Patti+Harris

=Patti's Class Project a Ning in the works =

**A brief into to my ning:**
==== A ning (means //peace// in Chinese) is a social network site that anyone can create to house a group that wants to share info, etc. Last year two colleagues and myself began a new ministry at Union Church of Manila called //Eat the Book//. This new ministry has taken on a life of its own and we have been amazed at the number of participants (more than 70/week) and their weekly commitment. We desire to find a way to keep participants ("diners") in the loop during the week to get updates, ask questions, download handouts, watch videos, etc. Scot suggested I try creating a ning. Well, it's up, barely! I'm finding myself technology-challenged at many levels and realizing the time it takes to create something like this. We leaders of Eat the Book also have to get our hands around what we want this ning "to do" for us and others. I'm looking forward to seeing what takes shape in the next weeks.====

**My on-going journal: **

 * April 20, 2009 - **I've completed my power point presentation of my Eat the Book ning for my online chat later this week. My powerpoint is attached above and in the forum post. Putting together the power point helped me assess from where I've come and where I still hope to go with developing this ning. I'm still struggling to implement some of the changes via the manage tabs - like adding the Eat the Book logo and changing the header. I think this will take more trial-and-error. With another module starting I need to bundle the downloads and get that page in order. Now that I figured out how to take photos of my ning pages, I'm planning to use this method to help the particpants become orientated to the ning.
 * April 8, 2009 - **We four Eat the Book Chefs will be giving the meditations at our Maundy Thursday service. We've decided to do these from a first person narrative perspective, with interspersed dialogue, as if we are looking back on the Last Supper and time in the Garden from a post-resurrection perspective. We'll be adding this material to the Eat the Book ning.


 * April 7, 2009 - **We finally were able to get together as Eat the Book Chefs (leaders) for a planning meeting. One item on the agenda was my ning. Unfortunately we weren't at a venue where internet was available, and that will be a similar problem at our church, for it doesn't have wifi yet. I walked them through the jist of the ning and we talked about its potential as a tool to keep the participants connected, to provide information from the modules, and perhaps to use as a training forum for other international churches who want to start a similar ministry. They had questions about security, private/public use, and connecting this to our church website. All very good things to consider. We decided to have the 6 of us log onto the ning over the next few months and see what we think about its capacity/limitations, etc. before we "go public." This discussion brought us into broader areas re. copyright needs of our material and goals we have to begin an Eat the Book Culinary Institute to train up new chefs. We're realizing technology can play a pivotal role in this endeavor along with mentoring, coursework, etc. So, what began as a short agenda item on whether or not we would launch the ning on May 17, took on a whole bigger life by the end of the meeting.
 * April 5, 2009 - **"Stop-and-go is a better name for this journal then "ongoing." I felt like a reached a wall or barrier where I wasn't sure what more the ning could do and what more I wanted to get done through the ning. I guess it's a question of potential - of the medium and of my work with Eat the Book. In a conversation with a 28 year old missionary colleague who teaches HS English at Faith Academy in Manila, I learned that she uses nings in her teaching and for her class preparation. So she was willing to come to my house Sunday afternoon and show me her nings and talk about the potential for mine. Her own class ning is serving to give feedback between her and the students, especially as they work on their group projects. She has made different pages for these so that her front page isn't so cluttered. Her "professional" ning grew from 300 English HS teachers to 30,000! And is still being administered by one person. She showed me the changes that have taken place because of the growth. One thing is the page listing guidelines for users. This gave me some ideas re. what guidelines I may want to set up and what potential growth my ning may have, as well as the outcomes fo that growth. Becca also helped me navigate some of the page managing tools. This is where I seem to get lost and find I have a short memory. After visiting her ning sites we went to my Eat the Book ning. I was pleasantly surprised to realize I've engaged many of the tools and potential of the ning. That probably has more to say about the limitations of the ning than my skill level. We did set up a tab for downloadables, where I can add all the monthly downloads/handouts. We also talked about membership issues, guidelines, and the purpose/usefulness of this ning. Fortunately Becca is also one of the Eat the Book participants so she could give me some intelligent input. It was a good experience to share my ning work with someone else who's done similar work for similar purposes. **

March 6, 2009 - Groundswell and POST article: **I always appreciate convergence of ideas and resources; it helps me synthesize my new knowledge and it reinforces concepts and skills. Our denomination just changed over to using google apps for all of our communication. Our mission, which is an agency of the denomination has started an intranet in conjunction with this changeover. I'm finding the new technology being used with our employment is a direct link to what I'm doing with this class. I came across an article today on our intranet from a group called Groundswell. It discusses reasons why groups/organizations/businesses decide to do what they do regarding new technology. It offers 4 strategies to discern what a group may or may not need that will fit the group's objectives. The acronym is POST: P = People, assess your customer's social activities; O = Objective, decide what you want to accomplish; S = Strategy, plan for how relationships with customers will change; T = Technology, decide which social technology to use. This four-step approach is geared toward business, but there is much I can adopt for my ning with Eat the Book. Here is the URL to the article. []

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">March 2, 2009 - Comments re. colleagues projects/journals: ** Today I read the project proposals and most all journal entries posted by our colleagues. I wrote a response (on the discussion pages of their wikipages) to each one. I know I will glean a lot from Dave's work on his ning because he's looking to do something similar to me, although with a different group and emphasis. I'm very interested in the content of Andrey's work, for I started some of this on my own over the holiday break. We're looking to provide such an overview to our Eat the Book participants. Nancy's project looks very worthy and could benefit many people. I, too, am concerned about the responsibility of shared-accessed to websites, etc. I'm glad Natalie can use this project to help her do evaluation of an important part of her work. We seldom allow enough time and discernment for such evaluation, but the outcomes can be very beneficial for future work. I wasn't able to find Brian's project proposal; perhaps he posted it somewhere else. But I know he is very apt at using technology and will pursue some creative and practical project.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">March 1, 2009 part 2 - **<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> Since part 1, below, I've put another 5 hours in my Eat the Book ning site. I needed a good chunk of time to fiddle with all the settings and try and figure out what can work for this ning and what cannot. I was able to put up a slideshow of photos from Eat the Book, attach one video, set up a calendar with an annoucement of this month's module, and provide an area where participants can download the module notes from February. I also moved the activity listing and limited what will show up on it. And, I was able to "unclone" my classmates and put a different default photo up besides my own. Finally, sorry to say, Scot, I deleted some of your things because my colleagues and I decided we wanted what's on the home page to only relate to Eat the Book material. I'm figuring participants can add other things to their own pages. I must say I'm quite pleased at what I could accomplish this time around. The ning seems quite easy to navigate once you get the hang of it. I'm not sure, though, that it will be able to accommodate all that we want to do on this site. Also, I have two areas I can't seem to fix or locate, though: 1) to keep the date set for my event, it keeps changing, and 2) to find out how to enlarge the font on the header.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">March 1, 2009 part 1 - **A week has gone by since my last post. I've looked at my classmates projects and learned several things from them. I find I get caught off guard by little things because I'm not a learn by trial-and-error kind of person. When I finally do happen upon the right way to do something I've tried so many approaches that I forget what got me to this point. I could really use a guidebook! I tried repeatedly to link my ning site to this page. I'd see that it came up looking like a link, but when I clicked on it nothing happened. So, I went back and viewed all of the wiki videos again, tried to re-link, and the same thing happened. Then, who knows why, I clicked "save" on my wikipage and when the saved page came up, the link was in place. This is all to say that if I had known to click "save" to get my changes in place, I would have saved myself at least 2 hours! This is a very humbling and frustrating experience, for I've had far more "failures" than "successes" and lots of hours spent of what seems like fruitless effort. Let's just say I'm not operating in my area of strengths, and I'm used to asking our communications/development staff to do this work for me.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">February 22, 2009 – **I really need to find more time to spend on this ning. The “diners” at Eat the Book today asked me about it and whether or not they can access the video clips I show in class. I’m going to have to see how all of these various items can be structured on the ning. I finalized my abstract so I can add it to my participants page.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">February 16, 2009 – **I announced the ning project at our UCM Elder council meeting and they are excited about this possibility. I was asked to see if the ning can be linked to our church website. More things to figure out! This is not an area of my strengths nor my interest, but I can see how useful it will be to learn such things.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">February 15, 2009 – ** We Eat the Book chefs (leaders) met to talk about the potential of this ning. Seeing that none of us really know the capacity of a ning, I’m the one to figure this out. We’ve decided to wait to announce this to the participants until I have it up and running. This semester can be a time of practice and seeing what we want to add, etc.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">February 9, 2009 – ** I put a short write up about my ning project on my participant’s page of the class wiki. I briefly explained what I hoped to accomplish and let the class know they were sent an email to join this ning. I tried to download photos to the participants page as well as a global clock but failed in doing both. I found this very time consuming and frustrating, for I thought I had followed the steps correctly, but never accomplished what I had hoped. What was even more frustrating and rather funny is that I misread the box that asked whether I wanted to use a default photo for those participants who are photo-less. I thought it was for getting my photo on my icon. Anyway, I wound up “cloning” everyone with my photo. I tried every way I could to get it back to normal, but no go. I’m not one to intelligently fiddle with these things, so I let it go for now, but it’s hard to accept spending 3 hours on these minor things and having nothing but problems to show for it.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">February 3, 2009 – ** I showed the home page of the ning to one of my Eat the Book colleagues. He was quite impressed with its capacity. We talked about what this ning could handle and how we want to set it up. Since both of us are new to this social networking world, we are wondering what are the pros and cons of people having open access to certain sites. I realize I need to figure out more of the capacity of the ning so we can better assess what we want to offer.=====

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 * <span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">February 2, 2009 –** After consulting with Scot re. what network would best facilitate the needs of Eat the Book ministries, I’ve decided to put up a ning. I had no idea what this was until I went online and looked at their website: www.ning.com. It’s a surprisingly easy website to maneuver and I was able to follow the step-by-step instructions to start a ning. I must say I had a great felling of accomplishment even if I was only using their formats to create this ning. With a few clicks and choices re. color, font, etc. I now have the barebones of a ning up and running. I decided to keep the membership closed at this point, so I invited my classmates via an email.=====