electro-textual

Michael Coghlan spoke at the recent ACE e-learning showcase on the topic of building online community. (A re-working of his piece from the Community Engagement showcase in Cairns Nov. ’07.)

For 21C learning, “you need a gang!” according to Mike Seyfang. (NB: Thanks mike S for your comment: i wonder where the “paraphrase” comes from  ;-]

It’s all about collaboration and connection.
“a gang”: Having a group of friends and colleagues within easy reach is a good way to strengthen your knowledge and understanding through the magic of PLN (Personal Learning Network).

Michael played us a video of a pastor from the US who vehemently believes that community is not possible without physical presence. That you can have connection online but not community.

There are all sorts of semantic debates about whether you have connection, community, or a network, in online environments. Michael firmly believes that community is possible. 

My favourite is slide 13, where he said:

“Online Community – what’s the appeal?

• You connect less with some of the people around you in your daily life!
  
• You connect with people you already know via a different medium (online). (You get to know people differently)
  
• You connect with people you would otherwise have had no contact with”

.. and happily acknowledged that there are plenty of people he’d rather not meet (in the daily physical world) at all. For Michael it’s much better to connect with like-minded souls, than to endure the presence of people who happen to be in the same physical environment.

Here’s the presentation with voiceover ..
(via the audio goodness of a “slidecast”).

Much of the story focusses on Michael’s experiences with the Webheads, an online community of people who have got to know each other really well over the last decade or so; who started off as friends in cyberspace, but who have now met up in person in many different places.

He talks about many tools used for building community, such as 

• twitter (and yammer)
• twemes.com
• poll everywhere (which he demonstrated live)
• flickr

Full story of this ACE e-showcase event on the Access ACE e-showcase site.

i was recently reading Lankshear and Knobel’s piece on Facebook as an environment for multiliteracies (more on that over here).

There is some disagreement around these social networking sites, that you must be self-centred to use them, or that they will damage your brain (eg this article). 

For me it’s about staying connected with colleagues and friends all over the world; staying in the loop.

i use different environments for different purposes: so on facebook i’m a social creature, while on twitter i aim to appear as a professional educator. It’s taken me a year to come to grips with twitter, while i felt at home in facebook within a couple of weeks.

Anyway, twitter is so 5 minutes ago .. i found this hilarious video via the inimitable michael coghlan in SA: “the world of nano-blogging”. Look for the special “Flutter-eyes” glasses, with the in-eye news scrolls. Could we mix these with a direct upload from our pov glasses too?

i was thinking that new vocabularies arise around new technologies and their accompanying social practices. Think of the podcast, coming from the iPod; and then the vodcast, being a video podcast.

Now of course we have a bunch of new words from twitter, including tweet, re-tweet .. tweetival, tweetfest, tweethearts .. (and so on)

If Tony Karrer says we are all infovores now (with an insatiable thirst for information) ..then i think i have met some Twittervores!

Plenty of places online where these new vocabularies are stored: eg the urban dictionary, and yes a “Twictionary”. Language just keeps expanding doesn’t it!

(PS to be honest i thought twitter was just awful until Greg Bird pointed me toward TweetDeck .. where you can be selective about following just a small group of people, set up ongoing keyword searches .. )