Empowering users to create their own learning communities

I've been really inspired by the tight knit learning communities that have emerged around a variety of topics ranging from rhizomatic learning (P2PU)to Python (Mechanical MOOC). While access to these communities is open to anybody with internet, access to creating these communities still seems to have many barriers to entry, especially for those who do not have a strong background in online learning/pedagogy/computer science. I am very interested in trying to document the creation of learning communities in ways that are accessible to anybody who has an idea that they want to share. (P2PU has a section their website about how to create a P2PU course, which is a good start).

Personally, I love to make condiments and have long dreamed of starting a MOOC/online community around making mustard, jam, hot sauce, etc. I think there are many steps along the way to document that could make it easier for others to create similar learning communities in the future. For me, working on LCL has been an exciting learning experience and I hope to instill a lot of the lessons I've learned here in my future work with condiments.

Does anybody else share this passion? It could be interesting to take a few very different interests (condiments being one of them) and work together to document our steps in creating our respective communities.

There is a related discussion on the P2PU forum. I've posted a link to this thread over there. I think the general challenge is to move from the conceptual to the practical without getting bogged down in the details.

Hi Grif,

It's unfortunate that I've had so much going on at this point in LCL because there might be a connection here with my interests. (It's been chaos -- I thought I was going to have to finish my Week 2 project on the kitchen floor.) I'm all about online communities. While learning communities are not my exclusive focus, I'm here now in hopes of getting a better feel for how to introduce learning to more general lifestyle/interest/fan communities.

I'd worked out an annoyingly long response here, but I'm going to do the right thing and ask for clarification: are you looking for people to document and work out steps with as we experiment with the creation of communities/resources over some period of time, or were you thinking about documenting steps together as a single thought exercise?

My learning about creating online learning communities over the last year is evident in the structure of "Collaborative Explorations" (see http://collabex.wikispaces.com and http://peeragogy.org/case-study-collaborative-explorations/) as well as the limited success in getting people to sign up or follow through on participation in such small, deep learning communities (e.g., http://bit.ly/LCLevents). I plan to continue to tinker on how I approach the latter challenge. Part of this tinkering will surely be focusing on learning topics that I am most passionate about even if this is not where the Masses in the MOOC-world are found. (LCL2 has shown me that I am not so much of a materials and technology makee or spacee.)

@pjtaylor I absolutely agree with your conclusion. Ultimately the work that will feel best to us is that which we are most passionate about. At this point, I don't think there are many people who make the connection from "I'm interested in an obscure topic" to "let me create a learning community around this topic". This seldom happens in person, let alone online. However, I think, as @Spamigail mentions, there still seems like a lot that we can do to introduce learning to broader lifestyle/interest/fan communities.

To your question, @Spamigail, I believe that I was thinking about your first hunch, that we just agree to co-document our work trying to create learning communities. @1L2P posted a useful link above, and if you click you'll see a series of slides, the last of which opens to door to how-to guides, best practices, etc. In my mind, we could each document our exploration into these topics focusing on whatever it is we are passionate about and see what, if any, least common denominators emerge.

Hi again @Grif, it sounds like we're on the same page and are both interested in the path that involves more work. I wanted to ask before going overboard.

This topic also enters my life at an interesting time. I've been trying to sort through the evolution of communities. As we know, many get stuck in what I'll loosely call "Phase I: Basic Platform Provided." Rather than starting communities entirely from scratch, I've been experimenting with struggling communities where the temperature is about right for a nudge.

From here I try to introduce activities, content, or traditions ("missing ingredients") that for some reason (budget or lack of vision/experience for instance) the sponsor hasn't included or encouraged. The sponsor may or may not be aware of what I'm trying to do, and this sometimes leads to a lot of confusion. My attempts have forced a return to fundamentals where I try to figure out which resources and strategies are most important. It's a lot like figuring out how to grow a garden without an instructional book/video/friend. Not having someone to swap notes with is a struggle, especially when ideas don't end up having the impact you expected, or you're not sure what to try next.

Growing up, I was fortunate to be part of online communities that were successful in becoming self-sustaining. My journey began in a sort of "virtual after school" program, somewhat akin to the Computer Clubhouse, accidentally sponsored by a company that for many years didn't understand how its online community functioned. From there we learned how to manage and maintain our own communities together. We had little technical knowledge when we came in, but had to learn to grow beyond our "sponsored space."

The community I’m currently "working" with is going to revive sponsored material (live videos, pseudo-mentors, events) this summer and I’m trying to come up with ideas to encourage particular topic exploration, active learning, and collaboration online. Because it’s summer camp themed, I see working with condiments as a completely fitting activity. I’m looking for activities where failure has the potential to be amusing and easy to share; kitchen mishaps are usually a good starting point. Seeing how you approach this could be very helpful to me in more ways than one. I would also appreciate having a group of coordinators or semi-coordinators to report my many failures to as I try to explore the issue of inspiring learners online. I am curious and eager to learn of any LCDs, too.

My experience FWIW:

Facebook does not seem to be interested in hosting such communities, even though they are receptive to social communities created around MOOCs. To start such a group on Facebook you basically have to friend everyone you invite to join the group.

GooglePlus is a possible platform for discussion groups and other communities. Even if the platform is not on GooglePlus, Google resources, like GoogleDrive, can be used to upload media and create a link for sharing. For example, in last year's LCL, with @CyberParra's encouragement, I created a survey using Google Forms to find out how many LCL participants had attended kindergarten and/or taught kindergarten. (If you're interested, 96 people responded, 83% had attended kindergarten and 11% had taught kindergarten.)

After taking The Challenges of Global Poverty MOOC last year on edX, I tried to start a discussion group on U.S. Poverty. Facebook did not respond to my technical issues with people not being able to see the group so that they could push a button to request to join -- my conclusion is they do not want these kinds of groups; they are not social enough for their purposes. I then started the group as a GooglePlus community where it remains. It has few members and I was told it is really hard to start these groups and there is a very long time to get a sufficient number of people interested to spark dialogue. Technology is not the only obstacle. Although I posted about the group on the MOOC discussion forum and the MOOC-related Facebook and GooglePlus groups, few MOOC people followed to the discussion group. One of the reasons: many MOOCers compartmentalize their participation the way most university students view their classes: once it's over, that's it for their time and energy to pursue the subject. (It's nice to see that LCL is more of an online community than the usual MOOC.)

MOOCs have started to have problems with griefers and trolls, and this can be a problem in any online community. MOOCs in the humanities seem to attract them more. They can really spoil the experience, even if they are just jamming up the forum with frivolous posts. But they can be very good at luring people into ridiculous discussions -- they always have a superficially plausible response that tends to keep people in the discussion. Limiting community access as a partial solution of course makes it harder for people to join the group. Here is a link I thought was useful about understanding this problem: http://www.osnews.com/story/25540

Is this a good link at the bottom?

Yes, this link works.

I want to reply to this thread because I recently tried P2PU for the first time and have tried to set up my first course.

https://p2pu.org/en/courses/2119/reprogramming-makey-makey/

Even though I have been consciously thinking about things like "don't be afraid of failure" and other tinkering-friendly concepts as we discuss them in detail here at LCL, I couldn't shake these feelings:

• How dare I set up my own course? I'm no expert.
• How dare I set up a MaKey MaKey reprogramming course? I only got mine reprogrammed this last year.
• I'm certain I'm doing this wrong. This is a bad thing I'm doing, and I feel guilty about even trying.

That being said, I got an initial 'about' section put in, an image uploaded, content modules, a couple badges created, and a discussion area started. I see this as a WIP course but I seem to have gotten through the initial first steps. I still feel like I have somehow done something wrong.

Posting this to try and help offer my perspective as a new P2PU user and to find feedback on my course (also looking for cohorts if any MaKey reprogrammers are frequenting this thread)

@James_B I, too, have been plagued with self-doubt in contributing my creative efforts in this class, and there are other examples in posts from people offering their projects this week of the same self-doubt. And, as you say, this hasn't stopped me either. For example, I was thrilled with my first Scratch project and felt it opened up my creativity in a way I have not experienced for a long time. A week later, this feeling had disappeared, and my first Scratch project seemed only so-so.
I've thought about this a lot this week. This experience (of which I could give many more examples) is puzzling given the encouragement among and to all in this class as well as, at least in my case, my usual self-esteem and willingness to put myself forward.
I'm curious about anyone's ideas about what is going on with this. I know our culture is often vicious to people who demonstrate initiative (I've been the target of it many times) and there is powerful social enforcement of passivity, but...even so. Is this just a symptom of really stretching one's limits? Or,...what?

Hi Grif,

I love that your passion is condiment-making. I sincerely hope you can find a way to attract all your fellow mustard, jam and hot sauce-makers out there!

One thing your discussion raises for me is the intersection of virtual and non-virtual relationships. Making mustard is such a tangible, non-virtual experience, that I would naively imagine friendships formed around condiment creation would happen face to face, e.g., at farmers' market and festivals, for instance, and then move into the virtual sphere to share techniques and organize events. But, there's no reason it can't happen the other way if people know where/how to find each other online.

You and I have talked a little bit about my role in developing a children's museum, which was a huge exercise in building community around shared interests. One lesson I learned is that it was much easier to bring people together around specific, tangible challenges than around big theoretical issues. I think you are right on in starting with your love of condiments and figuring out the process from there vs going at it from top down only.

For this project I started a blog exploring creative discovery (http://lovelivethequestions.tumblr.com, password=rilke). I'd be intrigued to learn more about how you discovered your love of condiment making. If it would be helpful, I'd also be happy to talk further about lessons learned in building community and how that might translate to the virtual sphere. Or, even better, explore how one might move fluidly between virtual and in person connections.

Cathy

Great insight, @KathyG. It's wonderful hearing about your experiences with Facebook and Google+. I'm new to MOOCs and you talk about many issues I've wondered about.

I was just thinking about this the other day. I like that LCL feels more like an ongoing community, too. From my own experience, I'm learning that it's difficult to work MOOCs into life while employed or enrolled in traditional school. I've had problems justifying the time not only to myself but to my support network as well. I intended to do much more in LCL than I have. But we always intend to do more.

Your experiences with Facebook are similar to mine. It definitely represents a particular space that caters to existing networks rather than growing or new networks. I've seen Facebook groups work well for reunions and gatherings of people who share a past. Most of these groups are invisible by nature, having passed a point in their evolution where they welcome and encourage outsiders.

Love what you say about trollers. You are right that trolls and griefers attract lurkers and generate activity. It's just not the kind of activity we as coordinators always want. How interesting that you chose the word "jamming" to describe what they do. I see the kind of work I do as a form of jamming, too, albeit a positive one (or so I like to think). I choose sponsors who I think will be good sports. I suppose I'm something of a troll myself from the perspective of coordinators who desire strict on-topic discussion. It sounds bad when we talk about jamming discussion in a learning community, but perhaps not as bad when we talk about jamming discussion in a brand community.

To offer a different perspective (or perhaps grounds for a distinction), here's what I can say about non-derogatory off-topic posts in my communities:

My favorite mentors were great jammers. They pulled people into the community core, maintained momentum, and made our community experience more meaningful through off-topic discussion. For us it was a healthy freedom. It's how we got to know one another and discovered unexpected connections, interests, and lifestyles. It's also how we built culture and learned new things.

OT is of course problematic from a moderation, structural, and productivity standpoint. The powers that be will probably even argue it's unsafe. Communities that tolerate OT are messy and sometimes difficult for outsiders to understand ("Aren't we supposed to talk about X here?"). Fostering spaces that strike the right balance is a challenge, especially as communities expand and reach a certain size. I would argue that communities that value friendship-building (or the third P, "Peers") are better off with at least moderate doses of OT.

to_the_glory_of_ot.jpg800x440 118 KB

OK! I'm getting a little -- ahem -- off-topic here, and also probably caught up in details. I share at some length because my community's evolution would have differed enormously without OT freedoms, yet most coordinators I speak with are unhappy with it. I'm curious to hear of other positive experiences, or perhaps instances where people feel it is acceptable.

I absolutely relate to the feelings of self-doubt, uncertainty, and failure that @James_B and @KathyG report. Often after working on a post or project, I regret sharing it or find myself eating really bad food. I suppose it's a sort of post-project depression. It doesn't hit right away.

I didn't used to feel this way when I was younger and online, at least not as much. Sometimes I wonder if this is part of the challenge of being an adult learner and tinkerer. We've developed adult filters, inhibitions, and expectations. This might be related to the "enforcement of passivity" that @KathyG brings up.

I need to sleep but I love what everyone is sharing in this thread.

Sorry to be absent for so long - it was great to read through this morning over a cup of tea and be reminded how many interesting people there are out there who stay up thinking about the same things that I do!
@Spamigail can you share more about your summer plans? I think cooking is a great example of creative learning and failing and remixing is so deeply engrained in how we prepare food. I'd love to learn more and possibly even try out a few stimuli with you and your community to see how folks respond.
@clm it's great to hear your support! I really enjoyed reading through your blog and would of course be interested in talking further about moving communities between online and offline (this is something @AyaJennifer has written about in another topic). I have a week and a half until all my final school stuff is done, so perhaps we can arrange to talk after that? (with anybody else who is interested as well!)

@Grif and @AyaJennifer Sure, I'd be glad to talk with you both at any point. I remember the stress of finishing up school. Happy to chat further whenever it's convenient for you both (and happy to include anyone else with interest in this area). Good luck wrapping up!

@Grif This just popped in my inbox and I thought of you. It's a conference on food creativity. The notice came via Paul Sowden (p.sowden@surrey.ac.uk) on the APA Division 10 listserv (http://www.apa.org/divisions/div10/).

“Understanding and Fostering Creativity in the Kitchen” will bring together creativity researchers, food researchers, chefs and the food industry in order to build a cross-disciplinary understanding of the creative process in the context of food. Understanding this process could both promote success in the restaurant and hospitality industry and enable consumers to make more creative use of food in the home, thereby helping society to address issues of sustainable food production by reducing food waste. Further, working creatively with food may help promote creative thinking skills and this could be harnessed in educational practice.

Abstract submission deadline extended to 5th May.

KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS WILL BE GIVEN BY:
· James Kaufman – University of Connecticut, USA

· Ron Beghetto – University of Oregon / Connecticut, USA

· Mark Stierand – Laussane Hotel School, Switzerland

· There will also be a practical workshop to explore approaches to stimulating creative food use led by Nuria May of the Alícia Foundation, Spain (http://www.alicia.cat/en/alicia/foundation), a research centre dedicated to technological innovation in cuisine, under the strategic leadership of world re-knowned chef Ferran Adrià.

THEMES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Contributions are invited under the following three themes:
· 1. Understanding creativity
· 2. Creativity in culinary practice
· 3. Fostering creativity in chefs and the general public

Contributions are welcomed from a wide range of disciplines, and from both academics and practitioners. We encourage various types of contributions:
· 1. Short oral presentations (10-15 minutes)
· 2. Research blasts (5 mins)
· 3. Posters

More details of the event including the call for participation, information about the venue and key dates can be found on the following website:

http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/creativity/index.php

Warm regards,

Paul Sowden

I was interested in this discussion as I am involved in the Trade School movement. The idea behind Trade School is that teaching happens in exchange for bartered goods. So I've taught history courses in exchange for children's clothes, coat hangers and peoples' favourite recipes.

The teachers do not have to have any formal qualifications or any teaching experience. All they need is a knowldedge and a passion for their subject and a desire to share that knowledge with others. Trade School may not be experts but they all have expertise.

It is fine to teach a course if you are not an expert, as long as you are honest about your level of expertise with the students. Characterize the course, for yourself and the students, as a collaborative learning experience and think of yourself as a guide rather than a deliverer of expert knowledge. Students will respond to your honesty and will probably appreciate the autonomy you have provided them. Plus, they will love the idea of being able to teach you, the teacher, something.

The feelings that you describe are the same ones that artists feel. Most artists are discontented and/or unsatisfied with how their artworks turn out because the work that is created can never live up to the concept of the artwork produced in the mind's eye. The thing to keep in mind is that there are two ways to react to these feelings, you can get frustrated and then despondent, and ultimately resign yourself to failure. Or, you can do what successful artists do, which is to take these feelings and use them as motivations to produce future works that they see as more successful. In this iterative process, artists continually refine their creative and technical skills as they loop through each cycle of production and reflection. And I would say that the most successful artists, after going through these repeated cycles of creativity, realize that their artwork does not have to conform to their initial expectations for it to be a successful work. In fact, some artists come to see each artwork s/he makes as a step in a creative process, with his/her entire body of work to be viewed as the artwork, per se. So, hang in there and stay motivated. Your feelings are natural.

@megapequeno Thanks for the insight and feedback!

Related: Users at meta.discourse are discussing user experience and how intimidating Discourse itself might be for first users (especially nontechnical users). User experience especially for new users unfamiliar with the technology being used (Discourse, in this case) seems directly related to empowering users to create their own learning community.

Would anyone be interested in coming up with a short list of technologies to cover for someone interested in setting up a community using tech like Discourse and then creating P2PU courses or similar? On same note, we could then look at creating companion courses for new users just becoming familiar with the tech.

P2PU as @grif mentioned already has great starter courses for using P2PU courses and even starting your own, and even Discourse already has great resources. However, I have yet to find a course for Discourse. A lot of people seem to do well with the "here's a list of open but lightly guided tasks/exercises/activities" format and if we combined that with the peer-learning highly encouraged at a place like P2PU we might be able to help out new users to tech like Discourse.

@megapequeno I've been meaning to say for a few days now that your thoughts on this topic are really eloquent! I hadn't thought about the connection between learning and the artist experience. I like what you say about viewing one's entire body of work as "the artwork," or as is usually my case "the project."

@Spamigail I am glad that something I wrote may have been helpful. Sometimes I forget to heed my own advice and get too hung up on the significance of one thing that I am working on. Then I just have to remind myself that it's all part of the process and that the end is not the means. My condolences on the passing of your cat. I know how hard it is to lose a pet.

As a testament to the crazy that is my life right now, I'm positing early in the AM before I go to bed. I wanted to drop by and say HI EVERYONE LTNS. This community and its fantastic topics are still in my thoughts. I've been trying to squeeze 12 weeks' worth of wedding planning into four, and while I might know a thing or two about planning online events, real-life events are turning out to be quite a learning experience.

"I don't understand, why didn't you get your invites out sooner?" "I HAD LCL PROJECTS TO WORK ON OK." True conversation.

I'm really hoping that I get to work on some community projects near the start of July. I need to share more on that front.

@Grif You'll be happy to know I've been experimenting with food processor salsa. Not sure if that qualifies as a condiment, but it's been fun and delicious when I haven't used the wrong peppers.

@megapequeno Thank you for your kind words. I feel much better now, I was very lucky to spend so much time with a childhood pet. Everyone at LCL was so nice and sympathetic, I was really touched.

@James_B Yo!

That concludes this update, I will return!

Your enthusiasm is contagious! And congratulations on your upcoming wedding! I've just graduated and am settling into work with Philipp and the gang. Not a bad way to spend the summer. Very happy to hear about the salsa and I trust we'll keep in touch about this as my plans move forward (or don't)

Grif, I am going to try pickling peppers and cukes soon, do those qualify as condiments or do I have to pulverize them into Picadilly relish in order to be considered condiments? Inquiring minds want to know...

@shari no need to pulverize for me to be hungry! The definition of condiment is surprisingly vague - a substance that is used to provide flavor to food. Somehow implying that condiments are not food in and of themselves...hmmm....

Well Grif, it's been a while since I wrote that last post, but in the interim, I did indeed end up learning how to make refrigerator pickles of all types. Right now I've got cucumber pickles and string bean pickles, the latter grown in my own garden this summer. I myself am in a pickle over pickles because my husband has become addicted to these fresh condiment pickles and now I feel like I have to keep them coming, even when growing season is over...Oy! I have created a fresh condiment monster!