CyberCampers Seeking Online Learning Communities

Good morning! I am working with a great group of folks in Northern Colorado at the moment in a class we're calling CyberCamp. As a piece of our exploration, we're going to be taking a look at different online learning communities. Obviously, we'll be starting here, in Classroom 2.0, as it's referenced in the text that we're reading together. We'll also be looking at the Flickr group that Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss have started to support project-based learning. What other online learning communities would you recommend to a great group of educators who are exploring project based learning? Thanks in advance - and feel free to join us over on the CyberCamp blog, if you'd like!

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Permalink Reply by shegstrom on June 3, 2008 at 9:04am

Have you considered meeting in Second Life? The ITSE room is my favorite.

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Permalink Reply by TERRY C ELLIOTT on June 3, 2008 at 10:20am

I recommend two social networking sites for you to look at:

Ravelry. This is a knitting site that my wife uses that I think sets the bar for the "new classroom" which is not really a classroom at all, but instead a place to learn. They are not necessarily the same. In fact if you read Medina's Brain Rules you will see that classrooms are places designed for the most part as part of a command and control structure that has little to do with how we learn best.

Peertrainer: This is a workout/diet/support site that I use. It ties together the idea that exercise and diet are better if you have a little social support. Amen to that from a guy who has lost over seventy pounds since last August in part due to the help I have gotten here.

Classrooms become more to reuse Weinberger's phrase, "spaces loosely joined". I have heard them 'virtual learning ecologies'. The webbed and complex nature of this new world much more closely mimics the natural world that surrounds. In other words they 'feel good' in ways that most classrooms don't and never will.