Brief for Community Developers

This brief describes the 'Changing the Learning Landscape' project, in relation to how the student community developers will set up their communities, suggestions on topics to discuss and the outcomes of the project.

The DIAL project has been working with a number of student groups to discuss issues relating to professional online presence, collaborating online, 'building your own environment', MOOCS, copyright, free and open education, etc. This project will continue along that vein to explore issues that may arise from the topics mentioned previously, and to discuss ways in which resources and online tools can be implemented to help students, graduates and staff.

How important is your online presence to your professional practice?

When you leave university what will you do to present yourself as a working professional?

What challenges do you encounter when managing your professional and personal online presence?

How do copyright issues affect your online professional presence?

What support do you need from the university to establish yourself online?

What:

Your role as community developer is to work within their colleges to set up a local community of students, in order to explore and develop issues, problems and solutions on how to present yourself once leaving university.

The communities created should be

• open

• accessible to students, staff and external contacts

• with face-to-face activities

• event documentation shared online, e.g. open blogs, website and social media.

Aims:

Build active communities of interest, get feedback, test resources, generate debate, engage the community in thinking about their online identity and how this affects their professional practice.

Community can be be developed in any way, face-to-face focus groups, events, online groups/events, blog, website, social media. You should think about your own practice and the practices of your college and how you can incorporate this, creatively, into the develop of your communities.

Objectives:

The objective of this project is to create four open, online and offline active communities of interest, this could be through:

• a website

• blog posts

• videos

• talking heads

• image

• documentation of conversations

• research findings

• face-to-face events

All of them should be around sharing practice and collaborating online.

In your communities you should focus on discussing following topics;

• Learning and Collaborating Online

- Pushing the boundaries of the art school

- MOOCs

- lifelong learning

- free & open education

- sharing & collaborating online                         

• Creative online identities

- Creating an online home as a creative industries professional

- where is your online professional home?

- what skills do you need?

- are you supported?

- do you know about web-building?

- do you know about code?

- open-source

- copyright

- how important are all the above?

• Digital Citizenship

- How does your online identity present you as an individual?

- what do you want your identity to be associated with?

- how do you create an online network?

• Legality

- what issues with copyright might you encounter?

- what issues may arise from online censorship?

- how do you protect intellectual copyright online?

Outcomes:

During the process of creating these communities you will be actively recording the progress, enabling you to review and access. This should be done in a way that reflects your own and your colleges practice (for example from Graphic design student from LCC may decide to produce an online blog of graphic representations of issues discussed).

At the end of the project all four of the communities created will be brought together to collate their findings, and develop a legacy for the project, looking at what tools can be implemented to help students and graduates, and how this can be made accessible to the people who need it.

The findings of their communities will be summarized in a short video, reflecting the other finding collation this video we be created in a way that reflects their own and college creative practice. (please note the community developers will be given assistance with this video, and skills in filmmaking are not required.)  

Practicalities:

We require the community developers to work a total of 45 hours over the month. These can be split between face-to-face time, administrative hours and resource creation.

What we expect from each communities developer:

• Face-to-face time; you are except to meet with you community at least once a week to discuss issues and develop ideas. These meetings should be documented in a way which reflects your practice and the practice of your college. As a rough estimate you should be spending 2/3 hours per week with your community.

• Administration; this will cover everything you are required to do in order to set up the meetings, publicize the communities, write up finding etc. This will also include any meeting you have with the DIAL team (please remember to time sheet for this meeting). This work can be done in the colleges or at home, it's is up to you, just remember to keep track of the hours worked and time sheet for them

• Resource creation; whilst working with your community you will be required to create some resources that reflect your finding, this could be anything for diagrams and charts on an online blog, to downloadable paper based resources to explore your findings. You will also need to create a short 20/30 second film to advertise for your community at the start of the project and a longer 2 minute film at the end of the project with your findings.

About:

The CCL Online identities project by UAL CLTAD - DIAL project, the project is part of the wider Changing the Learning Landscape is a groundbreaking partnership between the Association for Learning Technology, the Higher Education Academy, Jisc, the National Union of Students and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.