The Facilitating Online Community class has gotten off to a rambunctious start - like a bunch of wild horses we're snorting and huffing, and now we're off, out of the gate and running! There has been a real flurry of posts as people across a wide range of technological experience and skill, personal and professional backgrounds, primary languages, time zones, bandwidth and Meyers Briggs typologies grapple with the course instructions and attempt to fulfill the first week's assignments.
It's no small list of assignments either, even though it sounds innocuous enough: introducing ourselves on the wiki (with a link to our new blog), joining the Google mailing list, setting up a dedicated blog for the course (or being willing to post on an existing blog), posting about what you hope to get out of the course and any questions you have, and aggregating everyone else's blogs in the RSS reader of your choice. That doesn't count reading the 200+ posts on the Google mailing list or scanning the posts on 30+ (and rising) class blogs.
Whew! I'm exhausted just writing them down, and I'm an online vetran. I was feeling acutely aware that this is perhaps the first exposure that a number of people will have had to several new technologies, all at once - wikis, blogs, RSS feeds - and I have to admit when I first started I was irritated at what seemed to me the unnecessarily chaotic nature of this process. I couldn't help but wonder whether it was a test of some kind, designed to weed out 90% of the students, :-) or at least all but the die-hard chaos freaks. :-)
I wondered why it wasn't all made simpler, which of course it could have been if we were all working on one platform, like Ning or some other integrated CMS where the blogs and email conversations could all be in one place - organized in threads and groups and cross-referenced with tags. Or even if there were suggestions for one or two choices of blog or RSS software and clear directions on how to use it. But Noooooooo. Chaos. :-) Ok, enough of my rant. The truth is that there is a lot of chaos in online communities sometimes, and there was actually something a bit exciting, even fun, about all the jostling and rustling and crunching and helping each other get a handle on what's what.
I've had a quick scan of the blogs and read through the Google list, and now I'm feeling up to speed and ready to rock! :-)
Hi Amy
Great quote at the beginning. I was just looking into the book 'The world is flat' by Thomas Friedman before reading your post and felt it matched perfectly!
Can you see the parts Violeta highlighted? If not, join the diigo group to see them (yes, yet another tool!).
Illya
Posted by: Illya Arnet | August 09, 2008 at 08:43 AM
I found that the first week caused too much anxiety in some people because some others were trying to find a way (through technology, of course) to get organized. This meant finding a way to stay in contact with the participants' blogs which, in my opinion, is the place where the most interesting conversations take place. But these are just normal issues for the first week of many courses, I guess. Now that things seem to be settled down, I hope that the conversations start to flourish among groups through their blogs. I am still looking for my preferred connections but I guess those will come to surface naturally as soon as I start posting to my blog. At the moment I am just reading papers and blogs and thinking about our assignment for these two weeks. This is all new to me and I don't find it easy to rationalize about the subject yet.
Posted by: Joao | August 09, 2008 at 10:09 AM