I took part in the Mooc about Mooc’s earlier this month. It was only one week long, but in that short time the facilitators managed to create a strong sense of community among the participants.

They did this, in part, by giving a relatively open ended assignment on Monday then breaking us into groups of 50 to work collaboratively on shared google docs. The submission of the documents was followed by a lively twitter social hour.

It was fast, chaotic and disorganized, but it created a sense of community and resulted in some nice collaborative artifacts in the form of the google documents.

Next weeks assignment for the Ed tech 101 class offers an opportunity to explore The Ed Tech Startup Space as a group. Working in groups will give us the opportunity build some connections and gain a better feel for where each of us are coming from.

One idea would be to follow the MOOCMOOC model: break into groups and address an open ended question such as “what is an ed tech startup?”

Alternatively we could form groups to look at some or all of the nine companies listed in the space page through the filters we are going to use on our own ideas later in the course (idea, pain, solution etc).

Anyone interested in doing this? Leave a comment here or on the Ed Start up site.