Education rationale for the design elements of the platform tools and features

Based upon our observation of our community of learners, we propose a framework for analysis of community technology, with the following four levels, as suggested by (Wenger et al  2005, p. 8).

This is our ‘client context’ and is what we’ve experienced of our colleagues in e.g. teleconference meetings, working alongside them, how our Intranet highlights our peers. This will be important information  for the facilitator to be aware of, otherwise it may be harder to build a community. Similarly, they will need to know who needs more instruction.

1) Thecurrent configuration of technologies our community and its members use and depend on mostly are: email, telephone and mobile for communication, video conferencing and teleconferencing for communication with multiple stakeholders, presentation software such as power point, word processing for writing documents and a web browser such as Firefox and Google as the main search engine.

Out technology needs to reflect the constitution of our community  – including, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the group, the likelihood that members will form ‘sub-communities and their ICT skills.

2) The platform into which developers have historically packaged technology into for this group is an internal Intranet site, which consists of a series of integrated tools.

3) The tools within the Intranet site that support specific activities are e.g. feedback tabs, an archive of video resources, a blog, a resource link to industry sites/documents, a series of self-paced 20 minute modules, monthly key-note audio conferences with industry experts and discussion boards. All allow for browsing and are a bridge between asynchronous and synchronous activities (e.g video archive makes content available to those who were not there). We also need to anticipate what artefacts they will want to share? To answer some of these questions, we may conduct an analysis through Survey Monkey (which is a familiar tool to members) to help delineate the set of tools to use  (Wenger et al 2005, p. 11).

4) The features of tools and platforms that make them useable and also differentiate one from the other.  Most importantly, they provide a consistent interface and are easy to navigate. To help us in achieving this, we may turn some features off, so as to make the technology more useable in the beginning.

In providing technology to our community, we acknowledge that our learners are working in an institutional, rather than educational technological environment. This will influence their access to technology and the process of adopting technology (Wenger et al  2005, p.9).

Community members will:

• Have different levels of access to technology, some with very low bandwidth in regional and remote areas of NSW.
• Being a government agency, many will have low budgets and hence we will need to use tools that are cheaply or publicly available.
• As an organisation serving the community services sector, as an organisation there is a need to worry about the security of information, firewalls,  compatibility with existing software and sharing information outside the community.

Our learning group compares well to the Human Resources case study example, cited in Boud and Middleton (2003) , whereby this online learning community provides our learners with a key opportunity for informal learning. All staff, in particular this group of managers and new supervisors will be required to act in jobs at a more senior level, or to act in more specialised community sector areas and exercise good people management – that is achieving outcomes through other people.

Bibliography

Attwell, Graham. 2007 ‘The Personal Learning Environments – the future of eLearning?’

eLearning Papers, vol. 2 no. 1. ISSN 1887-1542.

Boud, D. & Middleton, H. 2003 ‘Learning from others at work’, Journal of Workplace Learning, vol 15, no. 5, 194 -202.

Wenger, E., White,N., Smith, J.,& Rowe, K, 2005 ‘Technology for Communities‘, CEFRIO Book Chapter – Jan 18, 2005.