Well, in the end I think it led to a few different publications, although I'm not sure how active the communities are at the moment. (These things tend to rise and fall, I guess.) This work was in collaboration with Nancy White, Alvaro Galvis, and Diego Leal. Here are two likely outcomes that I see on Alvaro's website ( https://sites.google.com/site/galvaro50/publicati... )

Hacia una Gestión Efectiva de Comunidades Virtuales. Antología (2008, co-editor con Martha Isabel Tobón y Patricia Salazar). Pereira: RVT - Serie Artefactos para la Educación Virtual . Publiprint Ltda. ISBN: 978-958-722-012-4.

Ambientes Educativos para la Era de la Informática (2001, co-autor con grupo LIDIE-UNIANDES). Bogotá: MEN, Portal Colombia Aprende, Mediateca.

Sounds like researchers in California are manifesting their PRO-cat-biases again! Where is the scientific review for such things? :-)

Hi, James. You'd think "what is being learned" would be the most frequently asked question, eh?

Talking with Diego Leal this afternoon I realize that the "offer" in a business model for a community is where change has to happen for the various constituencies in a community's "customer segments". So a business model for a community is different in that regard from a business model for an organization, where the offer is supposed to be more stable.

Esa traducción me parece muy buena idea, Piedad. Pero primero deberiamos buscar a ver si no hay ya recursos en Español. Eso sería una pregunta apropiada para la comunidad SIWA: http://dgroups.org/sulabatsu/siwa . (Y sería una manera ideal de conectarte con la comunidad -- ¡que pena que te perdiste la reunión!)

Partly this should be the job of conference organizers, although they may have a conflict of interest. It seems to me that there are many ways in which technology can help us get the conversation going before an event and help us continue it afterward. But it takes extra work to make that happen. If you are strictly driven by the current economics of conferences you might not bother to make that investment.

Although we do it all the time, it can be very problematic. One reason groups are handy is that you can tag a group: name it, label it, and whatever without causing offense. Tagging an occasion is safe, too. Tagging people can be quite delicate, don't you think?

Thanks for the fun response, Alice. You make me wonder, why not just advertise, "this will be fun?" As it happened within a few hours of your comment I got a newsletter from Bernie DeKoven ( http://www.deepfun.com ), where he says in part:

"After the lecture, we had a little time for some questions. One of the questions I was asked was about how to make educational games more fun. I explained that the problem with educational games is that they are designed to compensate for a system that has already taken the fun out of learning, and then to hope that educational games will somehow magically put the fun back. Talk to any experienced mathematician or writer or scientist and they will tell you about the joy that they find in their work. To make a good educational game, you have to go to the discipline before education got hold of it, find the fun that keeps people engaged in it, and make that accessible to kids. Unfortunately in all likelihood educators will not think it sufficiently educational, but for the kids who get to play the games, the experience could very well help them discover the fun that is central to the exploration of science, art, mathematics, language."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/funlog/message/1494

I guess the subtext of my diatribe is: how unfortunate if lively communities like CHIFOO are coopted by a no-fun behavioral model!

One thing I've noticed about myself is several different reading genres. The book-reading genre requires me to to start at the beginning and read it all word for word. And I need to have a book "going" most of the time. And I hate hurrying, too.
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But other kinds of reading allow skimming. Twitter being the most skimable. :-)

As you say, the online part may support us on the path but isn't a substitute. And finding the right balance is itself an issue for our time. One thing that I didn't mention in my comment above was that when we took students for a visit to Unfettered Mind, we always arranged to have a host to give us a tour. We've found that collections of websites like Unfettered Mind, and even specific pages need context and explanation. So I would also suggest, once you "check it out" is that you connect with someone, somehow. There are many means to do so (technology mediated or not).