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Published April 23rd, 2008
Community building and technology that goes with it (e.g. blogging) is my beloved niche. I personally love the web and the social aspects it can bring to anyone - on or offline. For me a learning community is generally just like any community. The principles for designing, launching, maintaining and evaluating communities are generally the same.
Last Friday the Elearning Network hosted an event on Building Learning
Communities. It was a good chance to hear stories from people who have
or are building (learning) communities.
The interesting parts that kept popping up during the event was the use of low or no cost tools. Particularly, Drupal and Ning. Even where the companies behind the learning communities were large, the creation of small and focused communities were relatively informal and experimental compared to other enterprise systems that were already in place.
It’s not that Drupal or Ning are better than the larger and more robust systems, they’re just really easy to set up. With Ning it literally takes a few minutes to get a site up and running - with no money involved. It doesn’t mean the community will work or people will come and participate, it’s just a low risk.
I was (pleasantly) surprised to see some of the larger companies using these tools and felt quite encouraged by it all. I don’t think it means that enterprise tools don’t have a future - perhaps quite the opposite. People and organisations can experiment with these tools - they couldn’t do that a couple of years ago, not at such a low risk anyways. Through this experimentation people will learn about building communities, what is involved, what works and what doesn’t work. All this learning in action will only help people create better and larger communities in the future across organisations.
Post Categories: Driven
