Judie Piner - EDU-255

Failure is Free… Make Lemonade.
Ahhh… now I am inspired. Steve Hargadon’s comments resonated with my Ning Experience and its lack of success. So much so I may be adding to my discussion group thread as well. Of course, what doesn’t work should be turned to opportunity.
So, I am embarrassed that I have spent the first weeks whining about my Ning site. Of course, I did make changes to it… I did invite this semester’s students to it (last semester I was so discouraged by it that I didn’t bother). I added new content and encouraged others to do the same. Still not much enthusiasm.
Ok. Steve’s comments are great. “You don’t really know what sites will take off or succeed.” Instead of stayed “married” to this site, or the format of this site… I need to change my expectations and purpose. The first thing I thought of when reading this was changing the content. Add tutorials. Do something new and cool. Well, that leaves the content still a little too much “all about me.” Its still “me” adding content, not my fellow collaborators. Thinking of this, I came to Steve’s #2, that content may not be as important as the collaboration. Ahhh…
So the trick here is to engage the participants. Again Steve comes to my rescue. “A network must fulfill some compelling needs.” What are their needs, not mine. Do we want to share tips and trick, do we want to share our successes? What will they get out of visiting the network regularly.
I don’t have the answers yet, working through the ideas presented in this article. But I will add some new content. Invite others to submit their ideas and tips and tricks. See if I can turn my failure into success. I love lemonade.