Adding a virtual community to a f-2-f one
Ed. Leadership, Web 2.0, community September 8th, 2008
For months now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to develop an online community to enhance our programs within the Department of Educational Leadership at VCU. Currently, each course has its own Blackboard space. We also send lots of e-mails to students, though sadly we don’t even have good e-mail groups in our e-mail client (that’s pathetic, I know). So, communication across courses, across programs, and across the years is impossible. It’s a sad state of affairs, and I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out the best way to establish an online community for all of our students, faculty and even alumni.
I suppose my biggest problem is that I’m looking for the perfect one-stop solution. I’m very familiar with Ning and I’ve been playing around with various wiki systems that work nicely as places for collaboration and communication. Those are fine ways to create a single online community. One problem for me, though, is that our department consists of many different groups, cohorts, etc. Here’s a graphical representation of our department:
I want each group, cohort, etc. to be able to communicate privately with each other, but to also be a part of the larger community. So, I could, for example, setup a department-wide Ning and then setup each cohort as a group. However, the groups within Ning don’t have the full functionality of Ning (e.g. they can’t setup their own document repository or a separate page for anything, really). And, the groups are not private.
A second problem is that I want to be able keep track of activity with an RSS feed. But, as you may know, private spaces (Ning, Wetpaint, etc.) don’t allow for RSS feeds. This limitation also stops me from setting up a Ning or Wetpaint for each group, cohort, etc. and then setting up a department-level aggregate page via NetVibes or Pageflakes (a la Steve Hargadon’s approach here).
So, where am I? Right now, I’m leaning towards a department-level Ning as the hub of our online community. From there, I could setup groups for each cohort, group, etc. with a link to a private wiki for each cohort, group, etc. (leaning heavily towards WetPaint for that). In the absence of RSS feeds, I’ll have to subscribe to each site via e-mail and then setup routing rules so that my inbox doesn’t get flooded. It’s also going to be a naming nightmare. But, that’s my best current solution.
If any of you smart people have better ideas, I’d be more than happy to hear them. Thanks in advance!
Hi Jon,
My name is Jeff Utecht and I’m an educator helping out Wetpaint this year. Sounds to me like you have some pretty specific needs for your site. Looking at your diagram above I know that Wetpaint can easily create pages within pages for this type of “group” that you want. There is also a private message service built into wetpaint that would allow everyone to communicate within the wiki environment. When you make a wiki private you do loose the RSS feed (and I’m double checking with wetpaint as I type) but you can still go into the “What’s New” tab and see the latest updates on all pages, threads, posts, etc. Not the perfect solution, but still a way to get updates on what has been happening on the site.
And of course, you have me there to support you along the way. I suggest you take a look at the http://wikisineducaiton.wetpaint.com site if you haven’t already. It is a community of educators k-12 and Univ. working together to solve such issues and bounce ideas off of each other. Feel free to contact me if you would like to talk and I’d be happy to help you set up a Wetpaint wiki if you feel it’s the right tool for the job.
Jon, if the wetpaint solution doesn’t help (never used it), what about 1 ning for the department and separate nings for each group? Then feed the RSS from the main ning into the top of fold in the smaller ones?
Kludgy, I know.
Great post Jon and it has got me thinking about what we can do here at UK.
Jeff, I checked out wetpaint and started setting up a wiki that I would use with my class, but one of the most important things is sharing documents. I noticed that the limit for document uploads is 2mb, which is not all that much. I would love to use wetpaint instead of blackboard, but limitations like that are pretty serious problems.