Web Communities for Educators?

January 22, 2008 11:10 AM

Web communities in conservative/educational climates: what are some good ones?

I am doing some consulting for a large educational firm, working to develop "Web Community" or "Web 2.0" assets on their already vast Web properties. While they do have a large network of websites, they've been hesitant to adopt blogs, message boards, wikis and commenting on articles -- the backbones of Web community. I'm here to spearhead that change. It's slow-going, especially in a culture that is hesitant to open the gates to public criticism of its practices.

Can you MeFites help me find good examples of Web 2.0/Community elements to share in a brainstorming session set to happen this Thursday afternoon, EST? I use Metafilter as an example *constantly*, but in this case, I am looking for pre-existing websites with a high amount of content output that has successfully incorporated community elements. And, while the sites don't have to be related to education, it wouldn't hurt if they were, either.

My natural default is to use best-practice sites like Metafilter, Flickr, etc., but I think I may need to look closer to "home," thematically. Thanks so much for your help here ...

posted by chinese_fashion to education (3 answers total)

There are a number of individual colleges with blog and podcasting projects. Karine Joly at collegewebeditor.com might be able to help.

If you can ask without being sales-y, you might also try joining the HighEdWebDev (?) email list. I spent 6 years at a community college, and that list was a life-saver.
posted by epersonae at 2:36 PM on January 22, 2008

It sounds surprising seeing that most educational websites used to exclusively use Listservs back in the day. Listservs are still popular(although extremely inefficient and outdated) with the likes of H-Net among many, many others.
posted by JJ86 at 3:37 PM on January 22, 2008

"Worldbridges is a network of individuals and organizations that use live, interactive webcasting and other new media technologies to help people connect, learn, & collaborate." One of their subsets is the EdTechTalk community. They've been doing live call-in shows since before the fist Talkshoe was ever vamped and podcasts as long as there has been such a thing. They seem to use a new Web 2.0 technology ever other week then discuss it on their shows.
posted by cephalopodcast at 4:19 PM on January 22, 2008