EduGlu Sandbox

So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised.

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.

I saw this earlier today over at groups.drupal.org --

Kyle Matthews and Clint Rogers built a Drupal site in suppport of a web analytics class. The site aggregates student blogs and expert blogs; this way, everyone blogs from their chosen blogging platform, and their feed gets imported into the course site. In other words, people use whatever blogging tool they are currently using, and the software running the course (in this case, Drupal) adapts to the participant. This is a nice contrast to the usual approach, where all participants must adapt to the structure required by the LMS.

The site was built using the FeedAPI and the Feed Element Mapper. We have talked about organizing classes and building Open Educational Repositories like this in the past, and our main proof of concept site has been humming along for the last few months with no issues at all.

There has been some great development behind the FeedAPI; just last week, the folks over at Development Seed put out another screencast showing how they are extending the functionality even further.

The main organization I work with uses Confluence as its internal wiki platform (and possibly for blogs too, we’ll see how that progresses). I have never been in love with it as a platform but on the principle that with social software, who is using it is often more important than what they are using, I’m trying to get behind it.

But it is frustrating the heck out of me for a number of reasons. We’ve CAS‘ified Confluence, which is great for single sign-on, but it means that any ‘protected’ space now requires authentication to get the RSS feed. And honestly, a wiki without RSS feeds is a non-starter for me.

Enter Google Reader. I made the switch about a year ago and now it is fairly entrenched in my workflow. Except…Google Reader doesn’t do authenticated feeds. So now I’m faced with either switching RSS readers again (ugh) or getting daily wiki updates via email (are you serious? At least Greader could support the email-to-RSS feature like Bloglines used to, and no, the Gmail to RSS hack wouldn’t work in this case).

Frustrating. Added to that, Confluence as a blogging platform leaves a bit to be desired, and to deal it’s inelegant posting workflow (10 clicks compared to my 1 or 2 now) I am trying out some XML-RPC based clients (because it does, at least, support that through a plugin). Hence, really, the reason for this post, to see if the ScribeFire (formally Performancing) plugin for Firefox will do the trick and provide a simply, free way of posting between both my WP blog and Confluence. Wish me luck. So far the experience hasn’t been stellar, with a memory leak and other bugs plaguing what should be a simple process. - SWL

Tags: google, greader, HTTP authentication sucks

http://event.dare2bdigital.ca/

The folks at BCcampus (and this may be logrolling but let me be clear up front, while I work for the folks who have produced Dare2bdigital, I had nothing to do with the project) have come up with an interesting experiment to promote online learning in the province.

Dare2BDigital is a six-week “event” in which student teams compete for prizes by performing various challenges around existing online learing resources in the province, documenting their experience in team blogs that allow the “audience” to follow along, “root” for them, and also participate through blogs and forums (and end up eligible for their own prizes.)

So for instance, the first challenge involves the students interacting with the Tatla Online Observatory and conceiving a “game” that would take place in zero-gravity.

This is definitely not traditional marketing. It really is an experiment to try and expose more people to the really wide range of possibilities for (admittedly, but that’s our bailiwick) formal online education in British Columbia. It has just started, so we will see how it goes. Check it out. Depending on how well it does they may make it a regular thing, but it is definitely worth a least a look as an experiment in alternative marketing. - SWL

Tags: BCcampus, online learning showcase

Amazon.com: Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication, and Community Online: Books: Meredith G. Farkas

Amazon.com: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms: Books: Will Richardson