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Who’s in your community?Online communities based around Blogging, Wikis and MSN are growing faster thanany other use of the internet. Ten years ago, a young person’s community did notextend very far from their school, today they are linked with people all over the worldwho have similar interests or views. These new global communities have incredible potential for collaborative learning but don’t fit easily within current schools.The problem is that learning within a community is most effective when everyone isequal and has something to offer. The structures within schools tend to dictate thatwe the teachers hold the answers and so many of the ‘in school’ online communitiestend to be moderated by teachers who get very nervous if pupils seem to be strayingtoo far off task. Conversely when the child gets home and goes to MSN for example,they can freely chat to children all around the world who are there by choice, eachgetting as much from the community. If we want to unlock the considerableopportunity for collaborative learning offered by the internet then we must trainchildren how to operate effectively and safely in such communities and empower them with the authority to feed their informal learning back into their school.In order for children to negotiate ‘virtual’ communities they need to know how ‘real’ones work first. Nowhere is this achieved more impressively than at the GrangeSchool in Long Eaton (www.grangeton.com). The school has set up a complete townentirely managed by the children. This problem based approach encourages studentsto understand the skills that exist in their community and how to employ themcollaboratively to solve problems. The children accept that they are modelling theoutside world and so their internal use of ICT as a mini internet used to share radio,generated knowledge and news is excellent training for the real thing. As Headteacher Richard Gerver says, ‘Grangeton is where they get to try out the skills they arelearning in context, to see how they will be useful when they go into the real world,'At the Five Islands School on the Isles of Scilly, the primary school community issplit between four schools servicing five separate islands. Online collaboration is being achieved through setting common extended problems for the children to solvefor which they alone will come up with solutions. If they hit a problem, the childrencan send instant messages to share the problem, use VOIP (telephone calls to multiple people through the computer for free), they can set up a blog so that suggestions andideas can be stored, shared and built upon or they can Wiki to organically build up ahandbook. As with the Grange school, children very quickly determine the network of skills within the community and feel genuinely empowered to contribute to a growing body of knowledge around shared problems. This knowledge is partly generated bythe experiences of the students, partly harvested by research and partly evaluated fromcontrasting sources. Blogs, Wikis, Conferences and MSN communities then serve asthe vehicles for sharing this knowledge bank.Successful international online collaborative communities also tend to be basedaround a shared problem and use the internet to harvest and share the knowledgecreated whilst trying to solve it. The British council has set up a number of suchexcellent examples including the Dreams and Teams scheme in which children inThai schools and children in UK schools both have to set up and run sporting events.
 
Ivybridge Community College in Devon has then used the leadership skills gained byits students through such schemes to further the scope of its student voice.The sidebar explains how you can get started but why not begin by commenting onwhat you have just read. I have posted the question “does blogging have anyeducational value?” at www.danbuckleyblog.blogspot.com.If you visit the blog and click on ‘comments’, you can add your opinion or read the comments which may (or may not) be posted there. I promise not to moderate your responses however cuttingthey are.
The Sidebar
Get blogging!
Take a look for blogs that interest you using the search engine athttp://websearch.about.com/od/internetresearch/a/newsblog.htm. Write your own blog by going towww.blogger.com. Don’t worry about making your first attemptgripping, if you haven’t commented on anyone else’s blog then yours will be quitehard for others to find at first. Comment on this article atwww.danbuckleyblog.blogspot.com 
Get a Wiki!
Wiki sites can be written to by all the participants equally with anyoneable to change any page and no official editor. The Wiki encyclopaedia is goingstrong athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_writingand is very informative.Like open source software it is a global collaborative problem solving exercise andsomehow it works. Take a look at some existing Wikis to get the idea. I likedhttp://www.wiktionary.org/and http://www.kayakforum.com/cgi- sys/cgiwrap/guille/wiki.pl. Now you know how they work set up your own bydownloading the free version at using any of thesehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_farms.
Get instant messaging!
If you are not already into instant messaging you candownload MSN for free atwww.msn.com or www.skype.comthen you need to convince someone else you know to do the same or seek out a random new friend.
Get ideas!
Go to some of the following sites and shamelessly steal ideas to use inyour classroom. I really like the potato project athttp://www.britishcouncil.org/montageworld.htm,http://vinccil253.blogspot.com/or  http://buckman.pps.k12.or.us/classrooms/leake/
Get serious!
In the article I have suggested that our current approach to onlinelearning is failing our children’s future needs. Online conferences are like managedcollections of blogs which allow you to get involved in the debatehttp://www.thefutureofwork.net/blog/archives/2005_07.html,http://www.sst-inet.net/olc/default.aspx or http://www.learningtimes.org/ 
Get technical!
Your network managers can host wiki and blogger sites for free. Lotsof open source tools exist. The best is probablywww.moodle.combutwww.druval.com is also extremely popular.
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