Following up some from the last post, I’d like to open the can of beans towards how we can use mobile and social web technologies to create collaborative spaces.

Traditionally, we are used to the typical learning environment to be a person speaking, projector behind them, occasionally a hand-out, and the audience usually head-down writing notes, or heads-up affirming the points made.

While this is good, its been stated by many educators that people tend to work better when they are a part of the story – an active participant in crafting the lesson. So, what can we do with the technology in our hands towards making people a bit more active in learning sessions, creating more chances for accountable and mature discussions and after-lesson applications. The example of an “instant” community as proposed by Nokia’s research project called Instant Community points to some ways in which this can happen.

Instant Community proposes to create a social network based on Wi-Fi and served from a mobile device. Those users who connect can then share text, links, and multimedia items between one another. In some cases, this would be a file transfer, but I can see streamed content being a part of this.

In our biblical communities, instead of starting and ending with a room of dozens of people spoken to by one person, a core group of leaders already equipped with the leadership and tech training would pull aside a group of 6-8 people, and in their “communities” create one of these networks.

They’d have prepared information saved to a community area (think like Google Docs or the ministrys intranet site), but then a usable set of documents – or even a local version of the collaboration site based around the document (think like SharePoint’s Document Workspaces) that all “members” of that small group could add to, comment on, and even save to send to people who were not in the group when its “finished.”

An engagement like this could happen anywhere – removing the dependency on the meeting room for the teaching, but leaving that space as a communial space purposed for corporate prayer and worship. It would also make sense in that meeting space to bring together the workspaces from the smaller groups and then talk/act as a community what that means to the group and the local community.

Just an idea; and one that I’ve tried with Nokia’s Mobile Web Server a few times (weird feedback). But, in terms of making learning more reliant on people interacting with content, and less about the person or place delivering it, it creates conversations that just don’t happen during lesson prep.

Would this be an engagement that would work in your community? Why or why not? What would be some of the issues with an approach like this, and would it encourage a change in those issues to opportunities? What could that look like for you?