In March 2009, a small group of key staff gathered for what turned out to be a really productive discussion centred on our ambitions for ILT development. We had representitives from the Senior Management Team, Heads of Faculty and Student Services Managers. We also had business support staff present, whom in the past have sometimes been under-represented in such sessions. Some really positive ideas began to emerge, as did plenty of enthusiasm for moving forward.
In follow up to this meeting, and in order to continue the development of ideas that emerged, I sent out invitations to the network; an opportunity I had been quietly waiting for since establishing the Ning site some months previously, and which I first proposed the previous year via our Moodle VLE.
Creation of the group using the ‘Ning’ social networking tool was perhaps critical as this time. In the spirit of the discussion we all had, this was something new that hadn’t been used on campus before. Nobody present really had any idea about it, nor had they actively participated in a network of this type. Ning is rapidly growing in popularity as a flexible method to create and develop your own [moderated] social community. Ning sites offer similar functionality to others that regularly crop up in conversation (you know their names!), but allow for slightly more control of content, features and members. I was particularly impressed with the community being gathered by the University of Bristol: http://developme.ning.com/
My ambition in establishing the network was for us to actively use a social tool to help support the aims of the College. This hadn’t been done before (with the exception of our ever-enthusiastic Music lecturer), but is something that should be perfectly possible with a myriad of web 2.0 tools available to our community.
I’ve kicked things off by posting some content in the form of my notes from the meeting, and invited others to do the same, leave comments on my notes, or just share some other ideas you may have had since the group met.
Invitations were sent, and lo! They joined!
ILT Innovation Group 