Multilitteratus Incognitus

Pondering what to learn next 🤔

So long, farewell, auf viedersehen, adieu! ;-)

16-10-2015, 05:00communities, CoP, EDDE802, EDDE806, INSDSG, NERCOMP, network, Ning, PhD, research, social, UMass

Well, after a couple of month of not paying the Ning bill UMassID.com is dead! Well, the domain is still fine, @cdetorres got that one for 10 years, but the Ning community that it pointed to is pretty much dead.

So what is was UMassID.com? Well, back in 2008, when I started my MEd in instructional design, the outgoing class was looking for a new president for the student association (GIDA - Graduate Instructional Design Association). This association - I later found out, started at some point in the early 90's (the program began in 1984). Since I didn't want to see the hard work of previous officers go to waste, I thought I would step up and take over the presidency. At the time, someone's final project for a course was to look into communities of practice, and as part of it they created a Ning community, which at the time provided freemium service, so for the student the community was free.

Within a few months of taking over I discovered that the network owner had created the network with their email, which made it a pain to transfer the network, so I created a new network that summer and kickstarted GIDA 2.0, which I nicknamed UMassID (UMass Instructional Design). Since 2008 I've been inviting current students of the program and alumni to join and to create a community of instructional designers. In the end I think we had around 500 members. @cdetorres also got us the nifty umassid.com domain (until 2018), and John Mazz. created an updated logo for us. So, we were all set to go and launch our new community!

Once Ning went pay-for-play I successfully got the department and college to pay for the service for a few years, but with other obligations on my docket at the moment, lobbying hard for a community (which was mostly dormant) didn't seem like a good use of my time.

So, 8 years in, what have I learned about communities, community building, and communities of practice from this experiment? Well, In the original paper I wrote about this (written a couple of years into the experiment), the three big take-aways were that:

A community manager is needed
A community needs a mission
You need volunteers

With a few more years under my belt, I would also say the following:

Field of Dreams lied

That is, if you build it they might not come ;-) Having a space on the web for people to come and join doesn't necessarily mean that people will come, or that people will stay and a community will take hold. One of the things that happened was that the community (at some point) was seen as "AK's place" because I spent a lot of time putting in resources of people that my name got associated with it. Others did not take up the mantle of the community as much in the early years, so most content had my name associated with it. Since students are busy people, a community like this needs better integration - which leads me to point #2

Department Buy-in

I think one of the important stakeholders in this type of community is the academic department itself. It's not just important to support the next by mentioning it here and there, and to pay the bills once a year, but it is important to utilize it. In teaching contexts we speak of teacher presence. I think something similar exists in network. A department needs to be active in the network by posting jobs, announcements, and news there. I also think that faculty have a huge part to play by incorporating such networks into their courses. For instance, Athabasca University has the landing (their social network based on Elgg) incorporated in EDDE 802 and 806. Now, do I visit the landing frequently? The answer is "no", even though our cohort has a group page there. I find Elgg a bit hard to manage, for one thing, and our cohort's facebook page much easier to interact with. Other EDDE courses don't require access to the landing, so I meet my cohort where it's easier for me. That said, I do think that if the social network was promoted and content were made available I'd be there more frequently, which makes me think that if MEd courses incorporated UMassID into their courses (in a tiered fashion) then the network might provide interesting bits for everyone.

Managing a network is time consuming

I guess I had much more time earlier on when I picked up the network, but this stuff is time consuming - and finding volunteers to shoulder the responsabilities is not easy ;-). That said, I did find it rewarding. Finding resources to share with other people was enriching for me as well because it got me to look for stuff that was outside of my own domain. It's a good thing I went in before the lights were turned off and saved a page of Instructional Desinger Resources that I had created for the community. Now I just need to updated it and curate it :)

I am not sure many people will mourn the loss of UMassID.com. The community needed a mission, but it seems that the mission driving GIDA, the one from the 90's, was not sufficient in the 2010's to keep it going. To some extent I think that communities go through cycles, and some communities re-work themselves, re-form, and re-combine to create new ones. I do wonder what the next community for the ID department will be like.

What are your experiences with creating and fostering communities?

Apostolos K. ("AK")

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