Produced by commoncraft, Aug 6 2007. This video describes social bookmarking in a fun and decidedly low-tech fashion. Runtime is just over 3 minutes. Please note that this video is for sale, though it is possible to watch an evaluation copy, for free, from this URL.
""Describe your preparation for and participation during discussion: note-taking, responding to e-mailed discussion questions and prompts, office hours, addressing or raising questions during discussion. How would you like your own participation to change, develop, or continue?""
I encounter a version of this "you didn't inform us" from students and teachers who can't find items in the top two topic blocks of their community. I don't know how to redesign the community to achieve more clarity. Maybe the answer lies in having "open office hours online" to offer digestible (i.e., not too long) explicit orientations to the community.
"Unlike most traditional academic conferences, sessions at an unconference don't consist of one or three or five people delivering papers to an audience. Instead, they might feature project demonstrations, discussions, creative work sessions, or other formats that build on the knowledge and expertise of whoever attends. For the Texas THATCamp (and I think this is fairly typical at others), participants posted session ideas beforehand on the website, followed by a 45-minute scheduling process as THATCamp began. Topic headings generated by those initial session ideas were posted on the walls of a large meeting room, and participants circulated through the space to meet up with others interested in similar topics. After some productive chaos (which admittedly tested my structure- and schedule-loving personality a bit) the group developed a schedule of sessions that represented not only a variety of interests but also the desire to cluster certain topics into tracks. Like any conference, I frequently wanted to be in two places at once - which I see as one marker of the event's success."
From the Overview, "Cal-PASS is an initiative that collects, analyzes and shares student data in order to track performance and improve success from elementary school through university."