Using the June 2009 Ning focus group

Last night in on the train, I had an idea about my PhD work.

Since it is an action research project, there will be different cycles. Who says where the cycle starts? So I thought I'd include my experiences with the online focus group that I held last June. In many ways, this was 'square one' since the group discusssed the potential and possible issues for the then proposed SMUO module. Obviously it wasn't set up to be part of the PhD work, so it was a 'naturally occurring event', but still, it is was gave me the PhD idea in the medium term.

Here's what I wrote in the SHU CoLab Ning by way of analysis of this first Ning experience.

I used Ning last summer as a platform for an online focus groups that brought together a group of past, current and prospective students. The point was to find out their views on a proposed DL pg module, which with their help, ended up being named 'social media uses in organisations'. I hadn't done that kind of online research work before so I kept things small and simple, but it was a good experience for me and the students. Their views were incorporated in the proposal for the module which was accepted (subject to the usual 'niggles'). May be I should write up my first Ning experience!

This focus group task created an opportunity to assesses Ning's usability in general and as a learning platform. Though as a group we didn't really stretch it, I did wonder about scalability for 'bigger' tasks (ie long-term discussions, with more members, when being able to locate new posts is really important). Ning would certainly be OK for small tasks within a module, eg group tasks or a short-term task such as as online focus group. However, I wouldn't use Ning for teaching an entire DL module because all the features that make managing a big online discussion are missing: there's no overview of fora discussions, no posibility to display discussions in reverse chronological order, no search facility, and no possibility to print only the messages you want (and yes, I know about print 'selection'). I'd rather use Blackboard - or a platform that offer similar features.

Which leads me to a couple of general conclusions (well, the first is not mine really, but that of Jenny Preece in her Online Communities book): for an online community to thrive, sociability factors are not enough; the usability of the chosen platform is also a key success factor. And since we're talking about social media, it might also be more appropriate to talk of a chosen ''ecology', since one media (medium?) can't do everything.
Note that I don't dislike Ning! It is good for some things. It's more a question of fitness for purpose.

So it's important to u/stand the technology first to decide whether to deploy it! A trite comment, I know, but right now I'm seeing a lot of enthusiasm about social media going untempered by an assessment of social software capability...