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!

Tags: community, leadership, network, Ning, VCU, Wetpaint

In the year 2000, the literary rage was all about Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. Today (2008), the “must read” book is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Shirky’s premise is that with the development of advanced networking technologies (Web 2.0?), group formation and collaborative action are happening rapidly and abundantly (i.e. everybody is coming…). This comes a mere eight years after Putnam’s book. I wrote about Putnam extensively in an article published in a peer-reviewed (not open access, UGH) journal so for the purposes of making my argument about community and social capital, I’m copying what I wrote below, with irrelevant parts deleted (I don’t have to cite myself, do I?):

Based on analyses of large datasets and evidence from nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century, Putnam (2000) concludes that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has dropped dramatically, thus impoverishing our lives and communities. He documents that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We are even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. In other words, we are increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures.

Putnam (2000) offers a number of reasons for this collapse of community in America. Among those reasons, time pressure, especially on two-career families, is considered one of the primary suspects., changes in family structures mean more and more of us are living alone and conventional means to civic engagement are not designed around single and/or childless people. Also, suburban sprawl is an important contributor to the loss of community as we live further away from one another and further away from cultural and civic centers…

The next paragraph that I wrote is the kicker here:

Putnam (2000), in his writing about the collapse of community, does address digital communications and argues that electronic entertainment, especially television, has severely privatized our leisure time and, therefore, has become a major contributor to the collapse of community. However, Putnam (2000) also admits that the verdict on the Internet is still out. That is, it may be that the primary effect of the Internet will be to reinforce existing social networks, as the telephone has done, or the Internet might become a virtual substitute for them.

So, has the Internet reinforced existing social networks or has it become a virtual substitute for them. Or, perhaps, Putnam’s binary choice was false. Maybe the Internet has had a different effect on social networks? Either way, I would argue that a LOT has happened in just 8 years. I don’t quite yet know what it is that we are doing with our social networking technology, but we are NOT bowling alone anymore.

Tags: community, Putnam, Shirky, social networks