More about Newspace
News of our Newspace, our Ning sites for news students, has been picked up on a number of blogs around the community, so I thought it worth summarising the reaction, and giving a quick update.
First one is from Tony Hirst from the OUsefulInfo on OUwith a posting 'Institutional Social Networks' , which starts saying
"Reading the feed from Michael Webb's Blog yesterday, I was.... stunned is probably the best word, to read his post "Newspace - a social networking site for new students"
I'm not sure if that's good thing or not! Read Tony's post and decide for yourself.
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus from UKOLN, picks it up on "Institutional Use of Ning", and says
"I welcome this development - and I am particularly pleased that Michael is being so open in describing the reasons for this decision, the possible risks and how the institution has responded to the risks."
Thanks for the positive feedback!
I also found posting about it on Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog and the tfpl blog , so I'm glad we are doing something of wider interested.
So a quick update.
Firstly, a quick thanks to a couple of my colleagues that did the hard work in getting it going - Allan Theophanides did all the hard work getting the site content together, including the Google maps and events, and, more importantly, getting the staff and mentors on board, and then organising the invitations to the students. If you want a site like this, it's crucial that someone takes this role, after all, a technically great site with no content and members is not much use! Secondly, to Jon Ingram, who sorted out the look of the site (it's based on an existing template, but Jon sorted out the logo, picture and CSS).
So how's it going? So far, really, really well - in a lot of ways it's turning out to be one of the most exciting projects I've been involved in. Feedback on the site is terrific, so far we've over 300 members (we're only a small institution, and have only invited two schools so far), and the quality and quantity of the communication is amazing! It's really working - students are using the site to make friends, share their excitement, create their own home pages, reassure one another and ask questions.
Obviously we won't know it's true value until the start of term, and maybe it's just initial enthusiasm, but, wow!
I'm also really glad we decided to make it a closed community. I'm sorry, that means that a lot of you won't see it, but I really don't think it would work if it was a more public space.