My work at CSP is focused on communities and social participation. My interests are mainly about ICT in education: I manage a regional project for a schools network, calledDschola in which schools supported schools. CSP worked also within a Latin America /European project for promoting practices exchange among teachers about ICT at school and open source software adoption (2005, in Buenos Aires). In 2005 I started the KEILab project about elearning and OSS: we made a survey on about one hundred of open source LCMS and compared them. The KEILab also developed an integrated enviroment, adopting an enterprise 2.0 paradigm, using multiblog (ELGG), wiki (Twiki), social bookmarking, that shared RSS and TAG. KEIlab also supported the Dept of Economy of University of Torino, in the Arcipelago Project; the idea was to combine open source software(ZOPE/PLONE) to develop 1)open repository for open content 2) aa learning management system - trying to adopt a learning 2.0 approach 3) an authoring tools supportint faculties in creating courseware SCORM compliant.

BluePrint

Basics

Short description: School, University, Library are facing a crisis in their traditional role, also it is not only a matter related with technology. The most important tools for informal learning today is Google. So we need not to bury contents in repositories or LCMS. There are thousand of education chunks (almost in English) that we don't know how to reach.

1) define a Sitemap format also for elearning contents. In Italy most of educational agencies use Moodle, but learning contents are not accessible outside Moodle. Many Universities and Schools agree to freely distribute their contents, but as the contents are "buried" inside the LCMS they are not accessible and usable. It was a school teacher, friend of mine, to suggest me the idea of using Sitemap for making contents more findable even by the search engines.

2) build an open source platform, easily to install and customize (wordpress-like) that allows teachers to create living libraries of educational objects. You could say: there are so many sites already, do you know connexions? In my experience people want to own the repository and use it in their own language. So this platform should easily allow to describe the education resources:I think something like www.librarything.com does with books, in which it is possible to pick the description of the books from external libraries (as we could pick the description of the education resources from other repositories), it is possible to assess and "review" the educational units, and also to suggest similar education units.. and many other actions..

What do you think about "www.educationalthing.com"?

Audience: K-12 school also from not english speaking countries

Who will participate?

Goals: These two proposal will allow teacher to find, catalogue, evaluate and share many educational resources. The primary objective is to overcome language barrier.

How does it work?:

A teacher, or also a student, could create its own portfolios, or better, educational library. He/she has the possibility to find from different repositories or websites, the educational units (video, text, photo, courseware, simulation, podcast, game) and add them to their personal library, adding a description (or using/modifying an existing one), tags, votes (based on how much he/she likes it), reviews (giving information to other colleagues related how to use it), recommedations (if you like this one, maybe you like also..).

Summary of the design.

Similar projects:

These ideas starting from many different projects:

1) about the easy-to-install and customize requirements, I think we could refer as a model, to something like moodle or, better, wordpress

2) about the concept of sharing educational contents, Connexions is the model

3) about the functionality of find, catalogue, tag, review, share and evaluate the model could be Librarything.

Open Technology

1) XML

2) Pbwiki

3) Wordpress

4) Pligg

...

Open Content / Licensing

The platform shoud be released and GPL (or other similar license) It will be very important that people understand difference between CC, Free and copyright. For this reason, the platform will be explain in local languages what OER are (and hopefully could be linked with local copyright legislation).

Open Pedagogy

People will learn the importance of sharing knowledge, the advantage of using open licensing in order to promote the best circulation of their contents.

Diagram / Sketch