ready setty?

A wedding photo ;)

So we are starting to come on back from holidays. A new series of 10 minute lectures is getting lined up, so get your typing fingers ready so we can look forward to some fresh and insightful blogging from everyone about what we are about to discover.

1. Derek Chirnside is going to talk with us about community in formal education courses on 15 October.
2. The week after we will spend a little more time looking at wikis in that we have a barn building event lined up for 22 October where we will use Elluminate to coordinate with those taking part.
3. Then we will start focusing on social networking sites like Facebook, and the new educational versions like Ecto. I think Sarah is lining up a few people on the 29th to give us a 10 minute lecture on Facebook, Bebo and Myspace.
4. After looking at social networking sites it might be about right to focus in on Virtual Worlds and reschedule Sean FitzGerald from Australia (remember when Elluminate broke down?). My brother in law is also willing to give a talk about World of Warcraft too.

So if you feel like you need a short background reading on Virtual Worlds, George Siemens recently pointed to this little summary by Mark Glaser at Media Shift. Adding to that is my own attempt to explain the virtual worlds at a Wellington web developers conference earlier this year.

We've already had a little look at Ecto by watching the promo video. Hopefully that video has helped people recognise the functionality and potential of these services for online community building. If not, try watching a few more Youtube videos about Ecto submitted by other users. Has anyone come across other good resources about social networking sites? There's the tried and true Social Networking in Plain English of course.

As for wikis and barn raising events, hopefully the Barn Raising event scheduled next Monday will attract experienced barn raisers and we can see and learn from them.

And if you have a few minutes before Monday 15 October, have a read through Derek's blog in readiness for his talk.

So, there's 4 topics to look at over the next 4 weeks. Try to make notes to your blog that summarise your understanding from the readings and resources and add links to other related resources that you find in your own research. Try and make it to the Elluminate sessions so we can have an energised discussion about the things we are looking at. And remember - 5 hours per week is your expected time allotment to this course, use it wisely. Use your blog to document what you do with that time and if you find yourself running out of time, make a note to your blog on the reasons.

Ok, that's it from me. Is nice to be back and feeling energised to explore some fascinating new areas of online learning communities with you all.