I’ve been deep in thought, planning a set of resources to support a community project, and have been struggling with how to best position these resources to best reflect a dynamic, engaged, face-to-face set of communities.
My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary and intended simply to continue and extend their conversations. The online resources are not the community. I think this part is pretty obvious.
My second reaction was that I should whip up a new site in Drupal to host the online portion of the communities – discussions, notes, questions, presentations, etc… I’ve even deployed the site and begun to craft it to reflect where I hope to help steer the communities.
But then, after thinking over Cole’s post, I started thinking that the right tack would be to just have the community members publish wherever they like (with a few suggestions offered) and pull their various bits back together in one central aggregation site to help them track the activities. It provides much more flexibility, and each community would be able to draw on any tools and resources they wished to use.
BUT.
After thinking some more, I realized that most people aren’t in the same headspace as the edtech geeks like myself. They don’t get eduglu. They don’t get distributed publishing. They don’t get aggregation. Or tagging, or rss, or rip-mix-burn. And, quite possibly, they shouldn’t have to. I take a fair number of things for granted in how I interact with various resources online. Most people don’t have the context to make sense of this, and forcing them to jump into the pool without first sticking their toes in is not productive – people will be overwhelmed, overstimulated, and alienated.
They’re in a place where they need some guidance. Not authoritarian mandates, but simple guidance. They need constraints and limits, because without them all they’ll see and hear is noise. They won’t be able to participate effectively in distributed conversations, because they will have difficulty even finding the various threads.
There are a few parameters in how a community can select resources, and I think these parameters also reflect the style of the community itself. Here’s a grossly oversimplified 5-minute diagram to help illustrate:
What we’re trying to do is hit the sweet spot, where a community resource has enough flexibility, support, control, and ease of use to enable a high quality online experience to help extend the community.
I’m now convinced that my initial draft at the centralized website resource “hub” for the community is the right approach. I’ll be providing means for the individuals within the community to basically do whatever they want to, to create their own groups (both formal and ad hoc), and to publish whatever they want within the resource. But – they won’t be required to use this website. If they want to move into a WikiSpace, or start up a WordPress blog, or any of a billion other options, they are free (and welcome) to do so. But by starting things in a more centralized and safe place, there is less risk of leaving people out in the cold by forcing them to move too quickly.
I think where you have arrived is the right place to be in — options are the best things we can promote. I like the idea that on the surface you are giving them a separate place to live and share and upon deeper inspection you are providing a framework to participate in the ways that make sense to them. We have this great thing called aggregation to help us bring it all together, so giving the audience an easy way to give content (post in your site) or a framework where they can share content (post in the their own and aggregate it) everyone wins. Keep me posted on this one.
Great post! I was working through something similar in a consult recently. I realized one of the coolest things about the edu-glu idea is that it can also be the publishing platform. I had an instructor that wanted to give students the option to blog publicly (say on blogger or wordpress), or to blog in a class-only password protected environment. An edu-glu like site gives you this flexibility, and as Cole says, everyone wins. Very cool.
Dude! Whoa …
I think you’ve got the balance right. I’ve looked at various projects that involve the same sort of groups online that you are talking about (at least, what I *think* you’re talking about – my understanding may be faulty). A big hurdle is that anyone who has an online presence doesn’t want to contribute to a group blog or have another blog for work/group/project. I want to write on my blog because it’s mine. You know – the power of positive narcissism and all that. I just want to write in my blog, tag the posts that are related to work/group/project then let someone take my feed, filter it for relevant posts then aggregate it with other people doing the same thing. I don’t care where anyone else is writing as long as I have the choice (important concept) about where I do my work.
At the same time, anyone who hasn’t tasted the ed tech kool-aid to the same extent that we (you, me, others in our blog and twitter networks) have. They need some guidance and hand-holding. They may prefer to write/post/share their stuff at the community hub so they can feel the connection with the community, and they may want some form of official support. That is their choice. Novices should probably start in the shallow end of the pool, but as people learn about other tools then gain the interest and confidence to use them they might want to move into deeper waters. That can be their choice.
In any case, the process is the same – rip, mix, aggregate/embed. All we need is a way for a website to create a feed of the content as it is updated, and some sort of tool for taking all the educational content then gluing it together. Hmmm …
the whole eduglu thing really gelled for me when Scott Leslie asked about the possibility of publishing directly within the aggregation site. of course! it all clicked into place. It was technically possible all along, but the importance of being able to publish into the same environment as more “able” individuals who are publishing elsewhere and being aggregated into the resource… Very powerful stuff. it’s still as flexible as all get out, but also provides some guidance and training wheels for newcomers or less geeky people.
I could say that I was surprised to see this post, as it’s a lesson I think you already learned, but then to do so would deny my own tendency to have to learn the same lesson a few times (endlessly? let’s hope not!). But I think you’re back in the same (correct) place you’ve been at for a while (I’m thinking back now to your response to me at NV08 about how to provide scaffolding to students who don’t want to/aren’t running their own blog, and you pointing out, quite correctly, that your Drupal aggregator solution wasn’t either/or – students could use it to get blogs, or simply register their feeds if they had them).
Ha! I just read your reply above where you even quote the same conversation! Ha! Would help if I read the comments first.
To take it one step further – while I’d much prefer it if the folks who want to use ‘loosely coupled’ tools would pick ones that actually do RSS, that itself doesn’t even need to be the barrier. Give us well formed HTML & we’ll scrape the hell out of it if we have to.
The flip side of this, the one us techies miss out I think, is what’s the ‘glue’ that makes something a community, and to what extent do these various models support it or inhibit it. I am not trying to open the network/group issue up (oh sheesh, did I just) but somehow that’s another vector to factor into the considerations. Anyways, good work, again… 😉
D … one thing I should mention is that we’ve taken this approach with our TLT Community Hubs and it works very well. Those who want to post in a specific Hub can and those that want to aggregate their content in can as well. Works well for novices and webpros.
This is the same thing I’ve struggled with during the development of the OER Handbook. There’s definitely a need for easy places for people to submit OER, though the landscape is a lot better now than it was a few years ago.
Hello, D’Arcy,
I put this into a longer blog post, but it seems like you’re getting at some version of a site that incorporates the following factors:
1. Low barrier to entry.
2. Multiple points of entry for end users (ie, choices. A user can post from multiple sites, and push their content to the institutional web space).
3. Tools for multiple ability levels — some users will only want to use their own blog, while others will be perfectly happy using a tool provided by the organization. Both choices are perfectly okay.
4. Guidelines and tutorials for posting to the system using both external tools, and publishing tools provided by the organization. At its most simple, this would include tagging guidelines, and links where external users could submit their rss feeds. This assumes, of course, a system designed to handle aggregation and embedding of external content.
5. A governance model designed to vet content, and maintain quality control over critical areas of the organizational web presence.
Aggregation (and by extension, solutions based on aggregation/embedding) are difficult for non-geeks to grok — questions I have encountered include, “Where does the information go?” and “Does it mean anybody can publish anything on my site?” — obviously, there are others, but people still have a hard time getting their head around how to work within a less restrictive environment. That, combined with a serious mistrust of people to not commit random acts of idiocy, helps explain some of the restrictions I’ve seen in the limits placed on greater community involvement.