#JuneEdTechChallenge DAY 1: The VLE in my life...

 

Join the #JuneEdTechChallenge at any point, whenever you can, throughout June #ALTC #EdTech pic.twitter.com/0B75s0yf9x

— David Hopkins (@hopkinsdavid) June 2, 2021

This is a great initiative from ALT, encouraging the open sharing of our different learning teach contexts throughout June through social media. Although I may not be able to keep up the pace every day I was reassured by David's tweet!

Day 1:

The VLE in my life - well there are multiple VLEs I have used over past years and as I have now retired it may be expected that I no longer have to use VLEs, but I do (mostly Moodle/Mahara/Google workspace/Canvas/Blackboard/Ning). I was responsible for procuring and implementing a VLE in the Language Centre at Warwick University back in the day, it was based on Moodle and Mahara (a mahoodle no less!) and was called Languages at Warwick. The focus was upon creating course spaces which encouraged interaction. I wrote about the development in this book chapter. We were ahead of the institutional curve by several years and when Moodle finally became a central initiative our platform was "dissolved". My colleagues still tell me though they are glad they had access to their own VLE prior to the wider implementation as they upskilled as a result. 

Moving to a central VLE came with some serious losses though. We had previously been able to create "managed holes" in Languages at Warwick courses in order to admit students from other institutions to participate in our virtual exchange initiatives. This was lost and we relocated this work to our Google Suite over which we still had control. Virtual Exchange is a proven approach to online learning which helps to build capacity for online teaching, supports interdisciplinary and intercultural learning and thanks to recent research through projects such as EVOLVE and EU initiatives involving the academic organisation (soon to be not for profit org) UNICollaboration , has gained significant traction. We were at the forefront, but faced with lack of institutional support we moved into the wilds. There we found personal learning networks (PLNs) and created personal learning environments (PLEs) of our own. 

VLEs have their place, they are private, institutional spaces generally. However, real life requires knowing how to navigate not just the private, secure digital spaces but also the broader "wilds" beyond. That journey requires greater critical expertise, a form of digital fluency which ideally comes with a deeper understanding of digital ownership, profile management, appropriate behaviours... a whole raft of "soft skills" and expertise which is best acquired through activity alongside others, a community of practice. My situation is very comparable now to that of Sheila and I was so delighted to read her post and see her use of the French word "dérive". I have described my journey through learning technology in the past as being that of a "flaneur" , wandering through online spaces to see how they affect my interactions, how communications change, who feels uncomfortable, who is excluded. This has become central to my critical digital practice, focussing on open educational practice using social media spaces for example. 

Being able to flow between spaces is a huge advantage. This water feature created with recycled television screens captured that feeling for me. Each VLE needs to suit the needs of those who are using it, it needs to make us welcome and protect what is dear to us. Otherwise we just move on and find our own spaces. The challenge now before all institutions in the post pivot era is to co-create spaces which are suitable for today's needs. Sustainable, equitable, welcoming, accessible, fair spaces. It should allow for continued learning beyond the institutional experience: portability of resources and acquisition of knowledge and skills to address online intellectual property confidently. This is more than any one VLE can offer. Like Sheila, I am keen to continue this reflective journey and I'm thinking about what I could contribute to the next #SocMed conference...

Demystifying Open

 

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I am delighted to see more educators engaging with OpenEducation or at least taking a greater interest in things "open" but I think it would be helpful to have a sort of beginner's guide to the many forms of open which are relevant to educators. I do not profess to be an expert in all things open but, as chair of the Open Education Special Interest Group and as an open education practitioner, I feel I could contribute a little to demystifying some of the terminology which comes under the banner "open". Here goes. 

Open Access:

Probably the first term most academics engage with as it relates to academic publishing. Essentially this is a category of publication which is accessible to anyone rather than being restricted to those who are registered with a university. Some publishers require APCs (article processing fees) in order to make publications available to a wider public. For more detail see Jisc's useful guide.  Librarians are often experts in this area. 

Open Source:

A term that applies to computer software and how the coding has been created. Open source software is usually created by a community and the source code is shared openly so that developers can build on it. Contributors to open source are not always paid, some do the work as a passion project. There are many examples of open source software which practitioners may encounter such as Moodle, H5P and others. Here's a more in depth article which explains why open source is helpful for teachers and learners.  

Open Educational Resources:

Often referred to as OERs, these are resources which are shared openly on the internet usually under a Creative Commons licence. UNESCO provides information here about the origins and place of OERs in education.  Many practitioners and institutions create OER as part of a mission to broaden access to learning, such as these from the University of Edinburgh.  Practitioners often share their own resources, known as Little OER (Weller,M) through sites such as Slideshare or social media free of charge, expressing their sharing preferences through a Creative Commons licence. 

Open badges:

Open badges are digital artefacts which can be created and issued to recognise participation or activity according to the criteria defined by a badge issuer. They are made up of a digital image which has hard coded data "baked in". Open Badge platforms build on a shared standard which enables portability of badge display for earners and, when used in a learning context, can allow the creation of an ecosystem of badges to support educational aims. Here's the handy badge wiki site to find out more. 

Open educational practice (or praxis):

OEP, or the act of working openly as an educator, may include creating and sharing OER, using social media to connect and collaborate with learners or other practitioners online, maintaining a digital profile which is visible to anyone online and curating digital resources. This is an emerging activity which is described in more detail here (Cronin,C) and is clearly connected with achieving the aims of open education. 

There are other "open..." terms in use out there - for example open data, open pedagogy but these are related to the ones mentioned above so I think this may be enough for a primer! However, here are some additional resources  should you wish to know more. 

An introduction to Open Educational Resources and Open Licensing. 

Open Education Policy Hub

The OER world map. 

The recent OERxDomains21 conference has many recordings and resources available openly as part of the #OpenCovid4Ed pledge. 

Open Education is a route to addressing the many inequalities suffered by our populations around the world which have only deepened during the pandemic. 

on e-portfolios

 

Over the years I have used eportfolios for many different purposes. Prior to the ALT Winter conference 2020 where I will be a panel member talking about e-portfolios I think it would be useful to draw all my explorations and activities into one place. This will be a post with lots of links but I hope also to summarize the rationale for looking to eportfolios in my work. The image above is taken from the Mahara #MUM (Mahara users Midlands) group which now resides in mahara.org. 

Firstly, it is important to distinguish between a portfolio and an eportfolio. There are many professions which expect to see a portfolio in order to recruit. A typical portfolio in this context (photography, modelling etc) would include examples of the work you are most proud of. A curation which shows your talents and expertise. An e-portfolio can also be used in this way of course. An electronic version of the same. This is how I used mahara for my CMALT assessment and subsequent review for example. The beauty of a digital curation is of course that it displays multimedia evidence wrapped with contextual narration. It reflects the fact that much of my activity is online and open. Display of my open badges also tells the story of my activity. So for me an e-portfolio is the logical choice. 

My rationale for supporting e-portfolio is more that just encouraging folk to "show off" however. An eportfolio is a very useful personal collection tool. By default, using Mahara the pages and collections you create are visible only to the user. This makes it a "domain of one's own" a space online (as I presented in ALT winter conference 2016) which can be used to collect your work, a space to reflect upon your experiences of online or blended learning which may for example have happened in a more formal VLE space. This is the approach we adopted in Languages@Warwick mahoodle and in the EVOLVE training co-laboratory. This store of personal reflection and evidence can easily be curated, selecting good examples which can then be shared more widely. There is an economy of time and effort gained in this approach and the results I've seen in our Assessed e-portfolio for language learning summarised in this e-book for example bear witness to the power of this approach. The eportfolio owner can acquire vital digital literacies (management of IP/copyright, permissions and online visibility) which improve the quality of their online presence. I have written extensively and openly about the process of forming a construct for assessment, leaving the documents available openly on scribd. A more recent final year module I created, Developing Language Teaching was 100% eportfolio assessed. A fact which was fully appreciated when lockdown arrived this year. Using their eportfolio as a private space throughout the course encouraged students to evidence the evolution of their development over time. Some extracts are included in this recent presentation for the MaharaHui2020 conference. 

Finally, I have also used an eportfolio shared space (Mahara group) to support shared research such as in the case of the WIHEA #knowhow project. Shared pages allowed us to collaborate and view each other's research and then decide together where we should investigate further. In a project such as this where staff and students in different roles had limited time to get together the shared group space mediated our interactions, saving time and allowing us to collaborate remotely. The digital artefacts we stored there were then easily accessible for us to create a digital poster for dissemination at the end of the project.  

My conviction that eportfolios can be a really useful tool for staff and students alike has several key contributing factors:

• Deep thought and reflection require private space and time as well as mediated discussion. We provide for both in the physical world, I believe we need to provide digital spaces with the same affordances. Especially in a pandemic.  
• Ownership is a crucial conversation in the digital domain. Legally there is too little protection for the rights of the individual who creates online, the industry would prefer us to all be consumers. There is much to do to increase understanding of Creative Commons licences.
• The assumption that all academic work should reside on institutional platforms to which you lose access at the end of your course or contract should be challenged. The possibility to export and retain your work should be supported. 
• Designing assessment which use e-portfolios is a really useful collaborative activity. For a practitioner it requires questioning what we value and empirically investigating how best to achieve that learning. There are of course disciplinary differences but sharing your construct openly can inspire others. 
• Learning is not a tidy, linear process. It is full of twists and turns. Making that explicit through reflection can help us come to terms with the challenges we face and find better strategies. 

Here's the recording from the ALT Winter conference 2020:

You can't stop wildflowers spreading!

Warwick's wildflower roundabout Summer 2019 CC BY 4.0 @warwicklanguage

It is now a year since the end of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA) #knowhow project ended. The metaphor for talking about open practice which we employed was based around wild flowers and I took a moment last week to revisit the campus roundabout which was one of the enduring images used to promote our activity, delighted to see that the wildflowers are back and blooming. The disadvantage of funded projects is that they often disappear once the funding runs out leaving little in the way of legacy. I'm pleased to say that our legacy continues as many of the project outputs are open and freely available, but they are sometimes changed by circumstances beyond my control:

• WIHEA has a set of project pages for #knowhow (sadly the G+ community is now only visible to those who are part of our GSuite)
• Our You Tube channel is open to all, as it our blog (frozen in time it reflects the experiences of project members)
• Dissemination of open practice is available on my website and my slideshare feed. 

The recent open education conference #OER19 shared many great ideas for the development and implementation of open educational practice which I have started to investigate now that my exam marking has finished. These conferences, supported by ALT, leave lasting footprints year after year modelling the advantages of open practice. Their CEO Maren Deepwell is committed to open practice and shares her learning as she participates in a range of educational activities and events. She is one of many open practitioners in my personal learning network (note to self I must update this as it was last done in 2017) who inspire me. She is a sower of seeds. Learning is lifelong, sharing that learning can help others in their journey. It is not a competition or a race which depends upon beating others by withholding information. We thrive through collaboration and co-creation. This may require compromise. There will be times when we become more vulnerable than we would like to, times when we have to admit we get things wrong, times when we have to as for help. Some of us have to learn this the hard way.

 Through posting openly online I offer an imperfect work in progress. As you will see in this recent update to a previous post on an EU project called Video for all. I hope others find it helpful in some way. I will be presenting at Eurocall 2019 on open practice, continuing to sow my seeds. I may have little control over where they fall and whether they grow but you can't stop wildflowers from spreading. 

Stories of connection

@WarwickLanguage mdr small changes in systems may have unforeseen major consequences. @makle1 #clavedu #warcler pic.twitter.com/WtxcEV7nla

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) November 10, 2017

The paths we take as we travel through life are sometimes the result of conscious decision making, sometimes the inevitable result of our behaviours, sometimes directed by others, often a complex weaving of all of these and more. Simon has asked me to reflect on my Clavier journey and as I have captured much of it through my writing, publications and discussions I have decided to weave it here in my first blog. 

CLAVIER is more difficult to define than the acronym may appear, as I recall Simon and I discussed the choice of letters as I traveled back from a trip to London for a UCML meeting. At that time I was working with this umbrella group for languages to support communications using social media and to raise awareness of the need for better government support for languages in the UK.  I have always been a passionate advocate of language learning, although my understanding was irrevocably changed when my first son was diagnosed with a language disorder back in the 1990's. 

The first connection with Simon came (as you can see in the artefact shared at the top of this post) in 2011. A supportive intervention in what was becoming a rather bad tempered exchange online. This serendipitous meeting on Steve Wheeler's blog back then was the spark that led to the creation of connected network at a point when I had recently developed an online space using moodle for supporting the teaching of languages at Warwick's Language Centre. The opportunity therefore to connect our student cohorts meant that we could set about creating a shared, large scale virtual exchange. 

The background to the years since then has been the "elevator music" of the skeptic. Public discourse full of condemnation of social media, a "bad thing" for promoting trolling, anti-social behaviour, even terrorism. I have to say that apart from the negative physical effects of all the time spent sitting working on a screen (which I should have counter balanced more actively through resistance and greater emphasis on physical wellbeing) the connected approach to learning and teaching has been overwhelmingly positive for me. In 2014 I reflected on the happenstance arising from digital connectivity.  

My background coming to this project was quite different from that of Simon. Language teaching has been my career since I left university, I completed my Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) back in the 1980s at Warwick and I had worked for 15 years in secondary education rising to a leadership role before joining the Language Centre as a part-time tutor when my children were still young. I had been an early adopter of learning technologies and when I returned to Warwick I was able to complete further learning including an e-learning award and a Masters in Post Compulsory Education which had provided lots of opportunities to reflect through blogging. I reconnected with the EuroCALL community finding Graham Davies online (sadly now passed away but not before he agreed to deliver some staff training through his Second Life presence, a real highlight for me) and this inspired me to research through my teaching and this community. The learning was further extended through becoming part of the Association for Learning Technology where I have increased my technical and theoretical perspectives in learning technology. 

So that's phase one of Clavier for me...the next post will cover the next phase. 

CMALT review: from now to 2020!

Thought for the day provided by random pen in my session room #eurocall2017 pic.twitter.com/jZUfzXIw6b

— Teresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage) August 26, 2017

With thanks to @davidhopkins for prompting me to write this!

Last summer I was delighted to get confirmation that my CMALT status has been extended until 2020. With it came the suggestion that my submission could have included reflection on where my career will go next. Well, that really would have required greater powers of prediction than I have. We all know the question don't we: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?"

From when I first started out in teaching back in the 1980's I have always been very aware of the importance of setting career goals and I have had what some might call a successful career. I moved into teaching management early on, becoming a Head of French after just 2 years in the job. I have been very deliberate in managing a portfolio of my work in order to navigate my way through the many challenges of having a family, balancing their needs with my own. I took the risk of changing sectors - hence la modification , investing time and energy in professional development, learning and contributing to my communities, supporting and mentoring others. It has been this approach which more recently has shaped my goals, which have become less about my career and more about what I believe to be important: addressing social injustice and working for fairer access to education for all.

Perhaps this means as I have got older I am less interested in being driven and more interested in who is driving! That's not to say I have decelerated my career though. When I became a teacher I was very aware of the privilege of becoming a member of a professional community. I have been shocked by the drive to de-professionalise my profession, successive politicians have undermined the importance of real people working as communities of practitioners, focusing instead upon target setting and league tables. Forgetting the humans at the heart of human learning. As a result there is a huge recruitment crisis in education and a real risk that UK young people will not have access to the learning they deserve. Social inequality is greater in the UK than ever with 4 million young people growing up in poverty.

So my personal career progression seems rather unimportant by comparison. It would probably also rely on completing a PhD. This would mean diverting financial resources away from my family to achieve an ambition. That's a club too far. If I do get there it won't be through the UK system as the financial cost is too high.

I take greater pride in these developments:

• being part of the EVOLVE project a 3 year project to scale up virtual exchange
• continuing my commitments to the ALT and Eurocall communities on the Open Ed Sig and the CMC sig
• the creation and delivery of a new module for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures: LN306 will focus on Developing Language Teaching to provide a new generation of creative language teachers who will pick up the challenges of the digital realm. 

In 2020 I will be 60 years old. I doubt that I will grow old gracefully, never been my style!

#BYOD4L: Thoughts on curation

To curate 

When I checked the verb I was intrigued by the connections. Curare in Latin to to take care of, from cura (care) is clearly linked. We curate objects we care about, arranging them so that they are perhaps displayed effectively to please you or the others you share them with. Above is a display of my son's work put together (curated, even) by Glasshouse College and showing the skills he acquired during one year of his college life. The above is a digital curation of this curation, displayed by a proud mum on my flickr channel. 

Today I'm thinking about what I curate, why and where and by returning to the origin of the word I have realised some things I do which I had not really thought of as curation before. At one level I digitally curate resources for my research and my areas of interest. This started with bookmarking websites many years ago, but I realise that I rarely do that any longer. Bookmarks soon become unreliable and lost in their folders. Simply no longer practical. I moved on to Diigo where I can co-curate with others publicly and Delicious where again the social aspect helped me find new connections. A further change then arose as my online presence increased, I started using Pearltrees finding the easy interface practical as it is easy to share and to create teams but I am almost at the limit of my free account already. Scoop.it is another tool I rely on for connecting through curation. This shift from the personal to the public has been helpful in my work especially as it enables me to join like-minded collections from around the world. Currently I am putting together a curation linked to my paper for #OER17 because I know that those listening can browse and see a range of perspectives on my topic of the sustainability of teaching. We will thus be able to have a useful conversation and meanwhile I can keep evolving my ideas prior to the session. 

At another level, I realise that my most useful tool for curation is my google account. I've never thought of this as curation, it's more like the central pot from which I can draw material to curate and reflect on. So perhaps it is curation once removed. By default the contents are private, I make my conference notes, slides forms and docs there, my phone photos back up directly to it, instantly available to share and use whenever needed.  My blogs are also forms of curation for a specific purpose, bringing resources together and giving me space to think more deeply about them. The ALTC blog (which I work on as a co-editor) provides a way of curating the many voices of the community, helping to highlight themes which are timely and relevant. There is so much out there and not enough time to trawl through it all so finding trustworthy curators really helps. 

Curation is how I capture the things I care about and how I find others with similar interests and values. 

Walking the walk!

We should never underestimate the power of imitation! Human beings don't always learn well from following instructions, from listening to advice or from doing as they are told - far from it! The most profound impact we make on each others' learning comes from what we do in front of them. I think that is what my Dad was trying to teach me when, in an attempt to get his rebellious daughter to stop smoking he (a 20 a day man) said:
"Do as I say, not as I do"

Of course, despite promises otherwise I did not give up. Years later though, divorced, newly single and on the lookout for the man of my dreams (now hubbie no.2, non-smoker) it was not difficult to stop smoking to join the pub trips which facilitated our getting together :)

In education, we call it "modelling". No, not the glossy magazine sort, with its unrealistic portrayal of life that crushes the soul. The simple human process of leading by example, sharing what we do (including the mistakes and how we improve) and encouraging others to try it too. We do it to inspire, hoping others see that we value our activity and it brings us joy. That's what I try to do in my language teaching. 

So, this week I'm joining the #BYOD4L team as a moderator and over 5 days we will indulge in a feast of lively activities on 5 C themes, linked here to some of my earlier musings on this and other virtual spaces:

Connecting - let's be open and accessible to all! 
Communicating - informed by my experience with computer-mediated communication
Curating written some time ago now so a good reminder of how it felt! 
Collaborating takes time and interpersonal skills!
Creating made this brief alternative CV as part of #digiwrimo 2 years ago. 

I hope that we will all walk the walk, listen to each other and be ACCCCCE! 

Weaving for peace

Image: Lucky charm 1 paper weaving

by Shannon Sinclair CC BY ND 2.0

I am not talented in an artistic sense. My secondary school art teacher took a dim view of my attempts to create a homework that scored anything above 7/10 and I quickly abandoned any attempt to improve after a brief struggle to convince her that my "gift" needed to be nurtured. However, I have a love of art and I derive great pleasure from the appreciation of the talent of others and the natural beauty I see around me in the world. I do maintain a passion for creativity which, in younger days took the form of poetry writing and singing (I thank a great English teacher for his encouragement). 

Once I was working as a teacher myself, I started to derive pleasure from creating activities and designing learning materials for my students. This interest has grown and mutated since the advent of digital media. I started in the late 1980's to devise web tours and treasure hunts, use databases as a resource for realistic oral role plays and I enjoyed how the use of new media disrupted the usual classroom dynamic and helped different students shine. Of course, much has changed since then - CD-ROMs, MP3 players, YouTube, WYSIWYGs and HTML5 have revolutionised how we create. Most recently of course digital communication tools such as smart phones have helped us to connect and interact online more easily, for better or worse. 

This has been the background for me finding a new creative space. Over the past 10 years I have gradually increased my online presence as part of my professional life. Having taught myself a little HTML many years ago, I realised that websites are rather like tapestries. The beautiful appearance of a page is the result of lots of knots and threads behind the scenes, a good deal of imagination and craft goes in to the finished product - if indeed it is ever finished. When you make online you enjoy a medium that offers lots of possibilities as long as you understand your purpose. Rather like the beautiful piece of weaving above, the various aspects of my digital presence: personal websites; twitter/instagram accounts; open resources shared through various repositories such as slideshare, XTlearn; video accounts and more have to be woven together in order to reveal all the facets of my work. I seem to have arrived at a place where my "next steps" are increasingly about weaving together the various threads of my digital creation. I worry about the web needing to remain this open canvas, a democratic space where all can participate, not one "owned" by states or multinationals who seek only to exploit or control the voice of users. My digital threads are multi-coloured but when they come together they form a coherent self portrait of an educator who will always value the spirit of the artist, who nurtures talent, openness and creativity whatever the circumstances. We can use our creativity for good or evil, I choose to support a positive vision of global human endeavour. I weave for peace. 

My thanks go to Martin Weller who commented on my weaving skills after this blog post which in turn inspired me to practice more!

Projecting the future

Having just emerged from the usual end of year exam marking frenzy I am now pushing ahead with a learning and teaching project supported by Warwick's International Higher Education Academy. The project team is an international mix, combining staff and students with a range of roles and experience and they are keen to investigate the new learning context we see all around us. We will be looking at how we can improve engagement in lectures, how the availability of information through digital devices changes the roles of student and teacher, how we manage our online presence and what sharing means today. 

For me, this is an exciting development as so far my thinking in these areas has largely been with others outside my immediate context, through participating in online interactions in and beyond my own teaching and ed tech communities. I am interested to see if our collaborative discussions help shed some light on where the newly founded School of Modern Languages and Cultures can progress good practice informed by these pioneer researchers. 

The project approach is heutagogic - participants will make their own decisions about the investigations they wish to contribute to, they will determine their own path, reflect on their learning and co-construct pages in Mahara (our e-portfolio tool) in order to make their findings explicit. Much of the activity will be mediated through our course areas and this in itself is a new challenge. My kick off meeting and drop in session so far have focused on making sure everyone gets to know each other and feels welcome in our digital spaces. We have a short project window (finishing at the end of July) and, given the nature of the project design each has to find their own way through our set of investigations, contributing to our shared goal as they go. Order will eventually emerge out of chaos, but we all have to be comfortable with the disruption involved in order to get to grips with some challenging ideas. Not surprisingly there are lots of questions for me as project manager: can I...? should I...? and the answer is typically Do you want to? Go ahead...try it...It is scary to have permission to follow your curiosity when you have been trained to meet targets and accomplish set goals. I am very grateful they are willing to give this a go. I can't wait to see what they think and to bring it back to the ALT conference in the autumn. 

ALT-C 2014 post conference reflections.

I always look forward to this conference and this year it was held at Warwick so it was a lovely opportunity to bring this brilliant community right to the heart of my work context. The keynotes were inspiring, the connections and presentations helpful, the sheer amount of experience and expertise in educational technology awesome. (and that's not a word I use lightly!) Since the conference finished on Wednesday however I have been mulling over my contributions. I spoke about #oie and #clavier on wed morning and Languages@Warwick development on the wed afternoon. I thought it might be helpful to summarise what I have learnt about using technologies for international interaction in a simple 5 point way for anyone who is thinking of taking this on in their own context. So here goes: 

 1. Choose your technologies carefully but choose your partners even more so! It may be almost impossible to find tech that everyone likes, but this matters not a jot if your collaborators don't trust each other. You will inevitably need to compromise on timings, activities, objectives - play the long game, agree to make progress gradually and take your teachers and students with you. If you're unhappy or resentful don't pretend everything's fine, establish clear communication right from the start and respect the opinions of others. 

 2. Connections precede collaboration. Allow time to let all participants get to know each other. Our experience shows that this is best done by proxy, that is to say carry out some tasks (profile writing,photo sharing etc) which allow the participants to discover each other without the pressure to work together immediately. If you are meeting in an online space each participant will want to build an identity in the space. Remember how you felt on arriving at the school disco or a party in a new house? You probably spent a while thinking about how to dress and then had a few drinks in the kitchen or chatted with familiar people first. 

 3. Ensure a good level of presence. There's little worse than entering an online space expecting to meet people and finding an empty space. Worse still if no-one replies to your messages. Tumbleweed moments! Plan to have sufficient "animators" in the space to welcome each new arrival and facilitate the mingling. Lead by example.

 4. Be open to ideas. Resist the urge to control everything. If people are to engage they must be given the space to make a contribution. They may want to do something you had not planned, you will not know how that will turn out unless you try it. Be flexible and generous with your time and support. 

 5. Celebrate every small win. It is important to growing the activities that you surface the impact of the activities you do. Use hard data as well as participant narratives to ensure that you have a clear picture. Communicate the findings openly and creatively so as to engage onlookers. Careful: Don't make unsubstantiated statements, that will come back to bite you! 

Collaboration is complex, see below the waterline!