Website development and community building takes a lot of time. There just aren't any shortcuts to creating an effective online community, no matter who it is. But things also sometimes move quicker than others and this week has been moving really quickly with our new education community.

Two weeks ago we sent Jennifer Janzen from the Unviersity of Winnipeg Collegiate packed with all our new bells and whistles from our website to the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking Summer Institute. Jennifer was a really enthusiastic and really jumped in head first, and without her none of this could have been possible. She blogged, took pictures for her new Flickr feed, and interviewed various participants about why they were attending the Summer Institute.

The results have been really great to see and we even recorded our first video interview back here at the University last Friday:

This is the type of support that our website is designed to provide to history and education organizations across Canada. Events like the summer institute bring together Canada's brightest teachers to talk about teaching, and creating a digital repository of the event allows that experience and the amazing ideas that come out of it to be shared with a considerably larger audience.

It's the type of experience that I want to continue to develop through our website as a focal point for discussion on Canadian History. And thus, why I'm extremely happy this week.