duke's digital initiative ning page - some thoughts and critiques

Malcolm forwarded me the URL to Duke's Digital Initiative's page:

http://dukedigitalinitiative.duke.edu/

I really like the mission statement:

"The goals of DDI are to promote innovative and effective teaching, to use technology in support of curriculum enhancement, to develop our technology infrastructure and to share knowledge about effective instructional technology strategies."

Duke decided to use Ning for their DDI site - as it looks like they are trying to build a "groundswell" community around educational technology.  This site complements the excellent Center for Instructional Technology site http://cit.duke.edu/  - the folks at Duke who run Blackboard, research and support tools for teaching, and who deliver faculty development.

From what I can gather, the DDI site differs from the CIT site in that it is intended to be a two-way discussion and collaboration site that gives members of the Duke community a publishing and discussion platform to share materials and ideas around instructional technology.  Where the CIT site is for CIT team members to communicate "out" - the DDI site is to communicate "with". 

The fact that Duke build the DDI site on Ning is fascinating.   Since Ning is built for community, collaboration and distributed publishing this seems like a great fit.  Building on Ning also allows for the sites tools and features to grow and scale quickly, as this eliminates the need for local hosting, support, etc.   Duke paid the extra dollars to get a custom url and to eliminate the ads (see note on page).

In looking through the DDI site - and trying to draw some lessons about how we might be able to scope out a project where we can use a platform like Ning (or home-built) that facilitates and encourages folks on campus who are innovating in their teaching with technology to discuss and share best practices - I came away with the following critiques:

Potential:

• Collaboration, discussion, and community among a Tribe of learning technology innovators, adopters, skeptics, and practitioners is a gorgeous idea.  The goal of being open to all the campus community to publish and share content, best practices, and ideas around learning and technology is one we all share. 

• Jumping into the water with a collaboration platform and community site makes sense to me on a number of levels.  This is a great way to model sound pedagogy and tools that may diffuse to teaching and learning.   Building community facilitated by online tools is hard (whether it be in a class with Blackboard or a community site with Ning) - and the only way to learn how to do this is to do it.

• Using Ning seems to be smart to me....as this gives experience in renting platforms as a service from the cloud, reduced dependency on local developers and systems, allows for rapid adoption of new services, and easy experimentation with different tools.

Pitfalls:

• I found the DDI site somewhat confusing to navigate.  Large amounts of real estate on the home page are taken up by less important content - such as the "members" area.  On the other hand, there is some really excellent content on the site - and it is clear a great deal of thought and care went into the information, materials, and features available.  The lesson I draw from this is that even if a cloud tool like Ning is used, assistance from the Web design professionals on campus is even more critical.   If I were to do a project like this on campus I'd be sure to get the Web designers on board early to figure out how the tool could be properly designed and utilized.

• Seems like the site does not have an active community - discussions are not active, media upload pretty bare.  I take from this that community is very hard to do.  The CIT site has much more in terms of fresh and relevant content, with a blog, an events calendar (with RSS feed), a great list of tools, examples of innovations, and a set of relevant reports.   From what I can guess, it seems that the DDI site was meant to be about the campus community, to draw content and discussion from everyone who is using technology for learning, but in practice the CIT site is much richer.  
  

This must be a hard balancing act - and I admire the Duke folks for their willingness to experiment and see what works.  I'm looking forward to engaging in a dialogue with our folks here (and the Duke folks) on their thinking behind DDI and their thoughts on the potentials and pitfalls of this initiative.