Just spend a crazy couple of hour writing/drafting/talking/developing the seed of some curricular tools and resources over at the EdTechTalk Barnraising. I think the core of curriculum is developing, but it will take a significant amount of time and resources over the new few weeks and months to flesh out and create a useful resource for teachers. We’ve all been creating our own tools and webpages to help us to share knowledge and help other teachers to use Web 2.0 as a classroom device. It’ll be nice to create a central place to develop and share all of our work.
I hope that’s what the EdTechTalk wiki will become. But it’ll be up to all of us to make sure that what we’ve created becomes more than a collection of neglected wiki pages.
Here are a couple of things that I’m thinking about as my brain is in super-connective thinking mode. #
- The wiki at EdTechTalk could become one stop shopping for anyone getting started and for those looking to further integrate Web 2.0 in the classroom.
- Lots of really smart people have lots of great ideas spread all over the Internet. How do we centralize that so as to be efficient and not recreating the wheel all of the time?
- How do we get stakeholders invested in using a central place for all of our resources? (I don’t mean that everyone should only use one place to write or share, but I do think we could be lots more efficient and effective if we can begin to at least link back to one or two central resources, as well as link ourselves to a few key places.)
- What are the essential resources/pages/ideas/people that should be linked in to the EdTechTalk wiki? Who will make the effort to make sure these links get created?
- What am I overlooking/missing through the haze of my excitement?
- How does centralization like I’m attempting to describe hurt/harm/conflict with the idea of Small Pieces Loosely Joined?
- How can we use the category features of MediaWiki to create a resource that contains multiple ways of organizing and accessing information?
- Can we pay people to develop some of these ideas further? Where would the money come from? Would people want to get paid to develop wiki materials that might and probably will be changed over time?
Bud,
I think your question about linking all that information on the internet has a start with the Edublogs grou.ps site, though there isn’t much way to organize that information. Two jumbled, brainstormy, thoughts:
-What if grou.ps or a site like it allowed people to create topics to categorize their posts? Would there just be too many topics since everyone will have a different view of what goes in what category?
-What about something like an online educator journal with an editor? How many people would submit, and would there be too much stuff for one person or even a group of people to organize?
So interesting to see you talking about web 2.0 as my husband just gave two talks on that very topic.
Bud,
Once again great questions on this type of thing. I haven’t revisited the EdTech wiki in a while, so I don’t know about the progress or parts that they have been working on. I know that as I have been looking at the little project that we have here I am have been continuously wrestling with the focus of the project, the idea of community, the centralization of information, the reliability issue (there is a great article on this in Linux Journal this month), and a million other things that parallel what you are talking about above.
I know that I started posting questions and thoughts on the community page, and if I can manage to build a community hope that this can be solved collectively, which if projects like these are to succeed that is what needs to happen. If there is a central place on the EdTechTalk wiki to hash out these things that is where these questions should start to be looked at. Beyond that I don’t know how to offer anymore thoughts on this. Going to have to sign up as a member and get to work over in the EdTechTalk wiki:)
Have a good one,
Tadge