Focusing on value

“Rather than attempting to determine their expected value in advance, communities need to create events, activities, and relationships that help their potential value merge and enable them to discover new ways to harvest it” (Wenger et al., 2002, p.60).

SCoPE exists to bring together individuals who share an interest in educational research and practice. The purpose of bringing them together is to interact, and to share and construct resources related to practice. The community site, then, is about people and relationships first, and this is figured somewhat into the site design. The main page features random member profiles (shown in figure 9), access to the full list of members, and information about who is online, or has been online recently. Also, some members choose to provide detailed information about themselves in their member profiles.  

Figure 9 Random member profile

In the initial design of SCoPE, every effort was made to provide several opportunities to communicate and to share resources in different contexts. For example any resource file type can be attached to forum posts during a seminar discussion or in an open-ended forum such as “Your News” in the Community Library. There are several archived resources that accompany forum discussions, such as transcripts from text chats, conference calls, recorded webcasts and webinars, and support documents provided to anchor the discussion.

Through SCoPE discussions a number of “outcome” resources (shown in table 7) have been created. These include wikis to gather key points alongside a seminar discussion and final summaries in other formats. In some cases seminar summaries are posted directly in the forum. Also, there are several archived resources that accompany forum discussions, such as transcripts from text chats, conference calls, recorded webcasts/webinars, support documents, and resources contributed as attachments and links as part of the discussions.

(INSERT OUTCOME RESOURCE TABLE)

A few repositories  were introduced to see how they would be used, such as a start on a collection of webcasts in the community library.  From the beginning we were mindful that our service to the community should be to provide opportunities and to model how resources can be added and created rather than decide which resources would be of interest to members. As stated by John Smith, technologist and coach at CPSquare.org, “Resources does not a community make”.

However, for the resources we produce and share in the community to be of value to members, we need to find ways to provide efficient methods of organizing and retrieving them. This is becoming an urgent issue in SCoPE. Also, our initial ideas that members would be willing to take extra steps to add content to a repository, and to share ideas, information about events and newsworthy items on an ongoing basis were off the mark. As mentioned, increasingly individuals are relying on blogs and RSS to keep up-to-date and to share and discuss current issues. Likewise, sharing and annotating Internet resources is easily accomplished through social bookmarking.

It seems each time we visit the need to organize communal resources, we see new possibilities that are more efficient and very different from traditional file folder metaphors or containers for gathering resources into one place. Figure 10 shows what I refer to as the collection of bad decisions – a space we originally referred to as the “community library” where members were expected to share their resources. Resource collections that are maintained outside of SCoPE and tagged for specific purposes and topics would obviously be more useful than a general Del.icio.us Bookmarks tag called SCoPE, or special place to upload links to podcasts and webcasts. Note that the forum in the library for members to post ideas about how to organize that space has never used, which is a clear indicator that there is little interest or need to maintain a community library of external resources.

Figure 10 The collection of bad decisions, captured April 4, 2007

Many seminar topics emerge from current events, such as the 2006 WebCT-Blackboard merger, or from discussions in the community. The request for a seminar on “Supporting and Advancing Online Dialogue” emerged during an earlier seminar on instructional design. Likewise the idea for the “Personal Learning Environments” seminar came about during the seminar “The Use of Open Source and Free Software in Education”. Other seminars coincided with and supported other scheduled events, such as Simon Fraser University’s Symposium on Innovative Teaching and selected webinars. A seminar called “Talking the Walk: Narratives of Online Learner Collaboration” served the purpose of collecting stories related to personal experiences with online collaboration, some of which will be published in a book – a writing project taking place in the BCcampus eLearning and Marketplace Expo community. The seminar topics, then, are directly connected with the lives of the members, rather than through an administrative process of selecting topics that might be of interest to members.

Perhaps the clearest indicator that SCoPE is providing value to its members is seen through expressions of appreciation and willingness to return, such as this one: “SCoPE is such an amazing learning environment. See you on the 4th!” (Ian McLeod, 2 April 2007)