Confessions of an elearning skeptic

Overview of chosen community

The community I chose was The Content Wrangler Community, a Ning-based community created by Scott Abel as the communal arm of his web site, The Content Wrangler.    The Content Wrangler Community is aimed at people involved in content management, which is “a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information” (Wikipedia 2008).  The areas covered by the community are diverse and include areas such instructional design, technical writing and content management.  The community is relatively new, coming into being in March 2008, and has 1591 members (as at 1^st May 2008). Community members are predominantly from North America, though there is representation from over 20 countries including Finland, Russia, New Zealand, South Africa and Israel.

What learning activities are occurring within the community?

The learning activities/events occurring within the community take five key forms:

(1) General forums

The Content Wrangler Community currently contains 35 general forums. While most of these forums represent the selling and job-seeking arm of the community there are four forums focused on collaboration and learning, these being:

• About the Content Wrangler Community – this forum provides help and advice to new community members
• Styles Guides – This forum provides access to a range of style guides for use in the development of content
• Presentation Slide Deck- This forum provides access to PowerPoint presentations from relevant conferences and other events
• Technical Writing – This forum provides access to a range of resources to help those new to technical writing

(2) Groups

There are currently 92 groups within the community focusing on a diverse range of topics.  Group membership is varied, with the largest group containing 113 members and the smallest containing three members.  The average group membership is around 20.

(3) Links

One of the community’s sidebars provides a number of links to items of interest from other web sites via www.thecontentwrangler.com.

(4) Conference information

Another of the community’s sidebars contains updated information about conferences centering around with content management.

(5) General networking

The community also allows for general networking between community members through the ability to add ‘friends’ to your personalised member’s page and communicate with them directly.

My experiences as a learner within The Content Wrangler Community

To commence with I needed to spend time going through the forums, getting a feel for what was going on and where I wanted to focus my efforts. As a result my initial role within the community was that of ‘lurker’, which is a person who reads the posts of others but does not participate (Wikipedia 2008).   The community was very much in its early days at this stage, and I was certainly not the only ‘lurker’.  I did make a some general posts to show my enthusiasm for the community in the hope that this would help keep its early momentum going, but my learning was very much focused on understand the range of what was on offer within the community. As specialised groups began to develop I found it much easier to target my individual areas of interest, joining three groups in total, these being: 

• Blogging – a group dealing with all aspects of web logging
• Leading Change – a group for those with an interest in leading and facilitating change
• Training Development Group – a group for people involved in the development of training courses and materials

On joining these groups I made some exploratory posts to get a feel for the types of people within the group and the learning opportunities present.  I also took the opportunity to share my experiences and/or expertise when sought by forums within a group.  In particular I found one group, the Training and Development Group, useful with a number of posts leading me to resources which have allowed me to continue my learning in relation to elearning.

Evaluation of The Content Wrangler as a Learning Community

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of The Content Wrangler Community as a learning community I used the definition which was formed in assignment 1.1 (Reason 2008) as a framework.  This framework contains the following five elements:

(1) A learning community should value learning and the sharing of knowledge

I strongly feel that the central intention of The Content Wrangler Community is learning and the sharing of knowledge. However, the actual learning and sharing that was occurring within the groups that I joined was minimal, demonstrating that the membership of the community is yet to live up to the intention of the community’s creator.

(2) Learning communities have structures in place to allow people to work together and address their learning needs collaboratively (Kilpatrick, Barrett and Jones 2003)

The Content Wrangler Community certainly has a number of structures in place to support collaboration including over 100 groups and forums covering a vast range of topics. 

(3) Learning communities expose their members to a range of new ideas and different outlooks (Kilpatrick, Barrett and Jones 2003)

Unfortunately, my experience of the groups that I joined indicates that the Content Wrangler Community does not do this well.  All the groups that I joined were dominated by a small group of individuals and this domination meant that each group only offered ideas and information from a small sector of the total membership.

(4) Learning communities empower members to take control of their own learning (Downes 2004)

The Content Wrangler is to certainly gives the learner easily access to information on a vast range of information, and does so in manner which is empowering to the learner.  However, I did not feel empowered as a learner within this community, mainly because the choices available to me were actually very limited due to the lack on content and regular contribution.

(5) Learning communities value the contributions of members within the community (Downes 2004)

Activity within the community has certainly waned and this has significantly impacted on the value I felt that my contributions received as a learner.  The majority of posts in the groups I participated in received no reply at all.  As a learner, I don’t want all my contributions to be applauded, but some recognition every now and then is very reinforcing and I found this lack of recognition and acknowledgement has dissuaded me somewhat as both a contributor and as a learner. 

My interpretation of my experiences

Overall I found this process of engaging with The Content Wrangler Community to be an excellent process, allowing me to take the abstract concepts from my research and see their practical application.  Of particular importance was the ability to:

(1)   Gain insight into the development of an on-line learning community

Being only a relatively new group I had an excellent opportunity to observe The Content Wrangler Community develop as an online community and was surprised at how the development of this on-line group aligned very closely with the Tuckman’s stages of group development, as outlined by Smith (2005).  At the time of its creation The Content Wrangler Community went through a distinct ‘forming’ process characterised by minimal posting activity on the forums and a lack of specialist groups. This was quickly followed by a ‘storming’ phase which was a process where individuals within the community created specifically focused groups and attempted to attract a sub-set of the members to these groups.  During this time there was a definite internal struggle for the interest of the community members.  The community now appears to be moving into the ‘norming’ stage, with each of the specialist groups created developing their own structures, rules and sets of ‘norms’. 

(2)   Reinforce the concept of brocolage and how I apply it

Being involved in such a large and diverse community has really brought home the concept of bricolage as outlined by Seely Brown and Duguid (1999).  The sheer volume of information that could potentially be available within a community such as The Content Wrangler Community is very daunting and it is essential that I, as a learner, can make informed choices about what information to accept and what to reject.  Personally, I found that there was an element of trial an error in this process where I gradually developed a pool of people that I ‘trusted’ based of the fact that the information they had provided in the past was of value to my learning experience and validated via further investigation.  These lessons will be very useful when I guide other learners through this process. 

(3)   Observe the development of power structures within learning groups

Saunders (1999) points out that ‘it is important to remember that power is not always shared in a learning group’.  Thegroups that I observed reinforced this, clearly demonstrating the power that the person that starts a forum has and their ability, through the exercise of this power, to affect the openness and extent of learning that occurs within that forum.  One forum I observed was clearly established with the intention to put the creator up as a ‘font of all knowledge’ on the forum topic.  Contributors who sought knowledge or assistance were quickly replied to, whilst others who treated the creator as an equal, received no reply and quickly lost interest.

On the whole I feel that I learned a great deal from the experience as it gave me a practical grounding in the theory that we have studied to date.  In particular, it clearly demonstrated that learning communities offer great potential for learning, but that effective learning communities are a combination of a good technological framework and proactive membership.  Without both these essential elements a learning community will never reach its full potential. 

References:

Downes, S. 2004, ‘Learning in communities’, Australian Flexible Learning Framework, Canberra, viewed 27 March 2008, http://community.flexiblelearning.net.au/GlobalPerspectives/content/article_5249.htm.

Kilpatrick, S. I., Barrett, M. S., & Jones, T. A. (2003). Defining learning communities. In Proceedings of the AARE/NZARE Conference 2003. Auckland, New Zealand, viewed  22 March 2008,  http://www.aare.edu.au/03pap/jon03441.pdf.

na 2008, Lurker ,Wikipedia, viewed 29^th April 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker

na 2008, Content Management ,Wikipedia, viewed 29^th April 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Management

Reason, M. 2008, Assignment 1.1, Confessions of an elearning skeptic, Sydney, viewed 2nd May 2008,  http://malreason.edublogs.org/assignment-11/

Saunders, S (1999) ‘Social Psychology of Adult Learning’ in James Athanasou (ed.), Adult Educational Psychology, Sydney Social Press, Katoomba, pp 26-71.

Seely Brown, J. & Duguid, O. 1999, Learning, Working and playing in the digital age, Transcript from a conference on Higher Education of the American Association for Higher Education, http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown.html, viewed 27th February 2008.

Smith, M.K. 2005, ‘Bruce W. Tuckman – forming, storming, norming and performing in groups, the encyclopaedia of informal education, viewed 30th April 2008, www.infed.org/thinkers/tuckman.htm