What does learning look like in your community? I hope it looks like more than an elementary school or a public library. In my community, we have a community gardening project as well as master gardeners ready to answer questions at the Farmer's Market, an integrated pest management hotline that will help you identify a bug and determine the most environmentally friendly way to eradicate it, tours--by storytellers, scientists, and artists--of a local canyon preserve, and more.

I'm looking forward to spending the weekend with some of my favorite people--all of whom I met online and at BlogHer '06: Barbara Sawhill, Laura Blankenship, and Barbara Ganley. (Martha Burtis, who is enjoying her maternity leave, will be with us in spirit.) We're going to be scheming collaborating around Barbara Ganley's new endeavor, a series of digital learning and community centers that serve rural residents. I'm excited because while Barbara, Barbara, Laura, Martha and I have worked together before around issues of forging communities--and especially classroom and university communities--online, this time we're talking about bringing communities together physically as well as digitally.

You'll have to forgive me, therefore, if I have community-based learning and being on my mind. I've been poring over my favorite books on the topic and related subjects, including Frank Fischer's Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge, Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, John Falk and Beverly Sheppard's Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions, Robert Archibald's The New Town Square: Museums and Communities in Transition, and Chris Wilson and Paul Groth's Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After J. B. Jackson as well as new-to-me books like Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein's Better Together: Restoring the American Community and Peter Block's Community: The Structure of Belonging.

For additional inspiration, I've been poking around the blogosphere, looking for people who live and learn conscientiously online and off. I've recently been drawn, for example, to Amy Lenzo's Beauty Dialogues, a space that Lenzo says embodies her

desire to discover and embody a new of way of 'being' online... I want to foster a 'feminine' approach to technology that holds Beauty at the center of all we do: Beauty in the design that creates the 'look and feel' of our online environments, Beauty in our decisions and listening about how to adapt & develop technology for our essential needs, and Beauty in the ways we interact with each other, as respectful and collaborative work teams and in curious heart-full online conversations.

Of course, the mama of all community-building blogs belongs to Nancy White, who is working on a book titled Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. I especially enjoyed the recent post where she wrote about "community as curriculum."

Now I want to know: Which bloggers do you feel do an excellent job of bridging online and offline worlds as they foster communities in the real world? And which bloggers do you feel are doing great work on building learning opportunities in their communities? Finally, which learning opportunities in your community are your favorites, and which opportunities are missing from your community?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and The Multicultural Toybox.