BretWagner.com

Sci­ence For Amer­ica empow­ers edu­ca­tors as teach­ers and learn­ers as they develop and imple­ment new themes, ideas, and cur­ricu­lum. Edu­ca­tors are given the oppor­tu­nity to learn and build net­works with lead­ers, experts and each other.

The web­site is built upon the belief that edu­ca­tors can only facil­i­tate the devel­op­ment of ana­lyt­i­cal rea­son­ing and problem-solving skills when these same pro­fi­cien­cies are used to resolve the issues con­fronting sci­ence edu­ca­tion today.

The Sci­ence For Amer­ica web site offers resources for plan­ning and imple­ment­ing instruc­tion, devel­op­ing project-based learn­ing cur­ricu­lum, and col­lab­o­rat­ing with col­leagues. Unlike other teaching-related web­sites, which fre­quently pro­vide large lists of unranked, unsorted links and resources, the Sci­ence For Amer­ica web­site pro­vides sub­mis­sion, rat­ing and dis­cus­sion tools to allow the best resources to sur­face near the top of the list. This saves teach­ers time, and allows the best resources to develop into excel­lent tools which all edu­ca­tors will want to imple­ment in their classrooms.

If you build it, they will come. A state­ment ingrained in America’s psy­che thanks to the 1989 film Field of Dreams. But while the film gar­nered numer­ous awards and acco­lades from crit­ics and movie­go­ers alike (three Oscar nom­i­na­tions alone, Best Pic­ture, Best Music, Best Writ­ing), not even Kevin Cost­ner can save your social net­work­ing site from fad­ing into obscu­rity with­out the right stuff.

If you build it they will come works well for build­ing base­ball dia­monds in Iowa corn­fields, but when it comes to social net­work­ing sites, it takes a con­certed effort of seed­ing, pro­mot­ing, and man­ag­ing to get things off the ground.

I’ve been scour­ing the web for other authors and orga­ni­za­tions who have addressed steps to build­ing suc­cess­ful online com­mu­ni­ties. Aside from a hand­ful of per­sonal blogs dis­cussing this issue, there isn’t a whole lot of offi­cial research on what fac­tors are nec­es­sary for suc­cess­ful social networks.

I did, how­ever, find an excel­lent resource from the Kick­Apps team. Kick­apps recently pub­lished a whitepa­per titled “Nine Steps to a Suc­cess­ful Online Com­mu­nity.” They’ve put together a list of guide­lines to help social net­works reach their fullest poten­tial. The nine steps nec­es­sary to pro­mote good plan­ning and best practices?

1. Define your community’s pur­pose and audience.
2. Get a Com­mu­nity Manager.
3. Choose the tech­nol­ogy that’s right for you.
4. Seed your com­mu­nity with great content.
5. Cus­tomize your community’s look and feel.
6. Pro­mote it!
7. Encour­age active participation.
8. Man­ager your com­mu­nity with fair-mind consistency.
9. Lis­ten and optimize.

I’ll be writ­ing about each one of these in sep­a­rate blogs in the next few weeks. In the mean­time, read up for your­self here and also check out some of these links.

Believe it or not, Sci­ence For Amer­ica was my first web­site. I’ve cre­ated four now– def­i­nitely still a new­bie– but I’ve come to appre­ci­ate the rel­a­tive ease of cre­at­ing web­sites and appli­ca­tions using tech­nolo­gies like con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, blog­ging plat­forms and devel­op­ment frameworks.

While I think the design of Sci­ence For Amer­ica is strong, and the plat­form I built it on is even stronger (Joomla! CMS), I’ve learned a few things about try­ing to cre­ate a social net­work that I’d like to share with you.

One…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes time. Both time on a day-by-day basis, and also time in the sense of build­ing up the site and brand to get pas­sion­ate vis­i­tors who come back for more. I would attribute the rel­a­tive suc­cess of Sci­ence For Amer­ica to its tenure on the web, now 18 months. I found that ini­tial traf­fic and get­ting the word out was crit­i­cal in the begin­ning, but that after this had started, it sim­ply took time for traf­fic and users to arrive at the site.

Two…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes plan­ning. I used a 20 Ques­tions doc­u­ment to develop the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples for the site. Who are we tar­get­ing? What are the sites’ com­peti­tors? What type of con­tent will be included? All of these were impor­tant in decid­ing the direc­tion of the site.

Three…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes orga­ni­za­tion. Proper lay­out is crit­i­cal, because you want your user inter­face to be intu­itive. Where can I find sci­ence work­sheets? Where do I go when I want to find links to sci­ence web­sites? All of these ques­tions should really be answered BEFORE you start on the site and through­out the beta phase of devel­op­ment. There are many plat­forms out there– Joomla! and Word­Press to name a cou­ple– that make it rel­a­tively easy to rearrange con­tent and links on web­sites, but it is still a crit­i­cal step to develop at least a rough sketch, wire­frames maybe, of where you are going to have vis­i­tors click to nav­i­gate cer­tain parts of the site.

This is sim­pli­fy­ing things a bit, but I believe if you focus on these three areas, you’ll have a solid site ready for visitors.

Where are all the sci­ence teach­ers? It seems log­i­cal that those who teach tech­nol­ogy should be using tech­nol­ogy to con­nect and share ideas on the web. I’ve been reflect­ing on why, after 18 months on the web, my web­site Sci­ence for Amer­ica only has 350 reg­is­tered mem­bers. While the site gets 200 vis­i­tors PER DAY, really only about 5–7 peo­ple will sign up per week. (more…)