The next SCoPE online (and very free!) conference is just beginning, this one facilitated by Nancy Randall. A flyer for the event is available here, and I am looking forward to this one in particular as my teaching is more and more done from a distance.

Why should my professional development be any different?

I just attended the Facilitating Online Communities online course conference call. We were from Peru, Vancouver, New Zealand, Texas, Argentina, New York, Brunei, and elsewhere. Wow! What a global perspective to discuss some of the issues around communities. This was the first time I was able to attend one of our calls,

I am increasingly interested in the issues in and around technology, especially how the technological capacity, abilities, costs, and limitations can tend to direct how online communities communicate and develop.

There was some discussion about the mini online conference during weeks 12 and 13. Leigh Blackall mentioned some options for online community development, facilitation, and almost anything interesting around the idea of facilitating online communities. We should begin to consider topics of various interest, and it was suggested we group up and do a variety of online events:

In these two weeks you will focus on your event that you are facilitating as part of the course mini conference. The idea is for you to organize something for the conference, such as a guest speaker or a discussion panel through web conference; a discussion forum on a social networking platform; or assisting with the preparation and promotion of the mini conference generally. This will be your chance to facilitate real events and communication online, and explore more dimensions to facilitating online communities. 

I wonder if Sylvia Currie has an idea for us to work on? More about that soon enough . . .

I have used <Alt>+<Tab> for years as the shortcut to quickly switch between open application windows on my computer. As I work on a lot at once, this is a very handy friend to have around.

Frustrated that this does not help me switch between tabs in the newest version of Internet Explorer, I finally went to work to find how to do this, and located the answer I have been yearning for at Online Tech Tips.

The shortcut? <Ctrl>+<Tab>

Yes, it it that simple! Use <Ctrl>+<Tab> to switch between open tabs in Internet Explorer and Firefox, and then <Alt>+<Tab> to switch between open programs.

I think online communities of practice and even online classes are changing the ways we think about distance. It almost seems, from the perspective of community, that distance no longer exists. Does it matter if I email colleagues who are spread across the globe? Speak with them via Skype whenever and wherever they may be, as long as I get the timezones correct? Has this flattening of our world changed the way we think about people in other cultural contexts, within national identities, and exotic (and not so exotic) locales?

As my work and research begins to more formally be online, do I  have to be concerned with distance at all?

Further to my point here, what does all this mean for where and how communities form and interact? Leigh asked us to consider what online communities are in our FOC08 class, and I have managed to say exactly what they are not–they are not separated by distance.

I started this post before and finished after having a delightful conversation with a colleague in Brazil, Barbara Dieu. We started speaking (via skype text, which is speaking with the fingers) about Second Life and the FOC08 Course, and the next thing I knew is that Bee asked me what interests me and what I want to learn more about. I gushed about Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarrative, Mezirow’s transformative learning, Denzin / Lincoln / Guba’s work in qualitative research, Freire, Brookfield, pugs, cities, theories, technology, and Madame Butterfly.

I think that community is in there someplace. Something about openness to ideas and encouragement to grow and learn and become more present. Something about being with others who share a space next to us along the journey, whatever and wherever it may lead.

This conversation would never have happened without the community focus of this course, and how our different interests and experiences helps to inform and realize them. To all this, community adds and supports, and it has an amazing capacity to do all this without regard to distance.

Perhaps communities of practice help realize the Internet’s claim to make the world a smaller place, though one with more individual possibilities?

Work, teaching, preparing to teach in the Fall, and the general hassle of life in the big city finds me busier than I ever recall being this deep into the summer. With my current Business Communication two-week intensive class beginning last night and its ending just before Labor Day (which means the summer ends in 2 weeks, at least for those of us who function in an academic mentality!), I see the summer slipping away . . .

As I try to dig out from a mountain of email and online discussions and papers and projects, I have to continually remind myself to seize the day and enjoy every last drop of the fleeting summer. After all, tomorrow there will be more communications and tasks and challenges, and the summer of 2008 will only be a memory.

What sort of a memory do I want to make it?

It is confirmed that I will be teaching an online class in the Fall at New York University: Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design.

The course description:

Designed as an introduction for faculty, trainers, and other instructors, this course prepares you to develop and teach online courses. Topics include the application of learning theory to online instruction, online course content development, and strategies for effective online curriculum planning and delivery. Learn how to define the characteristics and needs of adult distance learners; effective ways to meet these needs through online instruction; and the differences between online courses and traditional courses with respect to class participation, interaction, course materials, and instructor involvement. Reinforce your skills with the design and delivery of an instructional unit.

While the course is online, we are requiring a synchronous weekly attendance for it, though I am planning to record the sessions. The dates for the live sessions are 9/23, 9/30, 10/7, 10/14, 10/21, 10/28, 11/4, 11/11, 11/18, and 11/25. The time will be from 6:30 PM 8:00 PM EST.

I am excited to be using the new Epsilen platform, that NYU SCPS just purchased and is planning to use for their expanded online offerings.

I have been speaking with colleagues all over the Web about this class, and am interested in any and all suggestions and words of wisdom for this (as well as resource suggestions!).

I have been speaking with a few of my colleagues, namely Sylvia Currie and Bronwyn Stuckey, as well as reading some of the blogs of our online class members, including Leigh Blackall (the class facilitator), Joao Alves, and Mike Bogle (whose posting inspired me to write this one), and decided I want to be a little more specific.

What learning objective shall I adopt for this course?

I spoke about this a bit with a new colleague in the class, Lynne Gilliland Garber (congrats on your first blog!), and have been thinking about refining what I initially intended for me to try to accomplish in this class. I can name this or that, such as learn more or experience something or meet people or the like, yet I am not sure that I will be in the same place at the end of December when the class ends. My interests and needs and experiences and expectations all will have changed. Learning itself often means more than developing knowledge or gathering a skill. Can the learning objective I may set today be valuable for me in five months? Will I still care about what I want today when I am in a different place then? Am I just going to be satisfied with wanting something I can envision now, without allowing for or regarding that which I do not even know exists tomorrow?

As an instructional designer, I face and create objectives every day. How else can we measure how successful a class or learning experience is? How else will we be able to establish the direction for our class, or have a glimpse of what we want to get out of the experience?

Let me pose it in a different way–how can we establish an objective and then hold ourselves to it for an experience that we have not had yet? If my objective is to learn to blog, but I walk away from the class with closer friends and colleagues, or a more expanded worldview of how we can foster global communities of practice using technologies and methods I do not yet even know exist, who cares if I learned to blog? Strict learning objectives would have me count the course a failure, as I would not have gotten what I came to get. Given my worldview from transformative learning, with a little spice of Foucault, Denzin, Brookfield, and Lyotard thrown in for good measure, I believe we need to set objectives and goals, but they can change and develop just as we do.

Back to this online course. For my objectives in this course, I want to:

• apply methods of facilitating online communities to the online courses I am developing at NYU
• develop my perspective of global online community of practice-based education

Let’s see how these may develop over the class itself.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I just registered for another online class, Facilitating Online Communities.

I really like how Leigh Blackall, the facilitator for the class, has listed the assignments and is being more than patient with the flurry of email that is moving around from the course Google Group.

The assignments for the first week are:

1. Set up a blog to record the course notes. Done–I already have my own blog and will use it for this course as well as for my other work.
2. Listen to the recording for the first week. Not done yet; I have trouble focusing on something like this, and it may be one of the reasons I do not listen to podcasts too often as well. I listen to the radio all the time, but it usually becomes background noise. Thus, my challenge–how to make background noise into something I have to consciously focus on. Will have to try to do this.
3. Post here what I hope to get from this course. OK; here goes. I hope to learn more about online communities and how best to facilitate them. I have recently started to get active in CPsquare as I find a lot of value in collaborating with people who have different perspectives (due to the international audience and variety of experiences and education) from me in the areas of technology and adult learning. I am hoping that this class, which stretches for several months well into the Fall (in the US, at least) will give me ideas and encourage me to try new things with my online and F2F classes I teach. I am wondering how to apply the research, work, and experience from the communities of practice to higher education classes. I try to teach in a democratic manner, and am wondering how students may be encouraged to learn differently from this perspective. I hope Leigh’s class will help me think this through.
4. Introduce myself on the course discussion page. Done. Additionally, I just added my blog to my post there.
5. Set up an RSS blog reader, and subscribe to the blog posts of those in the class. Well, I use FeedDemon, which is an offline reader that synchs online (so I can access the same feeds home and at work).  I like having these things offline, but there has been so much talk about Google Reader, that perhaps I should check that one out as well. My question here is how to get all the RSS feeds for the class? Some people have tried to do this with various tools, but all the lists appear inconsistent. Will have to consider this on my own I suppose.

Let me speak for a moment on my first impressions. Leigh has done a tremendous amount of preparation for this class. Kudos to him! It does seem, however, that some of the students have started a flurry of discussion about tools and technology and the like–so much that I am already having trouble keeping up. Now, I am an instructional designer, university adjunct faculty member who teaches in and with technology, and do consider myself somewhat conversant in using technology; yet I am still struggling to keep up with all the emails that are discussing tools and such. I do, however, think it is very valuable to have this conversation, and am always happy to have (and sometimes be one of the) students who have passion and try to share it with others for the betterment of the entire experience. We need passionate people who want to share! My concern is for those who are not as fluent in the tools already and who may be a bit overwhelmed with hearing and seeing too much at once (namely, by day 3!). Interesting experience as I do not normally feel like one of them.

Nevertheless, we are off to a wonderful start, and I only hope that this passion remains and develops! 

Wonderful news that the updated CPsquare website is up and running, now on a new and improved WordPress platform. There are even working RSS feeds there, so if you have not been to their website recently (or better stated, our website (as I am a member!)), go and take a look. Running on a blogging foundation, there should now me more regular posts and adjustments on the front page.

Let’s see how the community of practice uses its new community website!