Everybody there commented how important these face-to-face sessions were, and many said how isolated they had begun to feel, particularly as posts to Moodle had dwindled to nothing in the weeks before the residential. Someone commented they had wondered at one point if anyone else was still doing the course, but that they didn’t feel they could just send an ‘anybody there’ post to Moodle. It made me wonder why, since social chat was the first thing people did when meeting face to face. Interestingly, after the residential there was also a brief flurry of 'chat' posts, before silence one again fell on Moodle.
I'm a very quiet person - always sat at the back of lectures and hoped not to be noticed - but other people on the course are much more outgoing, so I don't think personality explains the difficulties of keeping the site active. It is a fairly small group though, so perhaps there is a 'critical mass' required.
At the Innovation and Communication' event back in 2008, Oxford University showed how they had successfully used Facebook to support central and distributed IT Support Staff. However, they had a very large number of staff (around 600), and about 20% joined the Facebook group, and discussion was still relatively limited.
I wonder what you would regard as successful for this kind of group? Given that they use very few resources to maintain, is any discussion a win, even if it is very sporadic, or should we be putting more effort in to promoting their use?
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