George Roberts :: Blog :: Emerge usability

Comments

1. Hi,

   I was very kindly invited to join in discussions with this group. I've posted some evaluative comments in my own blog in emerge but something else might be worth commenting upon here with regards to pedagogical applications and usability.

   We are, many of us, members of different informal online communities. I certainly am and have been involved with one community for several years. One of the things I introduced to the community was the idea of informal online learning projects. We've published articles and a book chapter together on it which was a nice outcome.

   It occurs to me that social networking within an organisation -voluntary or otherwise- might be facilitated by individuals conceptualising their interests into informal learning projects and to gather support for others to join in. That's been the model I introduced with the WAOE (http://waoe.org). We've so far put together around 9 such projects the latest of which is trying out social networking software and using it to collaboratively design a notional course on learning2.0. 

   The idea is that the current collaborative course design project might be a demonstrator for others to conceptualise and bring their own project and get mentoring support from the community. There are 16 of us from the wider community engaged with this project at the moment. This is within the Ning social networking environment. That's the way we've worked before and we've had collaboration and projects from places like Mongolia, Egypt and North America.

   This is really what I would term "professional development2.0" It's not provided from the centre but rather constructed from the membership and developed within the network. Success and endurance varies with each project but it does generate collaboration and dialogue. It stems from the offline work of Alan Tough in Canada but I've re-fashioned it to see if it'll work in an online community context. Social networking software may be just what the doctor ordered to support this kind of work. We'll see.

   Elgg and Emerge may well provide a platform for similar kinds of approaches across the UK and elsewhere. Our volunteer community is in the second phase of our informal online learning project initiative. You can see the latest phase, both of which I designed and coordinate, at http://nicholas.bowskill.googlepages.com/ Our use of Ning aims to test out the utility of social networking software to see if it enhances collaboration amongst the community through such projects. Prior to this we've just used whatever tools we could beg or borrow from different sources (googlepages, old bulletin boards lying around the internet etc).

   I need to update the pages of the above site to reflect the latest social networking project but either way, might the model may be useful for thinking about working in a de-centred way in Emerge? It may be a way of networking with a purpose/focus and a way of obtaining support for your professional development needs. Then people get around something more concrete and possibly productive. Those not directly involved in the projects also get to see some of the outcomes and reports as a learning audience for activity within the initiative.

   Might this be something that would help make this environment more usable? Well its an idea I offer here.
   

    

   cheers,

   Nick Bowskill

   eChina Project Team Lancaster University
   & Freelance e-learning worker 

   Home: http://protopage.com/nickbowskill

   Informal Learning Project Base: http://nicholas.bowskill.googlepages.com/

    

   Nicholas Bowskill on Thursday, 31 May 2007, 11:50 UTC # |