What you are looking at is a tag cloud created with Be The Media Project description and the highly addictive WRDL (hat tip to Tom Watson). I think it perfectly illustrates how we will build the modules using swarm lists many people who may contribute small pieces of knowledge. So, is this a community or a network or something in between?
A few weeks back, Nancy White put a parking lot for the question "Where is the magic between communities and a network?" She captured the tweets from people on her favorites list.
Dave Cormier published a paper recently entitled "Community as Curriculum" and that phrase has stuck with me as one way to think about Be The Media project.
Curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning.
With this model, a community can construct a model of education flexible enough for the way knowledge develops and changes today by producing a map of contextual knowledge. The living curriculum of an active community is a map that is always "detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits"
So, I asked on Twitter, "What's the sweet spot between a network and community?" Gabe Ormsby says netmunity! Or perhaps a sociesphere? I'm thinking it might be a community that works in a networked way.
OMG, Beth... I love Wordle.
Here's my del.icio.us tag cloud: http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/38333/Social_Media_Marketing_for_The_Nature_Conservancy -- what it shows me is the way I think about what my organization does. And having it displayed like this actually allows me to go back to my stakeholders and check my understanding.
What a fascinating and useful tool!
Posted by: Jonathon D. Colman | June 28, 2008 at 09:09 AM