Community Engagement

Certainly for our 2007 project leaders, the recent Community Engagement project induction workshop, created an agreed ‘wow’ factor. Our twelve community leaders returned to their communities and project planning committees with a range of new ideas, resources and tools to support their project’s aims and objectives throughout 2007 and beyond.

The two-day workshop, held in Sydney, brought together projects from Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales who shared their project aims and objectives and also were given an opportunity to have a ’shared understanding’ of the expectations and operating environment for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework).

Well known Framework identities including Jeff Saul and his NSW team, Clint Smith, Cathy Baxter, Hayley Beck, Rhonda Appo, Carole McCulloch and Phil Wheeler helped to create a feeling of commitment, enthusiasm and excitement. Jeff ’set the scene’ with his official welcome in place of Simon Paine who at late notice was unable to attend the workshop. Robyn Jay handled the microphone with great professionalism. After hearing from Jeff, Robyn and Shane we all have a better understanding of e-learning in New South Wales.

Phil’s session left us all excited about the range of free tools available, where to find them and how to customise and upload them. Clint wowed us with a session on the Designing E-learning online resource, using the Tasmanian Communities Online as an exemplar.

Carole introduced us to the notion of personal learning environments and we are now ‘iGoogle‘ enthusiasts madly creating our own online presence. So much learning and so much fun!

Our two project community leaders representing 2005 and 2006 (John Tucker and Carole McCulloch) facilitated a study circle experience for the 2007 project community leaders using the following questions to stimulate the discussion:

• What are your best hopes for adding technology to teaching and learning?
• What are your worst fears for adding technology to teaching and learning?

The conversation was captured on a visual mind map which helped to summarise the main points providing a range of thoughts and perhaps challenges for the project team and project community leaders to consider as we move forward with the 2007 Community Engagement projects.

Other participants included Ron Anderson from Adult Learning Australia and Dr Kaye Bowman who is conducting an evaluation of the Community Engagement project.

It seemed everyone left the Community Engagement project induction workshop with a lot of energy and a sense of working together to achieve the project’s aims to create sustainable demand for and use of e-learning in communities, building human capacity and facilitating adult learning. You’ll find a collection of photos at flickr.

The Milang Old School House Community Centre (a 2005 Framework Community Engagement Project) was recently awarded the inaugural Australian Community ICT Award for the “Best use of software in non profit settings”.

MOSHCC received the award for its innovative use of open source software to deliver educational and engaging ICT experiences for people who participate in volunteering and adult learning programs in the region.

Karyn Bradford, Shirley Smith and Stuart Jones were at the Connecting Up Conference Dinner to receive the Award.

The MOSHCC team are really pushing ahead in embedding e-learning in their community, another success for the team was the news that they were a selected network within the 2007 Framework E-learning Networks Project. The MOSHCC team will work with the Community and Neighbourhood Houses and Centres Association in South Australia.

The project - CANH E-NET - will support Centre coordinators and ACE workers to investigate and develop e-learning strategies, while also strengthening the communication and partnerships between SA centres through enhanced IT strategies and understanding of available technologies. Links with other interstate ACE providers will also be made.

In 2006 MOSHCC were also the winners of the South Australian Adult Learners’ Week (ALW) “Learning Community of the Year”.

Well done to everyone at MOSHCC!

Six projects will be funded in 2007 representing a range of models supporting economic and regional development in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. This year there will be a strong emphasis on isolated learners. The successful projects are:

• VoluntElearning (Community Technology Centres Association, New South Wales)
• Building online communities in East Gippsland (BACE Inc, Victoria)
• CultureLink Queensland (Queensland Community Arts Network, Queensland)
• E-learning for natural resource management (Queensland Murray-Darling Committee, Queensland)
• Supporting e-learning in rural and regional communities (Tasmanian Communities Online, Tasmania)
• Regional skills for a changing environment (Byron Regional Community College, New South Wales).

The project team will meet with project community leaders at the project’s induction workshop to be held in Sydney 9 - 10 May 2007. The induction session will help to build a shared understanding of the expectations and operating environment for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework in 2007 and beyond and be a great opportunity to learn about online resources and provide an opportunity for networking and information-sharing to strengthen links between projects.

Members of the Project Team for the Community Engagement Project recently attended a day which featured Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, as keynote speaker and a Panel Discussion and Workshop facilitated by Mark Pesce. The project team members, Mary Hannan and Janie McOmish, attended the day hosted by education.au hoping to increase their knowledge and understanding of the uses and benefits of wikis.

The Community Engagement Project wiki, established in 2006, is seen by the team as a valuable, user-friendly tool whose extended use will enable information to be disseminated and explored by the many and varied community participants in even more effective and efficient ways.

However, as happened with Wikipedia, the team believes they need to develop people’s belief and trust in this new medium. In the six years since it has been launched, Wikipedia has become the thirteenth most visited website in the world but its existence has raised questions as to how readers decipher fact from fiction when multiple users have the capacity to both create and edit content. Jimmy Wales believes everyone should be given free access to information. Intrinsically, this belief brings problems:

• How can one ensure that this information is neither biased nor incorrect?
• How can one ensure that all changes will be comprehensively tracked?
• How can users store earlier versions or return to information or ideas that have been previously entered?

Therefore, Wales and his team set about developing guidelines that would allow these potential difficulties to be overcome. In doing so they faced the same problem that face today’s educators:

• What are the implications for education in using an online culture?
• What opportunities exist to best develop and utilise collaborative learning in our global community?
• Who holds knowledge in the world today?
• What barriers may stop us sharing knowledge?

The protocols Wikipedia developed have led to the online encyclopedia becoming one of the most recognised wikis in the world; one which utilises “a culture of sharing and creativity which is not based on market exchange but rather intellectual exchange.” As Wales states, “communities are becoming aware of the knowledge latent within them.” He added that educators must continue to build on these concepts and let communities of learners manage themselves rather than educators taking on the role of an umpire.

These words reflect the environment that the project team is dealing with. Community engagement programs appear to be fertile ground for developments such as wikis but, just as Wales has had to encourage participants to feel “safe” when they contribute to the on-line encyclopedia, so community leaders need to feel safe when they contribute their content. Just as Elites revel in the concept that “knowledge is power”, participants need to be assured that their knowledge and integrity will be protected and that other special interest groups will not be able to shape existent knowledge to suit their own ends.

With all fledgling development, people need to pool information and one of the strategies Wales suggested to instil confidence in wary stakeholders was to encourage them to examine the progress and protocols that have been developed at Wikipedia.

It would seem that this, together with the team’s continual fostering of the use of the online environment, the Community Engagement Project wiki will become a valuable tool that will permit intelligence to be more widely distributed.