As part of our Personal Viable Systems Model, learners need to spend time not only monitoring their activities within their various courses and groups (see the previous post for self-monitoring your AU Landing activities), but also deciding on which eco-systems and external networks to spend more time participating in.

Oftentimes, a single course might involve a Moodle forum, an instructor's blog, peers' blogs, a class blog, a wiki, and one's own blog. In addition, a common scenario is that a student needs to be aware of the different groups within AU landing unconnected to specific cohorts/courses, and be able to sign up for open groups such as  Friends of the Landing or the Landing Help Community.

Added to this complexity within the AU Landing practice network, one can opt to participate in larger networks such as Twitter, or set up and maintain one's own edublogs blog, or set up a Posterous e-portfolio, etc.

But how to coordinate all these efforts? To begin with, it is essential to identify what commitment you have, and prioritize them, allotting the time to be spent on each. For me, course-work would come first, then time blogging to aid me with completion of assignments, then the group Academic Blogging Group  I manage within AU Landing. I also have to coordinate my efforts between the AU landing blogging and content development, with the Twitter network, and with my own edublog. I need to allocate my time carefully, as the different activities sometimes overlap, and sometimes diverge. I sometimes decide to re-publish and re-purpose content in several locations. For example, a podcast might be published using posterous, then a tweeet is used to promote it, and then I post a wire post within AU landing to announce the work (if it might be of interest to this academic community). Sometimes my blog posts about literacy are not published here within AU landing, but remain on my edublogging4literacy blog, and promoted within the BC Literacy Forum blog and within Twitter that is picked up by Literacy-related groups.

I need to also coordinate my efforts seeking out contacts and content for analysis and weaving into my blog posts and Twitter tweets. I use BlogLines to aggregate the blog feeds, as well as twitter feeds to keep up to date with new content. I use different tools to help manage the information flow: (these are some examples).

bloglines to manage the new blog posts within edtech-related blogs

twitter edtech groups and favourite tweeters (not all activities of experts end up in blog posts)

notifications to help me keep track of AU landing activities

email notifications to alert me of updates within several online communities external to AU landing