Week Seven #ededc

Week seven has given me a little space to think, away from home. I’m now back at Uni and straight into community related issues! Take a look at the badges above, I created these badges as an attempt to define an ‘academic community’ at UoC that is related to HEA membership. The badges are related to Mozilla’s openbdage organisation, and are an attempt to bring together a disparate (not desperate) academic community at UoC, as a part of wider project named ‘Cumbria Academy’ (CA) whose aim is to share good academic practice, and promote collaborative research. The project uses our VLE, Blackboard, in combination with CampusPack community as a core tool. The Academy holds events, which are recorded and shared as community artifacts, and of course our Twitter feed in combination with other social media.

The CA project (or exercise) at UoC is very much related to our community readings, and extends the concept of a virtual community towards a definition of an academic virtual space, or intellectual space, and how that space can be identified (or branded) with in UoC.

Visual design as in learning design tries to identify key elements or sign posts that mark or signpost meaning. This is very much related to a previous post related to critical design, being an academic process (Critical Design) – it will be fascinating to begin to understand how community and the concept of critical design, to challenge thinking, are related.