What do you do in your spare time? Quilt? Fish? Read? We all have hobbies that we enjoy. However, to knit, fish, or read, we had to learn how to do it first.
Did your grandmother teach you to quilt? Maybe your father took you to the lake and taught you how to put the worm on the hook. Or you read a good book and discuss the plot with some friends. Each of these events is a step in the learning process for that particular hobby. And that learning process is fostered by the sense of community surrounding the hobby.
Quilting bees, fishermen at the lake or tackle store, a reading group at the local Barnes and Noble are all communities. In other words, a community is a group of people who are interested in the same things you are and whom you can bounce ideas off of, ask questions to, or even commiserate together when something doesn’t go as planned.
Wouldn’t it be nice if an online course also fostered that sense of community and purpose?
To design an online course with community in mind, an Instructional Designer should think about how to connect participants together so that they can communicate effectively, work together successfully and learn from one another. Web 2.0 communication and social networking tools are easily incorporated and foster community as well as a sense of purpose.
So, which tools can be used to foster a sense of community? Well, some very basic Web 2.0 tools are wikis and blogs.
- “A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily.” They are “often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIKI).
- Wikipedia is a good example of a wiki.
- We also use a wiki to collaborate on our design processes. Not only does it make it much easier to have a depository for our combined knowledge but we each can make changes as needed through the easy-to-use interface of wikispaces.com.
- “A blog is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order”. “The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogs).
- Sending your courses into the blogosphere: An introduction for “old people by T. Mills Kelly is an excellent article on integrating the use of blogs into a face-to-face course. The same principles can be applied to online courses.
There are other Web 2.0 tools that a community of learners can use during a course. Skype, Google Docs, RSS feeds, mashups, social networking sites like Facebook and folksonomies are all interactive and can bring information and people together quickly.
