I shared your blog with my colleagues as we’re thinking about the relationship between our student blogging program and our specific time-limited courses. We have similar questions, hopes and puzzlement, so this is very helpful.

Persistent communities are familiar to internet users* but strangely unfamiliar in educational settings. We have a haphazard understanding of cohort engagement as a good thing but mostly we see this through the lens of the specific course: these people, this time around, this conversation, with this result.

I think we introduced blogging to our students as a way of wondering about community alongside and around courses, so it’s not an either/or. Could you see yourself running #rhizo15, #rhizo16 etc like tours, and perhaps even letting others run them too? Then after the tour is finished, it’s up to individuals if they want to go on and participate in whatever part of the persistent community is on a platform that works for them? [insert lots of thoughts about FB here]

I don’t know, “newbies”, that feels kind of … I want to say (very quietly) cultish. I’m not sure that would make this newbie feel more welcomed. So there’s that.

** When I first taught online in the mid 90s, in IRC, I spent a fair bit of time in #callahans having a think about what it meant culturally and socially to walk into a bar and engage with the people who were already there, the people who set it up. Your post made me realise I’ve been thinking ever since then about the exact same thing.