Community as Committee

In higher education we use the committee model to get most things done. If you are planning a conference the first thing you do is get a committee or two together. If you are creating new policy, strategic direction, or just about anything else that requires a decision we assemble a group of people and ask them to build the recommendations. Committees are typically a good way to come to consensus around very complex issues. With that said, I feel like I have arrived at a new place with my thinking around planning — it may be time to take the next step and ask the community to be the committee.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately and I am having trouble figuring out why we wouldn’t want to ask the community to really interact with us as we make plans for new projects, initiatives, or approaches. I’m not coming up with anything that is an insurmountable negative and I am certainly not going to align myself with the attitude that talking openly about some of our direction is a bad thing. I know some people will get nervous about the idea of asking anyone in the PSU community to contribute ideas for what we are working on, but at the end of the day as long as we all recognize we can’t implement all the ideas we’ll be fine. So there in lies my first two questions … what are the real downsides to this approach and can it work to create stronger outcomes?

To this end, the one thing we’ve done recently is to start placing more of our planning documents in a quasi-open wiki. Quasi-open because it is limited to those who are part of the PSU community — both people with full access and to those with the Friends of Penn State account. We’ve started a wiki article on the Blogs at Penn State and will be asking the community to come in and help us think big about what we can and should do with it on our campus. Will people show up? Only time will tell … how will we manage the page editing if they do show up? Only time will tell. But if we are to address the needs of over 100,000 potential users it may be time to ask some of them what they think. So, consider yourself invited to be a part of the committee.

Our Learning Design Non-Conference

As the TLT Symposium approaches I am struck again and again at how much I enjoy working in the PSU Learning Design community … this community is made up of faculty in all sorts of disciplines, staff across our campuses who think about teaching and learning with technology, and students who are engaged in discovering new territory. It is really active and alive! My Twitter stream tells me that is true.

With that in mind, I am thinking about how we get as many of these people together to keep pushing our conversation forward. One thing I know we should have done a long time ago is some sort of an unconference model where we can come together, pick some topics, and share thoughts related to them. So, the other night I put together a page at my wiki asking for help in designing the First Annual Learning Design Non-Conference. Come on in and help us figure it out … the whole thing feels like the right thing to do. If there are people outside the area who would want to join the fun, help us think about how we could extend it to others.

Be a Pligg

For several years a couple of us have wanted an easy way to rate and organize content that students submit. Sure, we have a the typical CMS/LMS tools, but we have always talked about something much more simple and much more open. When Digg hit the web a couple of years ago we thought the model was perfect — a place where users submit content and then the community does the rest. All we wanted was that environment … enter Pligg. A little piece from their site:

In a world with so many Content Management Systems fighting for control it can seem nearly impossible to pick out a perfect CMS to suit your needs. That’s why Pligg exists, because we know that no CMS is going to offer a perfect out-of-the-box experience for every user. The net would be a boring place if every site looked and acted the same, so be different! Pligg’s dynamic structure allows users to quickly and effortlessly install and customize their sites.

What it all means to me is that I can quickly create a site that lets users submit content and control (through action) where that content lives on the site. I have a Pligg demo site running on one of my domains … take a look.

I see two areas where this stuff could be very helpful — at the course and at the organizational levels. We talked about this during ETS Talk 27 this past week, but I think it is worth repeating here and hoping that the community will participate in some sort of conversation around this thing — in other words, I could use some help thinking about what I will write about.

In the classroom this could be used as a sort of “Leader Board” where students could constantly submit and review content in an ongoing basis. The best content consistently rising to the top of the site. If you made it part of the assignment process you could create a very interesting way to view student and faculty contributions over the course of the semester. I have wanted to let my students be much more active in both contribution and quick assessment — this may be the way.

At the organizational level I think it could be very useful as well. As an example, the new Blogs at Penn State platform has allowed the vast majority of my staff to start blogging out in the open. I would say that at least half are blogging on a regular basis and their posts have been very insightful on many levels. A few weeks ago I discovered how to aggreagate posts together quickly and easily using Google Reader — that has been very helpful. But what if we wanted to take it to the next level? What if we wanted to see how the community would react to not only the content in their blogs, but also at all of our community hub sites and the general web? Pligg could offer us a very unique opportunity to create a new sort of meta hub for community based sharing and control. Solid and informative posts rise to the top and stay sticky longer — that would be a good thing. I am wondering if this could be viewed as the ETS News site — with our press releases competing with staff content … it could just prove to be very interesting.

I would really like to know what others think about adapting a digg model to support learning and organizational communications.