EduGlu Sandbox

I just took a quick peek at the “Top Posts & Pages” stats for my blog, as calculated by the WordPress.com Stats system. I had it run the numbers for my most popular posts of all time, and was both surprised and dejected. Apparently, this is not an edublog after all.

It’s my blog, and I get to determine what is spam and what is not. The latest round of human-generated spam is getting past the automated spamblocks because the comments look valid. They’re natural language, often on topic, and occasionally even interesting or insightful - or relevant to the post being spammed.

If you can read this, then the FeedBurner feed redirection is working properly. If your feed reader didn’t update your subscription automagically, the URL to the main feed for my blog is

http://www.darcynorman.net/feed

Hopefully things won’t get confused or lost in the shuffle…

From Weblog Tools Collection comes this late breaking item.

Over at weblogg-ed, Will Richardson has a post about, among other things, how teachers are increasingly networked outside their district, but not inside their district.

I’m writing these ideas out quickly -- there are sure to be holes in this, and gaps in this reasoning -- please point them out in the comments.

For some context on this post, see these two threads on Dan Meyer's blog.

Users working with online lessons will generally fall into at least one of the following categories:

1. People searching for lesson ideas (probably the majority)
2. People already creating content on their own blogs (a growing number of folks, but still a very small percentage, compared to people in category 1, or even teacher-bloggers)
3. People looking for a place to create content (people who want to create blogs, etc -- I have no idea how many people fall into this category, but I’d imagine that if people, particularly younger teachers, saw the benefit they would have some amazing things to contribute)
4. People who will find lessons on another site, edit/revise those lessons for use in their class, and republish the updated content on their own site
5. People who will edit/revise content on someone else’s site (ie, wiki-style) -- the majority of these people would probably be very committed to the ideals of Open Educational Resources (OERs), have part of their professional responsibilities include curriculum development, or have some other type of immediate personal connection to a learning community. These people would probably be the ones to make the greatest use of any social networking features within the site

Produce --> Share --> Reuse --> Remix -- where does influence fit in? The influence of shared lessons, and the role that influence can have in helping a teacher develop and revise their existing materials, should not be overlooked.

Most working teachers do not have the time to collaborate online with other teachers to create freely available resources. Most of the teachers I talk to barely have time to engage in that type of collaboration within their own schools, let alone within an online/social networking context. Most teachers, even the ones currently blogging their lessons, do not have the free time to join another site and learn another system, even if there are long-term benefits. Teacher time needs to be respected, which is why any system that mandates a teacher use a new tool to participate will lose a good number of potential contributors due to that barrier to entry.

Here is what I propose -- and what I have partially built, here: http://threeclicks.org/lessons

1. A site that aggregates lessons already being published online. This way, any teacher currently blogging lessons doesn’t need to change a single thing about how they work. If they want to make it easier, they can choose to tag any lessons with a unique keyword, like “lesson” -- this would allow us (in most cases, anyways) to aggregate posts in that specific keyword.
2. All imported lessons are full-text searchable, and, when possible, tagged with keywords that describe the lessons
3. Organize the lessons by content area
4. Possibly, add in rating mechanisms to allow site members to rate content
5. All posts imported into the site can be printed via a print-friendly page, and exported via rss.
6. As a further development, possibly create a mechanism where site users could clone and revise imported content, or create new lessons to be published within the site. This lesson development would leverage content already created and imported into the site, or could be used by interested people to develop learning resources from scratch. For this type of curricular planning, we could incorporate wiki-type functionality.
7. As noted by David Rothstein here, we could incorporate a “request a lesson” feature

What is missing? Please add any necessary details/suggestions in the comments.

Given the vast reach of my blog, with a readership that extends well into double digits, I feel a certain sense of obligation to use the awesome power of this platform wisely. So allow me to link to Professor David Wiley's announcement of a job opening with the Instructional Technology Department at Utah State University.

I have raved at length in the past about the calibre of faculty, staff and students at USU, and about the charms of Logan. Suffice it to say this will be a wonderful opportunity for a fortunate candidate.

In a comment to my recent ill-considered ramblings on OpenCourseWare, Leigh Blackall advocated 'truly OPEN source and not just "free"' approaches to open education. Point taken -- if there is one additional point I wish I had made in that original post, it is that open education takes many forms... I, for one, think that John Willinsky's wiki combining authentic teacher training and a database of useful lesson plans is every bit as much a contribution to open education as a collection of PDF'ed lecture notes assembled as a course.

One of the sites Leigh cited as a natural platform for open educators is WikiEducator, which is a very impressive project with lots on the go.

One, via Stephen Downes, I learn that WikiEducator is piloting a collaborative video project that may eventually benefit Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered environments. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I have never heard of Kaltura, especially since they have gathered some buzz previously...

Two, WikiEducator will be leading a very cool ongoing web seminar as part of the Learning4Content project which looks like a great opportunity to hone MediaWiki authoring skills and also to get a sense of a novel pedagogical model. Gotta love the Learner Contract: in return for your training, you deliver an open educational resource. I'm signing up.

Finally, WikiEducator will be hosting the ongoing development of the OER Handbook. (Here's the blog.)