Group items tagged

By Naava Frank in e-Jewish Philanthropy, May 2 2013. The author compares online communities to cocktail parties, in order to remind community sponsors that "guests" must be cultivated and introduced to each other. She describes a "relationship infrastructure" of equal importance to the technology infrastructure. The article concludes with a protocol that includes working in pairs, requiring an "assignment" (e.g. common goal) and for participants to post their responses -- and then to reply to each others' responses.

Frank's protocol matches KPI's findings in terms of engagement.

By Oliver Dreon, PhD in Online Education section of Faculty Focus website, May 13 2013. Citing research titled Critical inquiry in a text-based environment...from The Internet and Higher Education (2000), the author have 5 steps to improve the community aspect of online classes, including introductions and a "common area" for students to meet for discussions that are off-topic.

Confirming much of what we've learned with our communities.

""A new online community devoted soley to education in the 21st Century." Anyone with thoughts on education is welcome. We have so much to talk about."

Published by staff from Forum One, "The Online Community Report features best practices, strategies, research, and events for Online Community and Social Media professionals," per About the OC Report. Editors include Jim Cashel, Heather Virga, and other Forum One staff.

Users of Aggregage are Bloggers, Marketers and Readers."Aggregage creates online communities by bringing together content from the best sources around particular topics. We identify a topic (Social Media, eLearning, Careers, Leadership, etc), find high-quality blogs around that topic, and then display their posts on a new site dedicated to that given topic. The original site on eLearning has become the highest traffic site on that topic."

By Dawn Foster in Web Worker Daily, Jan 30 2009. This is a nice article (with slides) outlining what an online community manager does.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource hosts communities for members to contribute and share learning and teaching materials. The communities are categorized by higher education disciplines. In addition to contributing materials, members can comment about outside learning materials that are used, share information about themselves and knowledge about their discipline, put together personal collections to use in the classroom and become a Peer Reviewer of learning materials in member's discipline. In addition to discipline communities, there is the Community of MERLOT Partner Academic Support Services (COMPASS). This community is made up of ePortfolio, Faculty Development, Library and Information Services, Online Courses and Pedagogy. The ePortflio Portal centers educational resources around ePortfolio use in higher education, among students and faculty. Partner Communities like GLOBE extend the MERLOT network. The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Services Austrailia, LORNET in Canada, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan and MERLOT with the goal to "work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content." The majority of MERLOT members are faculty/instructors and the balance are students, campus administrators, librarians and other members of higher education who are concerned with online learning materials, technology, teaching and learning, and innovation.

Headed by Amy Bruckman, Associate professor at Georgia Tech, this Electronic Learning Communities center engages Ph.D. level students in studying the application of constructionist social learning online. They are doing some fascinating work, such as developing software to support leaders of learning communities, offering young A-A males the chance to be game testers and to use that experience credential as a route into computer science studies and careers, etc. These are but two research examples; there are more.

Gao, F. & Sun, Y. (2010). In C. Maddux et al. (Eds.) Research Highlights in Information Technology and Teacher Education. Article examines how to use VoiceThread to support online learning communities for professional development in teacher education

Blog and business site for Nancy White, a leader in "online group facilitation of distributed work, learning and community groups." The site includes both a blog that speaks to White's current work and interests, and also resources for online communities and related work.

White is a favorite of the KPI team.

By Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, published by CP Square, 2009.

Posted by Hans de Zwart to his blog, Technology as a Solution..., July 19, 2011. de Zwart conducted an experiment with his virtual team (18 people) asking them to "narrate their work," using the microblogging tool Yammer. He tried to make the rules as easy as possible, so there was no requirement on how frequently they blogged, etc. At the end, he conducted a survey, which is summarized in this post. I strongly recommend reading the original post as well (link in 1st paragraph).

Is this the equivalent of our "Rants and Raves" or coffee klatch? Would microblogging seem less onerous a task, so that we might do it more frequently? Is this the "killer app" for project management?

By Avdi Grimm and a service of ShipRise LLC. This site does not appear to be updated too often, but contains podcasts and posts about "geographically dispersed" workers, or those who, like us, work on virtual teams. The tabs Tips & Hacks and Toolkit both seem useful.

Website for the new textbook Key Concepts in Geomorphology by Paul Bierman and Dave Montgomery, published by W.H. Freeman. This text is, in effect, being "crowd-sourced," with members of the community invited to vet the work and to submit "vignettes," which are brief electronic supplements.

Posted by Clarance Fisher on his blog Remote Access, July 19 2011. Per his post, Fisher first wrote about a tool that would help "global kids in global classrooms to connect with each other." He then used the site vworker.com, where people post their projects, inviting coders to bid on them. Once he had a price for his project, he used ChipIn.com (for only one week) to raise the money for his project.

I've bookmarked for several reasons: (1) Love the idea of online community for kids around the globe (2) Vworker.com sounds like a great resource (3) Very interesting to see a social fundraising tool like ChipIn.com in action

Pronounced "haystack," this is the website for the Humanties, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. The site has all sorts of interesting features, including online groups (by topic) with open membership, notices of a wide variety of calls for papers and interesting blog posts and events. One of HASTAC's founders is Cathy Davidson (follow davidson tag for more). Membership is free and open to all.

18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online [Paperback]

The Community Roundtable is a an information services organization dedicated to the business of community. The goal of The Community Roundtable is to further the discipline of community management and provide practitioners a place to find peers, best practices, and resources. We are a member-based organization with an annual membership fee and we require members to be a community management or social media practitioner.

"By providing a space for campus clubs, groups, and organizations to interact online, colleges actually encourage community growth and participation. CampusCruiser can meet the needs of both traditional communities with virtual office space as well as web-born communities"