Frances Bell

Steve wrote "I have a similar project going for my MA....I agree with Helen....(heavily paraphrasing)"

You were actually agreeing with Frances though Helen may very well agree too.

And in this spirit of agreement, you have given some good ideas on social presence and sustainability, Patrick. There is another aspect though, that large volumes of activity can be problematic. I think this forum would be unbearable without the digest option or ruthless use of unsubscribe.

How about starting with something below the course level?  You could seed a glossary with some popular resources, then have a discussion that encourages people (some of them your friends!) to add more resources.  By making the glossary linked to a random glossary entry, you would increase its visibility.

Hi Steve,
I think that this is a great idea. You could look through this forum for some ideas on building learning communities.  IMHO, your biggest challenge is to establish a social context(s) for sharing (as has been done here on Moodle.org).
We are just completing a two year project where we have a STudent Network as part of our portal at http://www.cabweb.net. 
We promised to make an active staff network (called HELP) and to offer collaboration spaces for teacher-led activities but we included the Student Network as something for students to take up if they wish, and generally they haven't   You could look at this thread where students gave some ideas of what they might like.
I am not surprised or unhappy about this as I have always thought that a realistic student network would take place somewhere separate and be run by students- and maybe be what my colleague described as an "anarchic" network.
If you are successful with this Steve, you will need some resources, and you may investigate the possibility of sponsorship from, say, social networking sites rather than official education funds.
Have you heard of the site set up some years ago called revise-it (now defunct) where student  shared essays, etc.?  It got caught up in the whole plagiarism thing (but the reality was a little more complex).  Anyway, if you could get hold of the people who set that up (try googling for revise-it or reviseit - they were from Manchester Grammar School and now probably working in the city or running dot.coms!), they would probably have some valuable insights.

I'd start by checking out this discussion

What I meant was that if you put a message in your other topic at Richard's other topic, linking to this thread/topic then it would pick up those non_uk people who may be deterred by the title of this topic.

For example your message could say something like.

We have been discussing country-specific and global Frappr Groups in UKMoodlers in Education topic

so it's worth reading that topic if such groups interest you.

I probably haven't explained this very well