Contributing "organization" to online community

[Demetri Orlando]

Every day I learn things by reading colleagues' email list-serve messages, blogs, and discussion boards. I am constantly inspired by people's willingness to share their knowledge and expertise. The use of participatory technologies like nings and wikis gives us more capability to group, organize, categorize, and index this stream of conversation flowing across discussion boards and email lists. It is a human impulse to want to collect and organize things. For me, this extends into the world of online conversation. I struggle to save the tidbits of knowledge from the constant stream in a way that makes it possible to retrieve and add to their topics again later. The problem with general discussion boards and email lists is that the knowledge flows down them like water flowing down a river into the sea. Yes, you can use Search with key words to look for things in this ocean of information, but it's like looking for the needle in the haystack. However, when humans take the time to categorize, distill, and synthesize information by tagging, using groups, and posting to wiki pages, the information takes on more value because it is more easily found and understood, and in the case of a wiki, the information gets synthesized together.

It seems like nings and wikis are especially well suited to this collaborative style of sharing information. By adding to a discussion group or editing a wiki page, people add value to the network and make it easier for others to tune into whatever the topic is.

Have you ever added to a wiki page? It's a powerful feeling of collaboration. If you want to play with a wiki page, there are links on the Wiki tab above, and there is a "Sandbox Page" where you can play around to see how wiki editing works.

[Josie Holford]

Demetri and Matt - you are really on to something with these posts.

[Matt Montagne]

Hey Demetri,
Not totally related to this, but one of the reasons I discontinued my membership in the ISED list and other listserves is that my contributions, for the most part, are boxed up and only visible by the folks on the list. So, I've tried to work in online professional social networking spaces (like this one) because I feel as though my contributions have the chance to be seen by more people. To me, content in these spaces is much easier to track, search, and archive in comparison to listserve contributions. I know I've come back to discussions on classroom 2.0 that are over a year old and they're still active and going on. Again, not related at all to your question, but for some reason I made this connection and wanted to leave this thought here.