During my 20+ years in Higher Education and more specifically participating in communities relating to my interests and work in digital education I have had the pleasure to connect, meet and work with hundreds of amazing people who have challenged my thinking, enhanced my understanding and supported me in my work and my activities.
I try, as far as possible, to make notes of individuals and their specialist areas. Not in a creepy way (just to be clear) but so that if I get asked whether I know someone with a particular specialism I can say “yes of course – here’s a great person to connect with”.
Invariably though I’m not that efficient and I usually end up saying something like “oh yes I did meet someone online a few months ago who might be able to help”, but inevitably I can never remember when and more often than not fail to resurface my memory to make the connection.
So I came up with the idea of forming a “collective” – a way of bringing together a group of individuals within a structure “without hierarchy” under a common theme of digital education.
Therefore, the main purpose of this collective is to act as a directory of individuals so that when opportunities arise for work, collaboration or development then there’s a place to come to where we can reach out to the collective to find interested persons.
So I started to play around with building a wordpress site as a sub-domain of digisim.uk. I now have in place the overall structure, including a mock up of a members profiles area (this is currently using a free plugin but the paid for plugin will allow for searchable categories).
For now I’ve called it “Digisim Connect” and it wouldn’t take much more work for this to properly go live and for it to start running as a collective, but I wanted to get a sense of whether others thought this would be of use or of value before spending any more time on it. So please do visit the site and I’d welcome any feedback or suggestions as to whether it’s worth pursuing further or this may be something that the Association for Learning Technology might consider developing as part of their role supporting learning technology?
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