SHARING+GOOD+IDEAS+AND+PROBLEMS..AVOIDING+ISOLATION

Welcome to notes from the **SHARING GOOD IDEAS AND PROBLEMS..AVOID ISOLATION** group, which first convened Tuesday 9 Feb '10 at around 3 pm, hosted by Agenda Activists Becca Black and Dan Wagner. [this page created because it's a tad long to just be tacked on to the Agenda Activist page, IMHO (dw)]

What are our thoughts regarding this and what activities might be planned over the next 12 months to facilitate ...the sharing of good ideas we discover in our process as eLCC's ...the sharing of problems we encounter along the way ...avoiding isolation

Defining isolation. What do we mean by isolation? Who could be isolated, and how?


 * Us - as eLCC's (from one another)
 * Geographical
 * Campuses - Languages, Foundation Studies, Health & Social Sciences - just three examples of Departments which are spread over 3 or 4 campuses;
 * Workspace - Some departments are all split up into little tiny rooms
 * Temporal
 * Different schedules, timetabled differently
 * Workload demands prevent time for "extracurricular" discussion and pooling of resources
 * Office hours, planning, teaching, marking
 * might not see another teacher all day
 * Isolated as eLCC's within our department
 * "fighting the battle alone"
 * some have lack of support
 * from colleagues
 * from our supervisors
 * Our colleagues - other lecturers in our department [not eLCC's, but those who will be participating in the CoP's which we facilitate (and who will be engaging in eTeaching&Learning)]
 * Digital isolation
 * Skills
 * Exposure
 * don't know what they are
 * Investment
 * w/out exposure, don't see how can use, how helpful they can be

We've included the process we went through in order to share our journey with you. **
 * What follows is a loose record of our conversation - which led to a few interesting conclusions.

We're supposed to be leading these groups when we don't know what we're doing. I might come up with an idea, you with another, you with another - but I don't know yours, nor you mine - how do we pool our ideas?

Perhaps a master shell on Moodle whereby we eLCC's can go in and look at ideas. We don't want to each be inventing the wheel on our own.

Moodle is good LMS. But perhaps Ning is more collaborative and sharing based. More horizontal, more community-building. One central place to pool ideas which we all come up with. Ning includes capacity for blogs, where we can discuss the issues we're facing.

Would like an indexed list of resources - like Ning - so it's clear If we're going to make it work, we need to make it ours.

A discussion __AND__ a list of resources are both valuable. We might need to enable alerts or RSS to push the information when it's generated/shared.

One **activity** is to look at Ning and see how we can make it ours One possibility is to have the bank of resources on Moodle, bearing in mind that anything on a Moodle site is owned by Unitec; anything on Ning, GoogleDocs is not. Resources generated "on the clock" are Unitec's - so we can possibly have ** a Moodle course for us, which links out to our Ning **.

Is it worth asking TPA what is the best place to pool our resources? EdFlagg: that's good question for Thom Cochrane. We're moving to Ning because we at TPA have found it to be enormously useful. But if you can find (as an eLCC) other applications, tools and resources which work better for you - please share with us as a community why and how they work for you. This is central to the topic of this very discussion.

What about the "Sharing Good Ideas" group? or the "Are You Feeling Isolated" group? We can create this on the eLCC's Ning - or start a Ning of our own and have those as two of the groups. That Ning can be linked to by the main eLCC Ning.

We should not //just// have Ning. Combination of Ning and face-to-face could be very valuable. Some are too busy to share their good ideas electronically - in written form. But when you get those people together, you could hear them from the source, ask questions, etc. Easy to brainstorm and adapt ideas and put in context the points that people are making. We're combining media with our students - face to face, Moodle, Google Docs, Ning, etc. Let's do this with one another as well!

Maybe the first thing to do is to deposit examples of e-learning experiences we've already had. And that's not just always only with students, it can can also be about __how we do what we do__. Gather those materials and experiences in a private forum. Then, after, say, a month, this list can be tidied up and put onto some forum.

How about a monthly pot luck - bring a plate. Then maybe break into groups and share stories, then report. It could grow organically from there...who knows where? How often? Once a month? Twice? And if we had people there capturing the stories - if you couldn't make it, you don't get pudding, but you do get to hear/read the stories in our online group. That alone could develop skills. Could have Jonathan timetable it through TPA. [this is for all eLCC's]

This event would also be an excellent opportunity to **celebrate our successes**.

So...


 * **Monthly pot lucks**
 * **Scheduling extra time for training**
 * **Working with Ning in groups**

We won't know until next time we meet what many of the problems are, but then we'll deal with these recently-revealed issues at that time.

Perhaps we could use [] to ascertain who has used/who knows what. One way to use this info is to take those //with// experience in one technology or platform and those //without// experience in it, and have one teach the other.

This idea (bi-monthly pooling with one another) is one method we could take back to our departments to use with our colleagues. These things we're learning could be used within our own disciplines. There's also the ** ISOLATION ** our colleagues may experience w/in our dept. We won't know what kinds of isolation our colleagues will feel until we start to organise it w/in our departments. One idea was to form CoP with //another// Dept, which might alleviate one eLCC's sense of isolation within her own department - isolation **about** being the eLCC.

EdFlagg: your solution to a given problem just might be what another eLCC needs to address their own issues.

It's also a matter of sharing good examples with our colleagues - we need the equivalent of ** booths ** with examples of online applications: Wikis (G-Docs, Wikispaces, PBWiki, etc.) Blogs (Vox, Blogger, etc.) Discussion Groups Mind Maps (MindMeister, etc.) Personal Publishing (Scribd, etc.) Social Bookmarking (diigo, delicious, etc.)

So, another ** trade show/fair ** (combined with a pot luck) for our faculties. They don't know how they're going to use eLearning functionalities, because many of them don't know what it is, what's involved. We eLCC's present the trade show, and faculties walk through and see it in action (just like earlier today). We need to be in the marketplace. We're out there peddling something.

Another **ISOLATION** is bringing **industry** into our eLearning presence. So maybe later we can invite different industries to our trade fairs.

By Feb, 2011, we will have explored a variety of resources to share good ideas for eLearning, based on needs established by our sharing of some of the problems we've encountered during the previous year.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions.