Combining  familiarity with excitement

Successful communities combine familiar routines with “enough interesting and varied events to keep new ideas and new people cycling into the community” (Wenger et al., 2002, p.61).  As mentioned, the core activity for SCoPE is scheduled seminars facilitated by members of the community. Topics for the seminars emerge through participation, and from the backgrounds and interests of our members. These seminars establish a routine, but with new topics each month there is always something new and fresh to build expectations.

SCoPE activities are often organized in collaboration with other communities and events. For example the snapshot of front page community (figure 11) highlights University of Manitoba’s Future of Education online conference. As a mutual exchange of services and appreciation, I designed and maintained the Moodle environment for the conference. A seminar on the Educational Value of Podcasting was scheduled in tandem with other community events to form a “Podcasting Camp”, a theme initiated by the BCcampus Online Communities. BCcampus and SCoPE also worked together to launch SCoPE's Professional Reading Group Series, combining Elluminate sessions hosted by the BCcampus EdTech Community and asynchronous discussions hosted by SCoPE. A companion online discussion area was created to continue to the dialogue begun at Simon Fraser University’s 8th Annual Symposium on Innovative Teaching. In 2006 SCoPE was the organizing sponsor for the 2nd Annual Knowtips.ca conference, responsible for recruiting and supporting presenters at a separate venue altogether. Members and potential members presented at the online conference on the following topics:

• Technologies for Communities, with Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John Smith
• Collaborative eLearning: Feedback and Assessment, with Janet Salmons
• Open Networked Learning, with Leigh Blackall
• Games and Sims, with Rod Corbett
• Social Software: Going Beyond LMS Systems for eLearning, with Terry Anderson
• Facilitating Deepened Online Learning, with Sarah Haavind and Marsha West
• Memorization, with Bruno Vernier
• Training Practitioners Online to be Online Practitioners, with Kate Anthony
• The Attic, with Shula Klinger

Collaboration with these other communities both brings in new interest to SCoPE, and provides variety to our members.

Figure 11 Snapshot of the main page highlights section June 4, 2007

SCoPE offers an ideal venue for showcasing new education technology software and for beta testing. By using a familiar environment (Moodle) for organizing our activities we can integrate and experiment with other technologies that support our work as a community, or that we may use in our teaching and learning practices. For example, during the last 18 months SCoPE members have been using Marginalia Web Annotation (Xin & Glass, 2005). Marginalia provides a means for members to collect and revisit notes while participating in SCoPE discussions. It is also a valuable research tool, and is especially useful for moderators to flag and follow up on key contributions and emerging themes in a discussion. Use of new tools such as Marginalia provides valuable feedback to developers and also attracts new members. We continue to integrate and hook into tools that will help to improve our SCoPE experience and teaching practices. Maintaining a home base that is familiar helps to manage this experimentation.