Joining Online Education Communities

I'm in the early stages of creating a Multimedia Montage Project (MMP), which will be geared for professional development for instructors at my community college. I think this will be fitting since I just finished an extensive project spring semester developing a series of demo tutorials I hope to use for my fall semester students in my computer classes. Alongside this, I got the OK a few weeks ago to facilitate a few professional development sessions – assuming people sign up – so my colleagues can learn how I created my videos.

Creating demo videos is one thing, but teaching college instructors how to produce them for their own classes is a complex task. I teach basic computer classes. So I expect the steps I used to create mine may translate differently for other subjects. But I feel strongly about exploring where this will take me since I enjoy learning about technology, especially how instructors can seamlessly integrate it into teaching content. Subsequently, I hope instructors then challenge their students to use multimedia to demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter. In the article "Skills and Strategies for E-learning in a Participatory Culture" the authors write: "The institutional challenge is to bridge the gap for students between learning – or playing, or performing, or negotiating or networking – in an informal context, to carrying out these activities in a formal, academic context" (Walker, Jameson and Ryan, pg. 223). In the professional development context, instructors should be willing to go outside the box to produce helpful, engaging content students can then use as a model to further enhance their learning.

One resource I've been looking to in helping me develop ideas on this project is Google+ communities. In searching for groups that would fit what I'm trying to accomplish, I looked up search phrases such as "higher education," "education technology," "ed tech," and "technology teaching". This task proved to take a bit more legwork than expected. I found several listings that ended up being pages instead of communities, or the accounts were communities without posts in over a year.

Eventually, I found two groups I believe will be good resources for me: Connected Learning and Higher Education.

Connected Learning Google+ Community Page

Higher Education Google+ Community page

One reason I chose these two communities is they both have filters on their pages split by subject matter. In the Connected Learning community, there is a category called "Technology & Learning". The Higher Education community has a category called "Digital, Mobile, Web." Other communities did have related filters, but I felt their posts were either too broad or not very current. 

In skimming their posts, I feel like the Connected Learning and Higher Education communities both have relevant and useful links and information I can further investigate as well as reach out to other members about for questions or clarification. 

In addition to the Google+ groups, I've requested membership in a LinkedIn community called Higher Education Adjunct Faculty. Right now I can't tell if that group will be useful to me. However, assuming I am accepted, I hope to find others who are interested in education technology in relation to professional development to help with what I'd like to accomplish.

My expectation from these communities is to learn about tools I can present to colleagues as alternatives they can use to create their own tutorials. In addition, I hope to be able to test out some tools so I can confidently say they would be good to use.

Reference:
Walker, S, Jameson, J, & Ryan, M. (2010). Skills and Strategies for E-Learning in a Participatory Environment. Routledge: New York, NY. 

Shuva