The research conducted by Ardichvili et al indicted that, for some cultures, the way participants engage with an online community will be quite different.  Their study points out that common design is based around the individualistic culture (eg most western cultures) that “place personal goals ahead of the goals of a larger social group”.  This style of design tends to disadvantage participants from more collectivist cultures (eg China, Brazil and Russia) who tend to ”give priority to the goals of the larger collective or group”. 

How does this impact design?

(1) Expectations in relation to participation in online discussion may need to be modified for different countries as participants from some cultures will not be as forward with their ideas as those from other cultures.

(2) One size does not necessarily fit all and the look and feel of a site may need to be varied from one country to the next.

(3) Guidelines for usage, netiquette etc need to be very clear and not make any assumptions about the users underlying knowledge of the rule for social interaction as these may not be consistent across countries.

(4) In some countries it may be necessary to run a local community beside the global community and use ‘knowledge intermediaries’ to bridge the gap between the two.

(1) That it is vital that I consider the perspective of the participants because this prespective(s) will have a distinct affect on how they interact with the community and, as a result, what learning actually occurs.

(2) It is vital that the participants in the community engage with that community.  This engagement needs to be encouraged through the creation of value in the mind of the participant, both that they value the learning that is occurring and that their knowledge and expertise is valued by the other participants.

(3) That any chosen design must support the flow of information to all participants that could benefit from it.  This includes ensuring that separate discussion on the same topic cannot occur without some form of linkage between them.

(4) The learners must be able to shape the direction of the community and that this ability must be fairly shared between experienced participants and those who are less experienced.  Structures that allow ‘experts’ to dominate will have a tendancy to focus too much on the preservation of knowledge, to the detriment of the challenge of this knowedge and the creation of new knowledge.  On the opposite side, neither should the community be dominated soley by ‘novices’ as this will have a tendency to bog the community down.  A good design will spread the experts evenly across it and provide a good mix of experts and novices.

(5) A good design should give all users equal power in relation to the ability to contibute and to create new groups, forums etc.

(6) A good design should encourge the community members to be members of other communtities and should faciliate access to information from outside the community.  By doing this it will avoid the community becoming too isolated from the broader world and ensure that ideas can flow from outside.

(1) Participation vs reification

Participation deals directly with the concept of providing a structure and processes for learning, whereas reification is more about giving learners the ’space’ to negotiate thier own meaning.   Good design will balance these two.  I believe that The Content Wrangler does this well, because it provides a rigid structure of clearly divided groups and forums but, within these, provide a space where the participants can direct their own learning and collaborate to negotiate meaning as well as draw upon past learning, and interpretation.

(2) Preservation and creation of knowledge:

This dimensation is about balancing the preservation of meaning and the need to direct future learning towards emerging needs.  Once again, I feel that the Content Wrangler does this well (or will do once it has been around for a longer period) as its structure allows for the easy access and recording of past knowledge, learning and interpretations, but has the flexibility to allow the groups and/or forums to go off on a tangent it the need arises without the treat of losing all that has happened in the past.  The ability for all participants to contribute to the collaborative processes also means that there is always the ability to challenge past interpretations and knowledge and, by doing so, create new knowledge and interpretations.

(3) Spreading of Information:

This is about a design’s ability to faciliate the spreading of information.  The Content Wrangler does this well, in most cases, as its groups and forums are based around the principle of sharing and collabroation.  One issue with the design, though, is that the division of participants into groups is not necessarily conducive to the spread of information across groups and it is possible to have mutilple versions of the same information present without any linking threads.

 (4) Home for identities:

A group learning environment is one where each learner can have an identity.  The Content Wrangler certainly meets this need by allowing the participants within the community to create, and shape the direction and definition of, the individual groups and forums.   As such it is not a rigid, pre-defined environment.  Instead it is an environment that can be shaped and directed by the individials within it, but in a consistent and pre-deinfed way that allow all users to participate in this process.

The next step is to examine how my understanding of this reading will inform my work of designing a learning community for assignment 2.  This will be the focus of a separate post.  Watch this space!

The second day was certainly focussed more on ‘convential’ types of classroom/face-to-face learning with the key session of the day a presentation by Dr Michael Marquardt on Action Learning. With my current focus on elearning I spent a lot of time pondering the significance of Action Learning to the elearning sphere, as most information about Action Learning implied a face-to-face activity rather than something done digitally. During my trip home on the train I started to draw some threads between Action Learning and Learning Communities that I think are valuable in my study of online Learning Communities. Like Action Learning, online Learning Communities:

• Place more value on the questions than on the answers. Most threads start with a question and the better the question the better the outcome of the thread.
• Place learning as a key outcome of the process. True learning communities are not about showing-up your knowledge, but on contributing and learning from others.
• Require participants to ‘listen’ and treat each other with respect.

With this in mind I’m keen to read further about action learning and see how it can inform my study of learning communities.  I bought Dr Marquardt’s book ‘Leading with questions‘ so I will be studing that closely too to see how I can apply it to my learning and my context.

Well, the conference is over for another year and I’m keen to exploit my post-conference enthusiasm and try and implement a few of the key things I have learned. Fingers crossed.

As well as giving me a great laugh, the article has got me thinking about plagarism. Its a word you hear a lot in the world of education and something that I have already been pondering this week, largely because my workplace is in the process of developing its own plagarism policy. As well as reinforcing the fact that we need to reference any plagarism policy that we draw inspriation from, this got me thinking about the issue of plagarism in the on-line setting and how easy it is to take the ideas of others as pass them off as your own. Clearly the use of online media in education needs to have strict guidelines and I will be working to ensure that any plagarism policy that we develop is future-proofed by factoring in plagarism in all forms and all media. My studies in this area will prove invaluable in informing this process and the guidelines set down by my university will be a vital starting point.

I was particulalry taken with one of her posts, “5 ways to make linear navigation more interesting“.  The included PowerPoint show is fantastic and I will be using it in my workplace to demonstrate best practice in elearning design.

Thanks Jenise for sharing this excellent resource!

I am a little disappointed with the downturn in activity on the site, though this was always going to happen after its frenetic first couple of weeks.  Probably more concerning is the shift away from contributions and information sharing towards product marketing and touting for work.  This nows seems to represent the bulk of current activity, though this is contained within specific parts of the community.  Hopefully this trend doesn’t continue.  Regardless it is an excellent case study in the early days of a learning community and how its members shape it.