collaborative content submission

[Ryan Michael]

(comments inline)

Miles Berry wrote:

Moodleforge, which is a schoolforge.org.uk
<http://schoolforge.org.uk>project, is about using

> Moodle to provide communication and collaboration tools for groups of
> educators, in much the same way as Edna groups do down in Oz (see
> http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=40), but with the
> expectation that at least some of these groups will use it as a platform
> to work collectively at creating moodle courses, with, it is hoped,
> creative commons licences.


this is an interesting site, but it's a little sparse on content.

 I for
> one would prefer to polish things a bit before they make it out into a
> shared repository. More interesting would be to leaverage the
> collaborative principals underpinning wiki, or good old cvs, for
> e-learning materials - this is kinda what we hope to achieve with
> moodleforge in part, but moodle doesn't yet have any real version control.


of course nobody wants to publish things that are thrown together (not in a
bad way of course), but if they're good enough for your students they might
also be good enough for someone else's students - you've got to start
somewhere when creating a body of community maintained materials, right?


John Ingleby wrote:
> > If not, then Wikibooks - http://wilkibooks.org - has much to offer, and
> > is another collaborative venture.


thanks for this link - i saw this a year or so ago but never really looked
at it. it seems to be well maintained and quite diverse. i'm not sure if it
would be suitable as a primary course text in some areas, but it look like
it would provide good support materials.

it seems like collaborative projects fail for one of two reasons: either
there are too many versions of the same resource, or contributing takes too
much work. wikibooks (and wikipedia) do a good job of alleviating both
problems because they are essentially the only resources of their type and
contributing is immediate and doesn't require you to sign up for an account.

i guess what's less obvious about the success of wikis is that they tightly
integrate the processes of using and contributing to them. i think this is
the primary attribute lacking from the examples of shared teaching resources
i've been able to find (and the ones you've been kind enough to link to) -
they are too divorced from the everyday process of developing lesson plans,
hand-outs, tests, etc.

the moodle resources are clearly the most successful because they allow
teachers to develop presentation materials, making contributing a simple
matter of submitting the file.

here's what i would think could be improved:
-robust tagging and metadata for indexing/searching
-revisioning and forking
-integration with a scheduling program (perhaps organized by class)
-semester/year-long course timelines linking to any materials used
(syllabus, handouts, wikibooks, quizzes/tests, homework, etc)
-some type of discussion forum, either topical (typical BBS) or organized by
material (wikipedia)
-even more transparency to the user

perhaps a solution would be to write a wrapper program for most of the
administration tools included in the distro which would 'contextualize' any
work you did by inserting metadata regarding the class, date, your name and
the name of your school, etc. it could serve as a launcher and intercept
file i/o while providing a consistent metadata schema.
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