The LTD Project Blog

It is such a pleasure to have hooked up with the Learning with Computers (LwC) group – all the more so now that the group had undertaken to explore Diigo, and is putting that free social bookmarking engine through its paces.

Messages flowing into my mailbox on a daily basis are hard to ignore, and fill a professional development gap that I’d hoped might, after I joined the EdubloggerWorld wiki and started monitoring the Tagging Standards page (along with all others on the latter site).

Actually, I cannot recall getting any notifications at all from the latter. That is why I’m so happy to be involved with the LwC crowd in a collective exploration of tagging practices.

In Ongoing VCWG [Virtual Community Working Group] discussion, Carole McCulloch suggests a demonstrable difference between online communities and networks.

A community, on one hand, she suggests is “an online group where one’s absence will be noted (you will be missed).” In contrast, she suggests, a network is “an online group where one’s absence does not matter (the group will survive)” (Learning Times, Virtual Community Working Group, 2005.04.06).

Reading that led to wondering whether the WinK network is beginning to approximate a community. [Somehow, this quick post got clocked in on January 1, 1970. Since I don't recall when I posted it, I'm changing the timestamp to today (March 19, 2008).]

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Tags: communities, LearningTimes, networks, online, virtual