Gina Bennett

Welcome to Wednesday -- also known as 'hump day' by some who look forward to having the work-week almost half over. Today is also the suggested day to post your "creation" to the Sharing & Feedback forum. If you do have a draft of a community-building activity ready, we'd love to take a look at it (& try it out, if at all possible). The Sharing & Feedback forum has a short series of questions to guide your post. You'll note that a couple of community-building enthusiasts have already posted an activity but if you're not ready by the end of the day, no worries -- there are no hard & fast deadlines here & we understand if you're just too busy getting your Hallowe'en costume together :-D

I love this idea, Hillarie. Not only would this be a great conversation-opener, it could result in a finished product (the short essay or padlet) which the student may value for a number of other reasons. It's also offering a way for the student to invite a conversation while being as revealing or reserved as they want/need to be. 

I'm thinking that it *could* be a lot of work... If students are not terribly familiar with padlet or technology (searching for images, pasting links etc.) they may find it somewhat intimidating. However, this activity would be very configurable & you could easily reduce the technical requirements if your group felt uneasy. 

When were you thinking about trying this?

Tara, looks like your community-building activity is generating plenty of interest!

Another tweak you might consider (if looking for a lower-tech option) is to have people post that 'perfect image' as you describe, & then get the class (the student who posted the image and/or the rest of the class) to suggest captions. I've seen similar exercises in the past & they've added considerable humour to the activity.

Our MicroCourse has been underway for a day now & I've just been taking a few minutes to look around, see where we are, that kind of thing. This is a course about building community & I'm wondering how people experienced the "situating ourselves" activity using Moodle's glossary tool. I don't know about you but almost as soon as I had posted my "situation" I found myself checking back, looking to see who else had posted & reading the comments. I feel like I know everybody a little bit better & for me, that's an essential part of feeling "in community." But I'd be interested to hear what others think.

We had 8 people post an entry situating themselves & that accumulated more than 80 tags!!! We are a small but very diverse group, representing  5 provinces & 3 territories, 2 beverages, 3 animals, & an awful lot of interests. 

I'm wondering how people made out with the Activity Packet, & if you were able to complete some of the 10 steps suggested there. What's been your experience of community building in the past? Have you ever tried to create a sense of community in an online course before? In what ways do you hope community building activities will change your learning environment?

This is such a busy time & no doubt many of you are busy with midterms. If you get a minute, check out Tara's "midterm motivation" idea (posted in the Sharing & Feedback forum) for an interesting approach to strengthening community in the middle of the semester. 

Oh - before I forget - thanks to everybody who added resources to our Resource list. I don't know who added the idea about mindmap intros using Coggle but I'd love to learn more about that... can you share an example?

I'm really glad to see that this group has adopted SCoPE as a communication forum! I've been a participant on SCoPE for a long time & found it to be a great, low-threshold way to share ideas.

Hmm.... 3 skills or areas of expertise I'd like to share:

• appreciative processes in curriculum development or course redesign
• innovative approaches to evaluation
• open pedagogy

... & 3 areas I'd love to know more about:

• integration of mlearning techniques
• alternative assessments
• open pedagogy

Yes, I realize I have 'open pedagogy' in both categories! I know something about it, would be keen to share what I know, but would really like to know more.

Looking forward!

Gina