The Social Space Station

Yesterday I ran a Web 2.0 style interactive tutorial type thing with a summer school class. The course itself is about Web 2.0 (roughly) and online communities where students have been devising, building and managing their own online communities.

Cool idea I think.

Anyway, my task yesterday was to get them thinking about how to keep their users happy and productive and talking to others. The hope would be that potential newbies felt compelled to join and get active too.

In the spirit of user generated content, I displayed 29 images that I thought conveyed some issue, approach or best practice that should be considered when thinking about the lifeblood of online communities, i.e., users. I asked the students to document their initial interpretation with the first pass and discuss these in groups for the second.

The process was fun and the result was five lists of 29 ways to improve the user experience in their own online communities. There was a reasonable amount of overlap as well as some really interesting interpretations that were right on (and had previously escaped me).

The students thought about, discussed, interacted, justified and occasionally changed their interpretation all the while thinking about how they might implement them.

If you are interested in the images I used, the slides are up on slideshare. Check them out and see what you come up. Let me know too as I would be interested in the results.