Vivian Johnson - Creating a Community of Learners Using Technology

Community Building Wiki http://communitybuilding.wikispaces.com/

Community Building resources http://del.icio.us/communitybuilding

Community Building on Ning http://www.classroom20.com/group/communitybuilding20

Look at http://www.doodle.ch/ for a polling tool.

They engaged the audience in their presentation and recorded the results in their wiki so the information will be available for everyone.

Three conditions for building community -
1. Learners know each other.
2. Learners respect, affirm, and care about each other.
3. Learners feel membership in, and respect for the group.

This requires time to happen.

We must realize that communications over the Internet are not the same as face-to-face communications. You lose the body language. We need to teach this to our students.

In a conversation with the lady sitting next to me, the idea came up of having the group (class) decide on its values. Then create a blog for these values. The values would be listed in the introduction. Events in the classroom would get on the blog by student posting (teacher could moderate). The class would compare these postings to the stated class values.

Online class activities can give some learners the wait time they need to successfully participant in the conversation.

To help students learn collaboration have them create a video which shows good and bad examples of collaboration.

Google groups can be used for discussion. It will protect their identity.

Look at http://leadertalk.org/