Finding a learning community

There is nothing worse than doing research on something that does not interest you. And as this unit has asked me to join a learning community and essentially expose it, I have to say that while for years I have been an external student and self motivated teacher who reads blogs to find, follow and hopefully replicate others' great ideas the idea of actually looking for a community is a little daunting.

I'm just curious what kind of learning communities people are leaning to for this project? I've never taught in the MYP and was considering trying to kill two birds with one stone.

Is it expected that we enrol in or take a course, where an administrator or teacher as such gets us to first participate in social interaction and ensures we are able to login and see everything then step up to more demanding tasks like Salmon 2002 suggests.



Ref: Salmon, Gilly. 2002 'The five - stage framework and e-tivities' In: E-tivities : the key to active online learning / Gilly Salmon. London : Kogan Page, 2002. Chapter 2, pp. 10-36

Or is it OK that we join a learning community, that may simply be a blog or site where we get to simply ask, answer and support peers who have come together almost by pure chance?

I'm asking this mostly because I'm still trying to get my mind around what a learning community is. I'm in agreeance with the desire for it to be a social and also carry the belief that learning is a social process. However when I look at my own choice of online learning (self directed no enrolment) sometimes I follow people totally anonymously, while other times I am intrigued and email them for follow ups. I'm not a huge twitter fan, as I find it difficult to track, especially as I don't check twitter regularly and facebook pages, well behind the Chinese "Great" Fire Wall this needs a VPN and whilst it can be useful for finding topics of interest, once I've found them I tend to subscribe to their "proper" websites rather than join the page.