Our first conference at Holborn Bars in the City of London, Building Learning Communities, was organised and facilitated by Claire Line and supported by an impressive list of presenters from Royal Caribbean Cruises, the CIPD, the NCSL, London Gifted and Talented and B&Q.

Joe Quilter started the day by providing his own definitions of a learning community and inviting delegates to provide input. Suggestions included shared values, an aspiration or desire to contribute, an opportunity to develop, a point of focus and a sense of belonging.

Michelle Russelll and Dave Chidley, from Royal Caribbean, presented Captain’s Zone, their successful elearning programme and learning community, which was developed with the aim of increasing travel agents’ awareness of Royal Caribbean’s cruises as a boost to sales. Captain’s Zone uses different activities to keep its audience engaged, including addictive games, mini videos with latest cruise information and even a captain’s log (a blog). 

Stuart Sutherland from the National Centre for School Leadership presented the work he has carried out in developing learning communities for leaders in schools. He pointed the group to a free resource, 100,000 heads are better than one, that outlines lessons from the world’s largest community.  He focussed on how they were currently applying those lessons to support a programme for young school leaders of the future. He outlined how he built a community space using free software (Ning) that allows learners to blog about their reflections on the programme and the way they were applying their learning back in the workplace.

Stuart shared some lessons and observations from his experience: that first impressions count; the importance of stories; the value of multiple conversational tools, and the importance of making space for individual creativity and control.
Karen Ver from the CIPD emphasised the importance of culture and the different ways that people like to learn. She explained how some of their face-to-face programmes now use online learning communities to connect dispersed groups of students between formal study events.

Barry Sampson of B&Q and Liz Worthen, Director at London’s Gifted and Talented, shared their experiences and challenges in setting up learning communities and demonstrated Drupal as their software of choice for creating and managing these.  Liz described the community she had set up to support teachers working with gifted and talented children of different ages, encouraging participation and providing feedback.

The day concluded with an interview with Laura Overton, director of Towards Maturity, in which Laura shared some of the findings from her research. Case studies from the eLN event, and an article Supporting learners – making learning communities work can be accessed at
www.towardsmaturity.org.

Over fifty delegates attended the event and, overall, the conference was a great success. In line with the eLNS’s objectives, it provided valuable networking opportunities to share experiences and learn from others. Delegates were polled to establish which of the planned eLN services and products they would find most useful and were invited to suggest ideas for future eLN offerings. Ideas included posting case studies on the website and following-up with the speakers online; product reviews; guides to setting up technologies such as blogs; face-to-face events broken up into special interest groups; and short, interactive, lunchtime webinars between events.

Attendees were also very positive about the new venue, layout and format for the day. We will be looking to build on this success at the eLN’s next event on May 23rd, Rapid elearning: dumbing down or gearing up?

Report by Claire Line, Lovells and Joe Quilter, PSP learnix, eLN comittee members.