Building community… one step at a time

I’ve been giving community some thought over the past week, especially how to successfully construct it in an online environment, more specifically creating community with my peer learners on IDEL.

During week 1 of IDEL when we were constructing community, I made a point of checking the participant’s contact details page regularly so that I could form connections on Twitter (for immediate benefits) and even LinkedIn (for potential future benefits as programme alumni, totally forgot about the messaging feature!). Interestingly, several weeks into the course, some peers have not updated their details even though I have been on Skype group communications with them. My question is therefore, where is the sense of community for our cohort (or just in general terms)? How is it intended to evolve?

Even now, halfway through the course, I reluctantly post to the discussion forums since it feels that many of my peers are more knowledgeable than I am, and confidence remains an issue. Sharing my blog posts with any of my peers – who and how would I choose and why? I just don’t feel the sense of community right now, and that makes me nervous for the future. Perhaps more group work might be beneficial, just a thought.

But, in an asynchronous virtual community, how do we form and maintain a strong sense of community? In IDEL, I find Twitter to be a nice medium where peers share helpful information and even without commenting, just pressing the ‘heart’ button or retweeting promotes a sense of community. So, I’ve decided to take one step at a time and see if we can’t get this sense of community up and running. It may just be me of course, but somehow, I think we all have our different struggles and surely sharing can only help.

It’s week 7, Minecraft is a pain, keeping up with all the readings is a challenge, albeit an enjoyable one, and I’m enjoying creating the blog posts. Through Twitter, I’ve managed to connect with a peer and together we’ve decided we can help each other out by connecting through an informal study group. Who knows, perhaps others will join us and we can share both the pain and joy of learning!

One step at a time…. more to follow.