(comments inline) <div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Miles Berry wrote: </blockquote>Moodleforge, which is a <a href="http://schoolforge.org.uk"> schoolforge.org.uk</a> project, is about using <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Moodle to provide communication and collaboration tools for groups of educators, in much the same way as Edna groups do down in Oz (see <a href="http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=40)">http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=40)</a>, 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.</blockquote><div> this is an interesting site, but it's a little sparse on content. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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.</blockquote><div> 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? </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">John Ingleby wrote: > If not, then Wikibooks - <a href="http://wilkibooks.org">http://wilkibooks.org </a> - has much to offer, and > is another collaborative venture.</blockquote><div> 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) </div></div>-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.