When you need to learn more about communities & collaboration, you start to notice that it's difficult find signal amongst the noise. There's a lot of punditry and opinion among a mixed set of industries, from marketing & social media, to online and offline communities, to civic & economic growth, to urban development & more. It's a mess!
Instead of having to stumble around in the dark, I've long wished for a place to go to find essays, books, videos, and even academic source about community building, design thinking, collaboration, business, & leadership.
Below is my version of resource that I've compiled for myself over the years, which I'm happy to share with you for free.
If you love these resources, you can get more like it in your inbox for free by signing up for our mailing list.
"A lot of what I do is building, managing, and empowering both online and offline communities across different countries. Alex's resources have been full of useful ideas and best practices. Across the board what I found really useful is how grounded they are in real experiences. I found the links, readings, and videos to be well-curated and targeted, helping me filter out the noise from the signals in the community-building literature." - Annie Lin, Global Education Program Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.
If you love these books, you can get more like them in your inbox for free by signing up for our mailing list.
Scholarly Research
Collins, A. Joseph, D., & Bielaczyc, K. (2004). “Design Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues” The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13.1, 15-42. https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Public/Coliving%20Research/1466931.pdf?w=5b516756
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2003). Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning. New York: Viking.
Dweck, C. (2000). Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development. Psychology Press.
Edelson, D. C., & Joseph, D. M. “The Interest-Driven Learning Design Framework: Motivating Learning Through Usefulness.” ICLS '04 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences, 166-173.
Mueller, C. and Dweck, C. (1998). Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 75.1, 33-52.
Resnick, M. (2007). “All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten.” Presented at Creativity & Cognition conference, June 2007. Retrieved from: http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/CC2007-handout.pdf
