Half an Hour

Responding to Alan Levine: On “Building” Community I Got Bubkis I totally get what you're feeling. I've been online since the 1980s 'building community' the whole time. What do I have for my efforts? A response rate to my posts that averages around 'zero'. I had one successful community once - the 2200 people who joined that first MOOC. Never really replicated that success. My most recent MOOCs had far fewer people in them. The old definition of community is based on proximity - it would be based on neighbourhoods or regions - so online, 'building community' usually means pulling everybody into the same place - this almost never works - it's like getting people to pick up stakes and move to a new city You can 'create community' this way if you can capture people where they already are. That's why professors are so successful at building community - they have a built-in captive community consisting of students at their institution (I alway...