October evaluation notes

Seemed to be educators who are looking for online credentials by taking these courses. Yet they don't deserve the credential for this "course" because they didn't do the work for it and the "course" itself is not up to standards. The course must have credibility first.

These seem to be the type that are looking to promote themselves into a better job or career. They buy and promote books like "How to Organize without Organization" because they want to get connected and break into the market with their own theory.

Leigh stated at the start of this "course" that the platform is not what makes the community.
I agree. I think that Leigh should have met with the FOC08 people rather than admit whoever showed up on a given platform to be called "FOC members".

A course is a small group that meets continuously through a complete term. Leigh had only five hours a week for this course. That is hardly enough time for a very small group of seven to ten members.

Facilitating Online Communities is a set of human problems and solutions. Since platforms are not the community, I think that the course outline should not have included exploration of all of these platforms. Rather we should have taken one or two very common platforms and explored the ethical uses of them.

In a course, the participants are responsible to respond. I would expect higher standards for replying to the blogging. Sustained dialogue should have been a requirement. When I take a university level course or workshop, there is a very high degree of exchange. I didn't get that here, either on my own blog or on the blogs of the other participants. The blogging assignment should have included that each reply some number of times on each blog assignment. Maybe ten replies for each blog. That would not have been much to do for a group two or three people.

Leigh, I really think that you need to learn to organize two or three people in one of these courses. Organize them as a group and deliver this like a course. With such a small group, you could even do the assignments too. I think the fact that Leigh was not doing the assignments was what led him off track. In a teaching role, I would not expect the leader of the group to do the assignments but perhaps as a facilitator you should have? Doing the assignments would have kept you in touch. You somehow got out of touch with those who are blogging on the topic of Faciliatating Online Communities. Instead you got all touchy feely with whoever met on whatever platform of the week you had scheduled.

Platforms have little to do with the arts of facilitating groups.

I wonder if politics is not involved somehow? Leigh was running for an elected office at the same time as this course. I wonder if the course was not just a way of promoting the Leigh's name during the election? I wonder if Leigh allowed the course to be overrun by th WE community because they were the voters in the WE election? This led him to refusing to identify who was a member of the group and focus the five hours per week on those few.

Anyway, I'm a dissatisfied customer and think that this "course" degrades the reputation of the "university" that sponsored it.

steered discussion away fron ethical to technical
immature approach to human problems
problems created by technology
stoopid to expect technology to solve these problems

if you want "out-of-the-box" experience go trolling

need to demonstrate ethical democratic forms so people can learn them
urgent when country is going socialist and politicians are moving to suspend form

other important uses:
who makes rules for Internet?
Missouri state legislature?
City Council of Santa Barbara?
or the users themselves?

individuals have abdicated decision making to administrators because groups lack organized temporal and ordinal forms
great benefit in restoring form is that people can build their communities up through their own decision making efforts
rational discussion deliberation and decision making cannot be made with irrational forms or outside of rational form

open community closed groups

need open circuit for promotion, to let people know you exist, advertising
closed circuits should be used in organizing small groups, there is no reason to broadcast the proceedings of a small group, Rotary International does not need to know all of the goings on of every local club in the world.

disservice to expect people to be able to wade through mountains voluminous of info to find their way
how can someone know what to ask for?
how can they know that they don't know something unless someone shows them that the thing exists?
small group can verify what people know and don't know, this disclosing of blind spots is important for every member.
a practical dialogue gathers all the knowledge and increases the knowledge of each because it illuminates the blind areas the places where we don't even know that we don't know.

I expected that we would have as much exchange as a course with 10 or 15 people meeting once or twice a week should have.
Fewer people would have been easier to schedule more often
response ratio is affected by random multimemberships
people are not there to respond because they are too busy with their multi-"memberships", they go multi-membershipping because they do not recieve enough response in the "communities"
what seems to be lacking is the small cohesive group
ordinal form requires that each respond

blogging experience
first step in building groups is to find qualified individuals
dialogue can serve well and blogs are a good place to dialogue
still I find little interest in dialogue on many blogs
my role seems to be just to let people know that they exsist
finding people using blog search is easier also better faster way to connect less static

leigh said was not community
but treated it as if it were
my guess is that he is a part of a community
WE
and they were automatically qualified to participate
but it degraded the integrity of the course to act so
influenced by election?

gender politics maybe best to give gender neutral usernames?

relation of group to community

community is comprised of small individual groups
individual enters community through frequect contact with the small group
NOT through frequent contact with the whole community
the whole numvber of a group should be small enough so that the average member can lead it
Supreme Court is good example.
9 members
any one of them could lead it
community should not threaten the functioning of the group
but support it
groups should have seperate identities within the community

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