Structuring a community

Communities need to cater for a wide range of online social and learning styles, be easy to navigate and participate in, reliable and safe.

The Online learning Network was a short term Ultralab research project in 1997 bringing together a geographically distant community of learning professionals, new teachers and school governors. Participants had never met before and could select to explore one or any combination of the following:

• Learning about learning.
• Learning about good practice.
• Learning through exploration.

The image below shows the OLN desktop during the final evaluative stage; it includes elements found in many community contexts. Help areas, news, discussions, resources, social areas, reflective areas and archives.

A core social area was set up and new members were asked to select virtual scenarios to provide them with an informal context to establish dialogue.

One participant, an engineer, commented;

"I had a look on the web site once or twice and couldn't understand what was going on. Quirky little chats in pubs and cafes..., left me cold I’m afraid. I’m the type who wants to get down to the facts, being an engineer by training !".

In contrast another participant commented;
" The core groups helped", and "the contact through core groups was good early on. They did seem to generate a sense of community".

Several years later on in the Talking Heads project the social area (Heads and Tales) centred around more tangible interests for example; gardening, golf, fishing and travel. The roll out was gradual so after the first cohort; new members were coming into an existing social system, they were able to navigate easily to a range of social areas if they so wished. The area proved popular and provided a context for the development of relationships which went on to be valuable in other ways. Most were able to move on from the initial hand holding stage within a few weeks or months, so unlike notschool the mentoring role was not long term, during the pilot phase 10 facilitators were able to introduce 1500 headteachers to the system over 4-6 weeks.

With growing confidence and familiarity with the online tools and protocols, participants sometimes wish to take ownership of community areas.

As the community grew in size and over time the facilitators role moved from proactive participants towards reflective observation, the heads themselves are able to create discussions and community areas and new members can easily identify areas that are of interest to them, some groups of head join with an existing shared interest using the community as a tool to enhance their ability to communicate about their shared interest.

An example of this is the Special Educational Needs Community within Talking Heads. Facilitator support empowered these previously isolated Head Teachers to run this community themselves as far as the software would allow.

Notschool is a wonderful place to work because we give the young people a lot of freedom, the aim is re-engagement with the learning process and we start by encouraging them to talk about and learn about the things that interest them. Many of the young researchers are keen to take on more and more responsibility and peer support is high. A lot of communities are interest areas; often requested, designed and moderated by the young researchers- 3D Art, Music, Cars, Motorbikes, Horses, Travel, Languages...A group of four researchers asked if they could design and run their own area - the graphic below shows how they initially set up the interface.

We are witnessing a growing trend towards participant ownership of sub communities at all ages. In the increasingly large communities that are emerging the challenge is moving from, 'teaching the users how to use the tools' towards 'creating an efficient structure and navigation for complex multiple networks of people and information'.