community Member Roles and Types By Nancy White Updated 1/12/01 Every community and online group is different. The purposes vary, the structures are different -- and the people are different. But there are some common participation styles or patterns that have been observed. These can be helpful when you are trying to understand participation patterns in an online interaction space. Take note that for each style, there are attributes that can be seen as both positive and negative. That said, be careful of stereotyping people.

Home About the eLearning Network What is the eLN? The eLearning Network (eLN) is a non-profit organisation run by the elearning community for the elearning community. The eLN is the number one source for guidance on best practice and future trends in technology-based learning and development at work, with more than 1500 members in the UK and beyond. Here's why it has never been a better time to join the eLN: Inspiration Technology has never developed so quickly and with such far-reaching implications. You need information you can trust, practical advice and standards to aspire to. As a member of the eLN expect to be inspired: * The E-Learning Awards, run each year in conjunction with e.learning age magazine, provide a showcase for the very best elearning projects that the UK has to offer. In 2009, we are extending our programme to recognise talented practitioners in a wide range of disciplines from graphic design to project management. * Our 1-day conferences address the most critical issues faced by the elearning community and provide an opportunity to explore future trends. In 2009, we are looking at hot topics such as making the case for elearning, creating engaging and effective elearning content, the future of learning management systems, and next generation blended learning. * Our face-to-face events are supplemented by a series of free online events and, for the first time, premium webinars providing opportunities to interact with internationally-reknown experts.

Curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning is the way of the future, but it's a future most training departments are not quite ready to adopt. Most of us agree on where we're headed: to ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, where members of self-sustaining communities of professionals participate because they take pride in maintaining their standards and doing a great job, and where everyone strives to be all she can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that's what we're after. If only it were that simple. Learning professionals are already over-burdened. Budgets are tight. The economy is a shambles. Management demands cost-effective, rapid-impact solutions. And they want them up and running tomorrow. Pulling this off requires choosing among a myriad of new technologies, coordinating with IT, cobbling together social networking tools, CYA with legal, monitoring social network performance, and answering demands for new approaches, all the while doing the old job with fewer resources and more demands.

FORA.tv is the world's first on-demand, interactive fully searchable media portal delivering spoken words from the world's great writers, leaders, activists and thinkers. FORA community members can experience content via its immersive website with synchronized transcripts, chapters and user generated posts and content. It is one of the primary goals of FORA.tv to foster discussion and debate on issues relevant to our time. To that end, FORA.tv does not endorse viewpoints expressed by the speakers in our videos. Dissenting opinions are welcome and encouraged in our video comments (but keep it civil, please).

The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. MIT is dedicated to providing its students with an education that combines rigorous academic study and the excitement of discovery with the support and intellectual stimulation of a diverse campus community. We seek to develop in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others How to teach when learning is everywhere. by Will Richardson Print Forward Share Comments(0) Comment RSS Four teachers from High Tech High. Bringing Their A-Game: Humanities teacher Spencer Pforsich, digital arts/sound production teacher Margaret Noble, humanities teacher Leily Abbassi, and math/science teacher Marc Shulman make lessons come alive on the High Tech campuses in San Diego. Credit: David Julian Earlier this year, as I was listening to a presentation by an eleven-year-old community volunteer and blogger named Laura Stockman about the service projects she carries out in her hometown outside Buffalo, New York, an audience member asked where she got her ideas for her good work. Her response blew me away. "I ask my readers," she said. I doubt anyone in the room could have guessed that answer. But if you look at the Clustrmap on Laura's blog, Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference, you'll see that Laura's readers -- each represented by a little red dot -- come from all over the world. She has a network of connections, people from almost every continent and country, who share their own stories of service or volunteer to assist Laura in her work. She's sharing and learning and collaborating in ways that were unheard of just a few years ago.

First Experience Asssessing E-Portfolios December 17, 2008 by Terry Anderson As an instructor in Athabasca University's Master of Distance Education program, I was involved in providing an e-portfolio option to replace the standard comprehensive exam process for non thesis route students. The old 'comps' consisted of the candidate writing yet two more essays on material covered in the porgram and defending the essays with two faculty members via audio conference. As students in our program write at least 30 papers over the course of the 11 courses in the program the added value of writing yet two more seems of little value. We use the elgg platform with its "presentation" plugin to create the e-portfolio. We extracted the graduate competencies from throughout the program and then required students to demonstrate with a blog reflection and an artifact or two from their course work or 'real life' to show how they have achieved this competence. The assignment also called for a final terminal "reflection" on the whole program and the e-portfolio exercise.

uPortal uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. This group sees an institutional portal as an abridged and customized version of the institutional Web presence... a "pocket-sized" version of the campus Web. Portal technology adds "customization" and "community" to the campus Web presence. Customization allows each user to define a unique and personal view of the campus Web. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies. uPortal is an open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP and J2EE. It is a collaborative development project with the effort shared among several of the JA-SIG member institutions. You may download uPortal and use it on your site at no cost.

The goal was to think "outside the box" to create a web portal environment to help bridge on- and off-campus worlds, improve access to resources, and allow community members to publish their own information portlets and collections. This session podcast explores what one campus came up with as a next-generation web portal.

" The following document is posted by the University to guide SFU faculty members, employees or students who manage social media channels online in the name of the University. It may also aid those who have personal social media channels. It is a compilation of "best practices" from universities and social media pioneers. Blogs, social networks and Web sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, Second Life and YouTube are exciting channels to share knowledge, express creativity, and connect with others. The University supports your participation in these online communities. The following guidelines from respected online university, agency and industry sources will help you use these forums effectively, protect your personal and professional reputation, and help you to follow SFU branding and policies. "

Yochai Benkler's wealth of nations book online Next Chapter: Part I: The Networked Information Economy » read paragraph Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Why Facilitate Online? Online group interactions do not always "happen" spontaneously. They require care and nurturing: facilitation. The core of facilitation and hosting is to serve the group and assist it in reaching its goals or purpose. Some describe this role as a gardener, a conductor, the distributed leadership of jazz improvisers, a teacher, or an innkeeper. It can be this and more. Levitt, Popkin and Hatch, in their article "Building Online Communities for High Profile Internet Sites" wrote, "Communities are organic in nature and site owners can't make them successful or force them to grow. As site owner can only provide the fertile ground on which a community may grow, and then provide some gentle guidance to help the group thrive. Much of the challenge in fostering an online community is social, rather than technical." Facilitation is a balance between functions that enhance the environment and content, create openness and opportunity, and functions that protect the members from harassment.

Composica 4.0 is a social e‑learning authoring system that offers real-time collaboration among team members and provides a powerful programming- free WYSIWYG environment to create and deliver high-quality interactive e‑learning 2.0 content with embedded social media.

Acceptable Use What am I allowed to write on my blog? You can write about anything that you like on your blog - a great night out, an idea for a project, or your favourite food! However, you must bear in mind that the University has strict regulations about the use of computing facilities, which all users are required to accept before they are assigned a IT Services username. They cover authorisation, copyright and defamation. Disciplinary procedures are in place to deal with breaches of these regulations. The regulations incorporate conditions for acceptable use of the national academic IT network, JANET. There is also a code of conduct that covers use of the public work areas and connection to the campus data network. For more information see the Sunderland Blogs terms and conditions. Also note that your blog is not an official means of communication with the University or any member of the University. If you wish to discuss something with your tutor or the counselling service, for example, you must get in touch with them via email, telephone, or in person.