The Community Engine Blog: LearningBlogosphere Archives

Identity

There are starting to be building blocks for distributed identity, but you still have to put a lot of pieces together to get it to work.

I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.

I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.

Continue reading "Identity"

Bud posted this on May 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — How to form business community

Online communities usually form around information honey pots. They thrive when individual contributors get reinforced, and the reinforced behavior makes the honey pot richer.

In blogsavvy today, James Farmer makes a very good point regarding how to organize online communities:

While the hub model of online communities has each person coming to one place, the hubris approach has each participant secure in their own space and the ‘centre’ simply being an administrative / aggregation portal to these different spaces. Through the portal context each user is able to find relevant users to themselves and aggregate individually each of them. In essence you have a blogosphere… just right on your doorstep.
Blogsavvy » Creating and sustaining a local blogging community - hubs, hubris & your neighboursphere

In the new High Octane Blogging Bootcamp and the original Learning Blogosphere, we used a combination of the two to a little bit better effect than either alone. In my experience with both of these efforts, there are really three dynamic components required to create an effective blogging community:

Continue reading "High Octane Blogging — How to form business community"

Bud posted this on May 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — Off to the Races

The first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp has started, and we are inviting feedback.

We began our first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp last Saturday. As I mentioned before, participants are working in the Restoration and Cleaning industry with Coach's, a local area cleaning and disaster recovery firm employing approximately 80 people.

Participants are divided up into five teams who are competing to write effective blog posts and gain Internet visibility in five weeks. We have a bootcamp aggregation site at: http://highoctane.portspaces.com. On the site, you can see my blog about the bootcamp with several entries. You can also see, from the left-hand pane, an aggregation of each of the participant's team sites.

Continue reading "High Octane Blogging — Off to the Races"

Bud posted this on May 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — Computing platform

We will be using The Port Network, a great RSS-based system that has the potential to marry back-end information consumption with front-end publishing. Issues we are working around include social bookmarking and training with a very short time frame.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we were using The Port Network's platform for the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp. This decision is deeply rooted in what I expect to be the main value creation dynamic for bootcamp participants:

Learn about the target industry: cleaning and restoration.
Collect ongoing information about cleaning and restoration.
Determine who the target audience is and how to influence them. I expect the target audience to be a mix of: customers, media types, and web opinion makers.
Write blog posts that leverage the information collected to influence the target audience.

Participants will be working in teams of five or six. So, the question is how to get this dynamic to work in a team?

Continue reading "High Octane Blogging — Computing platform"

Bud posted this on May 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — Much Progress

The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp will begin in two weeks. We have students, judges, a company, and a community blogging platform. I will likely devote a whole post to the platform decision soon.

The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp will start May 14, 2005. There have been a number of developments since my last post. Let me lay them out:

Twenty-nine students have signed up to be in the Small and Medium Enterprise course of which the bootcamp is a part. That's a good number to start. Not too big and not too small.
In alphabetical order: Susie Gardner, Sarah Goldman, and Jeremy Wright have agreed to be blogging judges for Bootcamp. They will do two evaluations each of the six teams.
We will be working with Coach's, a local Ann Arbor company in the cleaning and restoration industry. A good web resource for this industry is the Association of Specialists in Cleaning and Restoration.
The Port Network has agreed to host the blogging communities.

This last point is worth some elaboration. There are really a number of factors here. The two that weighed the most heavily in my mind were: (1) getting a simple enough environment to use that would allow us to fully unleash the power of xml syndication; (2) various network effects related to using widely adopted vs. narrowly adopted yet well-tailored technology. I will likely devote a post to the platform decision soon.

Bud posted this on May 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk and Learning Blogosophere

Expect some interesting folksonomy and Learning Blogosphere posts.

I've been a bit ambitious in my projects, and so my posting frequency has dropped off a bit. Sometime in the next day or two, you should see a post about xFolk. This is an exciting project born out of this year's IASummit and SXSW one-two punch. It really has the potential to help people trying to publish folksonomies in non-vendor specific formats.

I also have several more posts on the Learning Blogosphere work in process. It's all just a matter of getting the time to crank them out.

Bud posted this on March 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A Learning Blogosphere (2): The Long Tail

Quantitative analysis of posting volumes and patterns indicates that the Learning Blogosphere succeeded in opening up the potential for student participation. Reasons were a combination of technical efficiencies and online social facilitation.

Here I will present quantitative analysis indicating that blogging led to an inversion of control in the learning blogosphere I developed in Fall, 2004. Over the course of the term, there were 1,078 posts in the blogosphere. The number of posts represents a doubling in online communication over when interaction in the course occurred principally in email. Student posts accounted for 78% of this volume and determined the content of the discussion. The group leader (professor) level of involvement represents a halving of moderator effort relative to the email method. Thus, the use of blogging tools, specifically RSS, appears to have led to a quadrupling of moderator productivity over email.

Inversion of control

The accompanying graph shows levels of contribution by the 31 student and 1 moderator (me) participants ordered from left to right by decreasing order of contribution. As can be read in the graph, I made 233 posts, 22% of total. The graph is labeled as the long tail because the individually lower volume contributors in the tail of the distribution actually made most of the aggregate contribution. I will have more to say on this below.

Given these figures alone, one might wonder that I was guiding the conversation from the top down. However, a closer examination of the content of his posts reveals that all but 14 (six percent) of my posts were direct comments on the 845 posts by students. Further, I only account for 9 of the 50 longest posts, and a large part of the length of these 9 posts was due to heavy excerpting of the posts I was commenting on. Thus, my posts were almost entirely responsive to and generally shorter than the other posts in the blogosphere. Students controlled the topic of conversation, not me.

Interestingly, had students only been responding to the course blogging requirement, we would have expected the majority to meet the 26 one-paragraph blog post requirement and then stop. The graph shows that 17 of the 31 students exceeded the minimum requirement with only 6 failing to come near the requirement (but still posting almost weekly). Further, 60% of posts exceeded the one paragraph minimum length, 25% were greater than two paragraphs, and 15% greater than three paragraphs. Thus, more than half the students went beyond the minimum frequency, and students tended to write more than the minimum length. The posting requirement got students going; after that they became engaged and went further.

Continue reading "A Learning Blogosphere (2): The Long Tail"

Bud posted this on March 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (5)

A Learning Blogosphere (1): Into the Deep

In Fall 2004, I developed a distributed learning blogosphere for non-technical students at the University of Michigan. Ninety-five percent of participants felt blogging improved their learning. Here I provide the hard, pragmatic lessons we learned in getting community interaction to work. In follow-on posts, I will provide quantitative analysis of how blogging shaped the class.

This post follows up on a project to build a distributed learning blogging community (blogosphere) that I initiated with a class of 31 non-technical students at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Fall, 2004. I initially began reporting on the project here and continued making posts through late 2004 on the project here. Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the project at its conception when he asked “Blogs + Egos = Learning?”. One fragment from a comment to that post stands out as prescient of what the whole experience became:

Ultimately, blogs are probably a tool best suited for a constructivist learning environment.
MaryH

In this spirit, a number of high-profile bloggers generously agreed to contribute content to our effort, and by design, their contribution shaped the path we followed. Let me recognize each individually (in alphabetical order): John Battelle (Searchblog), Jason Calacanis (the RSS Weblog), Todd Cochrane (Geeknews Central), Asa Dotzler (adot's notblog), Chris Pirillo (lockergnome), Robert Scoble (Scobleizer), Andy Seidl and Bill French (Think Outside the Feed), Brent Simmons (inessential), and Dave Winer (Scripting News). I'm very grateful to these bloggers as well as all the many other people who contributed to this project.

This post narrates the pragmatic odyssey of our ultimately successful attempts to mix technology and behavior to achieve useful online interaction through blogs. The next post in this series takes a quantitative look at the impact blogging had on the class.

Continue reading "A Learning Blogosphere (1): Into the Deep"

Bud posted this on March 1, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (25)

The Key to Online Communities — Fostering Interactivity

Online communities exist through interactivity. Three keys to fostering interactivity are: scalability, opportunities for participant initiative, and feedback (responsiveness). Achieving these three things is more important than the specific technology you employ. Sometimes they work against each other.

I had breakfast with Scott Moore, director of the undergraduate business program at Michigan's Ross School of Business. He's wondering how he might use social software (blogs, wikis, etc.) to enhance a class of 1000 students that he will run in a year. He was speaking to me because of my experience creating the “BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere” where we had a quite successful classroom experience enhanced by an active blogging community. Put on the spot like this, I managed to come up with three keys to success that I think are worth sharing. They all have to do with fostering online interactivity and should work across many different types of social software.

Continue reading "The Key to Online Communities — Fostering Interactivity"

Bud posted this on January 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

The Community Engine

Creating Effective Information Communities

LearningBlogosphere

How we transformed a course at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business using information communities