ReturNING to the scene of the crime (Thing 6)

I'm back! After about 4 months, I have returned to the 23 Things for Web 2.0. I'm proud of myself. Usually I'd just let a project go after this much time off, but it's my "I need to do something productive!" part of the day, and I need something to do. So I start looking through my bookmarks and links, and there it is, the little button that says "23 Things". Brilliant! Now I don't have to resort to cleaning!

Looking back, I see I'm on Thing 6 - Nings. The Ning.com page has changed since I last looked at it. But I can still search for "math", and get a nice list of nings to look at.
.
.
.
.
Aaand 100 nings later, I have yet to find one to join. I'd estimate that I actually clicked on 15 links to nings that seemed relevant to me, but that's because only (~)15 of those 100 listed so far have had titles or descriptions that were relevant. This is frustrating. Several of these nings have titles and descriptions that make them sound open and interesting, but they are all much smaller and for a very specific group of people. For example, Mathematics Professional Learning Community is actually a class at ASU. Others haven't been touched since early 2009. Grrr.

I'm going to keep looking, but I feel that I can answer some of the questions about nings without actually joining one. The majority of the nings I've looked at had a relatively small number of members, I'd say between 8 and 30. Then again, I keep finding nings that are designed for small groups that actually meet in real life - college classes, teachers from one area doing professional development, etc. I did see several high school teacher-created nings for the students in their classes. One had a tab for students to post notes from class. I loved that, because the student who did most of the posting took pictures of the notes in her notebook and posted the pictures. My students could do that by taking a "screen shot" of their OneNote notebook. It would be so much cleaner and clearer!

Unfortunately, the classroom ning that looked the most interesting required you to sign-up before you could really look around the ning. "Bravo!" to the teacher for being conscious of his students' safety, but "Boo!" for not getting to see how it worked!

(Wow, spell check does not like the word "ning"!)