Problem
OpenContent has made great strides in providing digital content to a broad student constituency. There is still considerable work to be done in the dissemination and uptake of these materials, especially with regards to building learning communities around the assets. Leveraging expertise and capabilities in a variety of social software tools along with deep content knowledge, a number of experiments into how material can be made viral are proposed.
At this point efforts have resulted in a growing wealth of rich content in a variety of subject areas. One remaining challenge lies in looking at ways to facilitate the uptake, and perhaps more importantly, build “communities of learners.” The explosion in social software (weblogs, wikis, and BBS) use in the mainstream bodes well for educational opportunities. However most commercial solutions have met with varying levels of success, and in general suffer from their proprietary nature. Open source solutions are improving (most notably Sakai), but there is still much work to be done. From a technology standpoint these solutions are becoming robust and powerful. From a social standpoint there are still numerous challenges.
Now that there is a critical mass of content available, a survey of the current efforts needs to take place. In particular, the failures need to be discussed and understood, along with the successes. Too often reports on funded work focus almost entirely on the positive (for obvious reasons), but the more important data almost always lies in the failures. Bringing together this information from the current providers (MIT, CMU, Utah State, Rice, DeAnza) will hopefully provide insight into variations on current themes, along with different directions to pursue.
With this background information a series of small-scale experiments in marrying existing content with social network tools (weblogs, wikis, Flickr, del.ico.us, IM, etc) will be undertaken to probe “soft spots” in the community-building educational process. Collaboration and connection with the Open Education Resources (OER) portal will further expand the possible experiments. Results from this work (delivered via a conference/workshop, white papers, and portal site(s)) can lead to broader work that leverages existing infrastructure and content, thus extending and expanding the reach of Hewlett investments.