Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: Re: Communities of practice

By: Frances Bell

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It is quite timely that this discussion has popped up because I have been thinking of commenting on this myself.
I am a facilitator for the CABWEB portal that hosts the HELP (Higher Education Learning Professionals) network and the JILID community ( a staff and student space that aims to build a global network of people who are interested in the research and collaboration on intercultural aspects of learning and the design of educational media.)
We launched in January 2005, and have grown steadily since then. I agree with the comment about the growth and change of the Moodle community (where I am a moderately active non-developer member). One of our dissemination strategies has been to work with other networks sharing or hosting discussion events and this seems to have been productive in terms of attracting members.
I know that some of our HELP members would be very interested in LAMS, and so I have a proposition to put to you. We have two upcoming discussion events scheduled (and one just finishing) but we do have some space in May/June.
Someone from LAMS would be most welcome to facilitate a 2 week discussion on LAMS. The deal is
1. Suggest a title that we post on our calendar.
2. About two weeks before you provide a 'trigger' for the discussion event - that could be a paper slide show or some multimedia resources that would interest potential participants.
3. CABWEB and event leaders publicise the event in suitable places, including our HELP news forum.
4. We set up a forum that is visble but inactive prior to the agreed date, directing people to HELP Social Forum if they wish to get started sooner.
5. Facilitator posts opening message, keeps a check on the discussion (maybe splitting long threads. etc)
6. Once discussion is over (may run slightly longer than 2 weeks but definitely curtail at three weeks), we archive the (now closed) discussion forum on HELP.

We have had quite a lot of activity on recent discussions considering our portal is a fairly clunky configuration of Moodle (no fancy customisation),
see this extract from our project report "A recent online discussion (on the Assessment of Online Discussion) attracted 87 participants who enrolled on the HELP network, and numerous other ‘guest’ accesses. 26 participants posted to the social forum. 30 posted to the actual discussion, contributing 65 posts over a 2 week period. Participants came from Europe, USA and Australia, and included PhD students, lecturers, schoolteachers and an international thinker in learning, Jan Visser. Our survey indicates that 69% of participants who responded to date found that postings caused them to reflect on their practice, and 85% intend to return to CABWEB in future."
In fact the high level of activity can be a turn off for users, and the challenge is showing them how to manage this with user profile settings, and subscribing , unsubscribing for forums. Some users just read emails or look at hte archives.
Anyway, how about it LAMS - do you want to come to tea at CABWEB HELP?

Posted by Frances Bell