Introductions
Hi Leigh and everyone else,
I just found this course, today, a week after you all started. Well, I would love to participate, this sure sounds interesting. My name is Peter Efland, I am executive secretary at the Danish-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I have no experience running online communities, actually the nearest I get is to have studied a bit about community behavior at at my masters at Intercultural Management at Copenhagen University. Except from that, my experience with online communities is that I spend way too much time on twitter, friendfeed, socialmedian, identi.ca, Facebook etc etc. At the Chamber, which in a way is a offline community, we naturally make quite a few events offline, but I would love to get a chance to learn how to facilitate communities online as well - specifically, from a corporate point of view, I find it very curious why so many companies fail when they set-up communities as part of their marketing. I would think this is due to some cultural differences between off-line and on-line communities, but hopefully I will learn much more about that.
My Contacts are as follows:
email: phefland@gmail.com blog: http://phefland.wordpress.com/ skype: peter_efland twitter: phefland
I look forward to catching up with you guys.
Best Regards, Peter H. Efland
Hi all,
Like Peter, I am starting late here (many thanks Leigh for adding me to the list.) My name is Kylie Benton-Connell, and I work with Oxfam International Youth Partnerships, based in the Oxfam Australia Sydney office.
OIYP is a network of 300 young people working for social change in various ways in many different parts of the world. Over a period of three years, OIYP provides networking platforms, collaborative face to face learning, small grants and skills-building opportunities.
You can find our website here: http://www.oiyp.oxfam.org
Part of our skills program is a series of E-workshops, where reading materials are mailed to participants, and a structured online forum is facilitated by members of previous OIYP 3-year cycles.
I look forward to sharing experiences and knowledge over the coming weeks.
All the best, Kylie
Hello everyone,
I came across this page a few weeks ago, and was really wondering whether I should join or not. On the one hand, I have had a great experience with David Wiley's course last fall, which was conducted in a similar manner, and the topic is very interesting to me. On the other hand, I will be travelling in India and China for the next 30 days (exactly), and often not have very good or regular internet access. I am also starting a new MA in September (in international and comparative higher education - focusing on OER and open learning, so very relevant to this course), and I don't know how much time I will have.
But I have decided to at least try... all though I might not always be able to participate fully... (Which is an interesting problematics in itself - are these kind of courses dependent on everyone who joins being a full-time committed student, or is it ok for people to drift in an out? What does that do with the group dynamics?).
I will be blogging on http://reganmian.net, which is also my main blog (and if you go back in the archives, you can find everything I wrote during Wiley's course :) I hope someone will create an OPML file of all the people who have joined this course, once the dust settles, so that it will be easier to add you all to my feed reader.
Looking forward to learning from you all!
Stian
