Building Niche Virtual Communities

“Cover Design: The Magic Garden“
a response to a visual activity in the Magic Garden Project

Lori Gloyd (c) 2007

Working together! Grade 6 Hawkesdale
The Magic Garden

THE MAGIC GARDEN

The Magic Garden is a project designed to show educators and their students how good curriculum can be delivered and the outcomes published, using new technology such as blogs, writeboard, photo board and many other exciting applications.

Cora Zon, a professional storyteller and Heather Blakey, an experienced web publisher and webmaster of the Soul Food Cafe, work collaboratively and demonstrate how educators can marry the ancient craft of storytelling, apply current curriculum and publish using state of the art blogging software. Cora tells the enchanting Kazakha story of the ‘The Magic Garden’ while Heather Blakey delivers a curriculum package that climaxes with self publication on a constellation of Global Teacher, Global Student blogs. Watch, in wonder, at the way this virtual garden is growing as staff, students and the wider community contribute by responding to the activities within the Magic Garden Project.

FEBRUARY 2006 JOURNAL by Chris Dunmire

A Blogternative to Going it Alone
Are you among those who enjoy using a blog for creative, expressive purposes? If so, you’re in good company. Artists, writers, and creatives of all kinds are drawn to the interactive nature of blogging to express their creativity, share their work, and elicit feedback from the virtual world. Furthermore, one can blog it alone or (if they desire) team up with others on collaborative blogging projects with creative themes like illustration, photography, and creative writing.

Community blogs know no boundaries, for if a theme can be conceptualized, it can be created. You know this is true if you’ve wandered over to the Soul Food Cafe Web site (www.dailywriting.net) recently. My friend Heather Blakey, Soul Food’s driving force and teacher, started using team blogging in 2003 with her students. When she retired from secondary school teaching in 2005, she began planting a labyrinth of blogs throughout the corridors of Soul Food, which now number over 60.

What goes on in blogs with mythical names like the Lemurian Abbey, the Hermitage, Riversleigh and Gypsy Camp? Plenty. And the sense of creative community experienced in the supportive Soul Food environment has been transforming lives. Troops willingly inhabit these virtual places under Heather’s skillful facilitation to explore more than just their art and creativity.

Intrigued by Heather’s success, I inquired if she would report on the transforming opportunities and creative unleashing that lie within the realm of group blogging. No sooner did I send my e-mail down under that I received a response by Heather and her creative collaborators in a piece titled “Zen and the Art of Team Blogging.”

Take note of Heather’s personal invitation to join in with the Soul Food team bloggers if you dare. But beware — she’ll make you work hard to earn your keep.

Chris Dunmire
Publisher, Creativity Portal

At the Soul Food Cafe, within the sanctuary that Lemuria affords, Heather Blakey has quite literally built a target specific, interactive community for people who want to practice the Soul Food Way and make writing and art a daily practice. Soul Food now has artists, writers, journalists, photographers, scientists, archaelogists, storytellers, illustrators, musicians living in residence. The Soul Food Cafe has long ceased to be a static webside and provides very real mechanisms for working collaboratively in a creative, online environment.

In 2005 Heather Blakey wrote an article entitled ‘Zen and the Art of Team Blogging’ for Chris Dunmire and the Creativity Portal. The article explores the creative transformation that can take place within a collaborative, online setting.

Heather now helps organisations and people from all walks of life set up virtual, niche market communities. Global Teacher, for example, is an intricate online network, created by Heather Blakey for the Victorian Education Channel and SLAV to provide a dualistic, interactive, cyber setting, for educators and students to self publish using an especially designed publishing and communication tool.

The Victorian Education Channel is currently establishing a network that has been designed to enable educationalists from all over the world to work collaboratively, share educational materials and publish staff and student work. Staff will use a tailor made blogging program called Global Teacher while students will use a twin program called Global Student. These programs are ‘clones’ of Edublog and WordPress which many educators will be already familiar with.

Heather launched this innovative approach to teaching and learning at a conference entitled ‘Crystallising Your Knowledge – A Fresh Look At ITC In Learning’ run by the Victorian Curriculum Corporation and SLAV.

Can you afford to be left behind? Can you afford to just have a static website? You can contact Heather at heatherblakey at iinet dot net dot au and have her support you, or actively help you build a vibrant virtual community to attach to your website or blogger.