On the sustainability of this network

One of the goals of any E-learning networks projects such as this is to set up a network that is sustainable.

People on the Net are participating in learning networks all of the time, and they exist for as long as they serve a need.

I saw our role as facilitators of this project - which is about experientially exploring a distributed, networked learning model - as being responsible for setting up the online spaces and tools, creating the environment, articulating the vision, explaining how the network/community/model works and give instruction and guidance on how to get involved and participate.

Essentially our role is to kick-start a self-organising and self-sustaining network.

In time, the project would come to an end, the money will be spent, the facilitators will have moved on or become regular members of the network with their own PLEs, and the blog will have served it's purpose.

Hopefully, what we will be left with is a community of bloggers posting to their own blogs, commenting on other member's blogs, subscribing to other blogs in their RSS readers, linking to other blogs in their blogrolls and contributing resources using the 'clcommunity' tag on del.icio.us.

In fact, the 'clcommunity' tag on del.icio.us may be the only 'tool' set up by the facilitators that is left to connect the community and even indicate that there is any community happening. Most of the other tools (excuding the wiki) need some form of adminstration or effort to keep going. The delicio.us tag doesn't.

The blog may take on a new role and evolve into a place for discussion about the issues involved in Web 2.0 in education, PLE's, PLN's, networked learning etc. but there will be no centre of the network anymore, with all member's blogs existing as nodes in a flat network.

We are still exploring ways to create a combined feed (more on that in a later post) which may continue well after the project has officially finished, but, once again, if we don't find a tool that can be communally administered, then it may go by the wayside as well.

I wanted to re-iterate this vision and the importance of creating a sustainable network because I think it's important to remember that the project tools aren't the network - the network is a community of interconnected bloggers and their PLEs.

Funny little aside: when writing this post I discovered that Blogger's spell-checker doesn't recognise the words 'blog', 'blogging' or 'blogger'!

(Image by sillygwailo)