Activities
Portal Development: An existing effort coordinated by the Institute for Studies of Knowledge Management (ISKE) involves the creation of a portal designed to aggregate and disseminate content from the Open Educational Resources project (OER). The PI will serve on the advisory board of this group, and has already begun collaborating with the developers on the design and implementation of the beta version. This portal will be an integral part of the viral and community experiments that will follow, and will undergo iterative development informed by the social network/social software experiments and vice versa.
Initial meetings with current OpenContent units will take place not only to asses the existing content, but more importantly to identify willing partners to undertake the enhanced community OpenContent work. Once a critical mass of partners are identified, work will begin to create tools that help virulize the material and enable communities of learners to assemble and thrive.
Especially critical are discussions with the Connexions group, particularly what approaches have worked and which have failed. Talks with MIT will focus on the possibility of adding community aspects to certain courses, and the prospect of both coalescing materials into integrated units as well as breaking materials out into modules. Information from CMU on their OLI work and feedback, as well as Utah State and their Open Learning Support work will figure in the mix. Finally, Foothill-DeAnza provides the critical community college angle on the OpenContent framework.
Following survey and assessment of successes and failures, along with a broader and deeper understanding of not only the current material available, but also local plans and trajectories, a series of experiments will be designed involving suitable social software tools in concert with selected content. Preliminary plans are to focus on music and physics, but this could change depending on the results of the survey work. One thrust will be to create various “test beds” for aggregation, distribution, and repurposing of the content. The social phenomenon of “remix” provides various models both behavioral and technological that help inform the design of the experiment. In addition, consideration of the content with an eye towards reformulation and distribution to K-12 will be employed.
The results of both the initial assessment work and the resulting experiments will be aggregated and disseminated in white paper(s) and via the OER portal, as well as a project portal site. The portal site for the project will “practice what it preaches”, utilizing various social software tools for distribution and collaboration. The results will be collected and made available on wikis, and the creation of the white paper will take place in a network environment (with suitable access controls). Thus the dissemination of the results is in fact a further continuation of the “experiments”, bringing the project full circle. The PI has used these tools effectively with other groups for similar purposes (specifically, grant, paper, and book authoring as well as project management), and as such is confident of their capabilities for this work. The portal also serves as a vehicle for evaluation and comment.
A conference and workshop on the topic of social networks, social software, and peer-to-peer networks as they relate to OpenContent will be held in the fall of ‘06. This workshop will bring together principals from the various OpenContent stakeholders as well as practitioners in the fields. The results of this workshop will be a more informed community on both sides of the content world, and will be described in a white paper(s) and web portal. The portal will tie in with other efforts (such as the OER portal), and serve as an aggregation point for resources in the field.