I love what Gladys said in her introductory post "Reading your messages every day has become an enjoyable habit!"
Gladys, I checked out your NING group and it looks like it's beginning to take shape!
http://teachustech.ning.com One of the most established and well designed NING communities I've come across is Classroom 2.0
http://classroom20.ning.com/. It's up for an
edublog award.
I followed the ecotlearning link and it took me to my own dashboard. Did you create something there as well?
I completely get what Emma is saying about Elgg, Facebook, etc being user-centric and NING being community-centric. Maybe that's why, as Deirdre points out, "groups" in Facebook aren't as active as they are in NING. I'd say that's especially true for
discussions in FB groups. Announcement type messages seem to be the most common -- wall and event posts, etc. Also, there seems to be a lot of content posting in both places -- videos, photos, links, etc. Much of this activity is what you would expect to see on a blog, but that might not get the same kind of attention.
These days I find that I rely so heavily on pull technology to keep discussions on my radar. No, wait a minute, maybe I mean push? In any case, I just don't take the extra steps to GO somewhere to keep up-to-date. I need RSS or email subscriptions. I also like to be able to link to specific items in other venues without the burden of passwords (I mean if anyone can join, why force a log in?) and mile-long URLs.
I do like the idea of a lasso approach to grouping individuals according to interests or other commonalities. Nancy White wrote an interesting piece called
Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community? I think we're looking at blogs and more at this point. Individuals leave their contributions to discussions here and there, twitter here, blog there...
It seems the ideal would be a design that:
- is open
- has options to hide selected items (like draft posts, maybe membership in a group that
- provides a view on individuals' activities across groups
- alerts/tracks new items, either all, or individual topics
- has RSS for everything
- is a combination of PLE and community.
- plus all the other things I can't think of on a weekend :-)
During Jason Toal's session, Paul Stacey asked if tagging will become a part of our identities. I think he envisioned a tag cloud following him around over his Second Life avatar's head. Hmmm, maybe we need to lasso the tag clouds?