Visualization and education network on ning: The first six months

CHED 764

Elizabeth M. Dorland, dorland@wustl.edu, Departments of Chemistry and Biology, Washington University, 100 Brookings Drive, Campus Box #1137, St. Louis, MO 63130
Everywhere you look (if you do your looking online) there are new social networks. Our students have been using them for a long time (MySpace, LiveJournal, FaceBook, etc.). In October of 2007, I used the free service at Ning.com to create the "Visualization and Education Network" (visualization.ning.com). The plan is to evolve an interdisciplinary online space to discuss and debate the research on cognition, multimedia, visualization, and teaching and learning with technology. The first invitees included about 60 international researchers and experts from science and education, with links to their websites and publications. The network also provides a space for any participant to create an interest group, host online workshops, create personal and course resource collections, post or stream video content, blog, and many other options. What kind of resources and activities will attract members and keep them coming back? Will being a part of an online network help us to understand the power the new online world and the potential implications for our teaching? What are those implications anyway??