Michelle Franken

After these weeks working with the online communities, I can say the design and the structure on the online communities are really importante. Now a days is really easy to find a lot of online communities and platforms, but from my point of view they are never completely useful, because most of the cases they focus just in one thing ( for example twitter is just for sharing ideas and pictures, or skype is just for video chats) so I learnt that it is better if you design an online community that includes everything that a online person could want.

On the first place, to design an online community, you need to ask your target group what they want and what they need. A really good community would be a place that reaches several target groups with different interests, like Facebook, that reaches any topic that you can imagine. The only problem with facebook is that you can get lost with all the extra information. That is why my online community would be reaching a lot of topics, but it would be well divided.

If I had a design challenge of course I would join and participate in an online community, for example I would use Facebook, because that is the main online community that I have been working with. From my point of view Facebook is the most important online community, because a lot of people in the world use it, and you can find any kind of person, from almost any age, with different interests and different points of view.

During this term I’ve had a tough and also good experience, at the beginning I didn’t contribute that much because I had a lot of problems understanding the class and also it was hard for me, because this is the first time that I am at school with boys, and I am the only girl on my team, so it was strange for me. Right now I am doing better, because my work team and me are communicating and working better.

About my own learning I think I am not learning that much, because for me a normal lecture works better than an online hangout, because it is really hard to understand everything and you can not communicate that much with the teacher. Also I think that posting on a blog every week is not teaching me anything, because I am just writting my experiences.

On the other hand, my experience with the NGOs is teaching me a lot, because I am analyzing several things about the NGOs that I never seen before and everything that I am learning is going to help me in the future.

It is the first time on my life that I am asking myself this question “how does my professors, instructors and fellow students facilitate my learning?” I started to think about it and of course unconsciously we learn thing from each other.

For the professors I would think it is easier because their objective at school is teach us their knowledge, but it may be more complicated, uncounsciously they do more things apart from teaching. For example if I am talking with them face to face or on Facebook, we might be having a conversation, so in a different way they are being facilitators for me. For my own experience my teachers and instructors have been very useful, because thanks to them I am taking a good track on my studies and also I have a clear idea about what I am doing here.

About my fellow students, I have had an amazing experience, because at the begining it was really hard to communicate with eachother, because they were all strangers for me. But every week it is getting easier to communicate with them, and thanks to them I can understand more things than before. I love that we found new ways of sharing our knowledge like Facebook groups, comments on the blog posts, Facebook events, etc. On my opinion I really like to communicate with my fellow students, specialy in the “online way” because they can share their experiences and opinions, so in that case they are being facilitators for me.

For these three coming years I want to learn and communicate more with my teachers and fellow students, but also I want to be a facilitator for them, I like to help and share my knowledge, so I hope I can give them advice and information too.

Now a days, we have many choices for online communities, and attached to them we have a lot of tools, so it is really hard to get to know all of them, everyone uses at least one or two online communities, but one or two is not enough to know about all the tools and different ways to communicate. For example in my case I only use Facebook (that includes direct messages, wall posts, sharing pictures, groups, events, applications, etc.) or Twitter ( that has hashtags, private messages, followers, twits, etc). But what about kickstarter or google +? or the rest of the online communities? 

For my own experience, I chose those options because, my preferences are to get close and be connected to all the people around me, and they are always using facebook and twitter, more than other online communities, so I am always posting comments or pictures in facebook, and for twitter, I am always tagging friends and putting hashtags that I am interested with. But if I had the necessity of using other tools in other online communities, I would learn them. Even though I am not good with technology, I don’t consider myself a technology steward, because I am really new at it and it is really hard for me to understand them.

Working on teams…you might think that this is something easy, but it is the opposite! It is something really challenging, that everyone needs to confront at least once in his or her life. In these past weeks I have been experienced and worked with my group work for the communities class. At the beginning it was hard to communicate with each other, because the assignments was not very clear, but now we are having more communication, and things are getting better.

The most challenging thing about teamwork is the communication and the division of roles. Thanks to the “Belbin test” we were able to divide the group in the most logical way, over time we realized that the roles might change, and this may depend on the job or team size.

Another point that might be challenging is that sometimes there are one or several team members that put a lot of pressure to the rest of the group, but the solution for this is also the communication.

Not everything is bad about teamwork, there are a lot of advantages: The people work with less stress, because they share the hard and difficult job, they have more points of view to find the solution, but the most important thing is that in the results there is more quality and quantity.

In the past,  humans didn’t have many ways to communicate with each, in consecuence there were not spaces to explore new ideas with people around the world. Today with Internet, online communities together with social networks make the perfect mix to bring new ideas. In this online communities people can express themselves with comments and ideas on topics of interest, but also with video, photos, etc.

It is very important that in this online communities there are people all around the world, because then each person can comment, discuss or contribute with ideas related to their culture and their country.