The head of the nail: telling and listening to stories is fun.

I really like it when people blog about what students say, or potentially say, and how they respond. I find that I’ve learned and shared a lot about classroom practice both online and particularly in person by repeating or inventing dialogue between students and teacher. That makes it real enough that I can imagine doing it (or imagine someone doing it) and then feel like it’s possible to try something new.

(I’ll post more about the Drupal side of things on your website, by the way — thanks. Gotta love how Drupal makes it possible to build a site like yours in one night! ;)

As for getting people to share: I think altruism is only one factor. There is also a “quid pro quo” deal where if you are someone who is generous about sharing your lessons, other people will be more likely to help you out when YOU’RE in need. Plus if you share a lot, you gain a reputation in the community, respect from your peers, fame, fortune, etc ;) It does happen in real life — teachers share things informally all the time — so I think it CAN happen online if the right tools are in place to make it easy and intuitive. And there are a lot of people out there working on this (heck, even Yahoo is trying, although I don’t get the impression that they’re going to come up with the magic solution). In my case, I have a little bit of funding and some time to work on this, so I’m going to do what I can, and we’ll see what happens ;)

just wanted to end by saying that teachers will put in extra time if it makes their own practice better. if there’s no reciprocation or any other kind of benefit to the person doing the sharing, they’re going to stop sharing as frequently.

my two bits.

Why are there not more resources out there? Because it takes TIME.

Druin is spot on, why do something simply for altruisim, for the betterment of our profession? It’s not about the technical capabilities of the teacher / website. No matter how “fun” it is to share your stuff, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s going to mean an extra session at the coffee shop.

However, if I may end with a remix of my own, I’d like to focus the conversation back on something you wrote earlier:

>>
Make lesson sharing part of your teaching/learning cycle. For me, I don’t feel like I can call a lesson a success, or close the book on it, if I haven’t mashed through it here. Simply start.

Also, @ David Rothstein, if you are using Drupal as a base, I’d be glad to talk through any details — I’m a fan of this Drupal of which you speak :)

As you can probably tell, the resource we are all talking about is something we are committed to helping to build, and are willing to both put some time (as other projects allow) and some hosting (as we already have a hosting infrastructure) behind what we say — the basic building blocks are in place.

Here is the text of my blog post, and all feedback is welcome, either here or on the OA blog — I’ll be looking in both places

———text of blog post——-
I’m writing these ideas out quickly — there are sure to be holes in this, and gaps in this reasoning — please point them out in the comments.

Users working with online lessons will generally fall into at least one of the following categories:

People searching for lesson ideas (probably the majority)

People already creating content on their own blogs (a growing number of folks, but still a very small percentage, compared to people in category 1, or even teacher-bloggers)

People looking for a place to create content (people who want to create blogs, etc — I have no idea how many people fall into this category, but I’d imagine that if people, particularly younger teachers, saw the benefit they would have some amazing things to contribute)

People who will find lessons on another site, edit/revise those lessons for use in their class, and republish the updated content on their own site

People who will edit/revise content on someone else’s site (ie, wiki-style) — the majority of these people would probably be very committed to the ideals of Open Educational Resources (OERs), have part of their professional responsibilities include curriculum development, or have some other type of immediate personal connection to a learning community. These people would probably be the ones to make the greatest use of any social networking features within the site

Produce –> Share –> Reuse –> Remix — where does influence fit in? The influence of shared lessons, and the role that influence can have in helping a teacher develop and revise their existing materials, should not be overlooked.

Most working teachers do not have the time to collaborate online with other teachers to create freely available resources. Most of the teachers I talk to barely have time to engage in that type of collaboration within their own schools, let alone within an online/social networking context. Most teachers, even the ones currently blogging their lessons, do not have the free time to join another site and learn another system, even if there are long-term benefits. Teacher time needs to be respected, which is why any system that mandates a teacher use a new tool to participate will lose a good number of potential contributors due to that barrier to entry.

Here is what I propose — and what I have partially built, here: http://threeclicks.org/lessons

A site that aggregates lessons already being published online. This way, any teacher currently blogging lessons doesn’t need to change a single thing about how they work. If they want to make it easier, they can choose to tag any lessons with a unique keyword, like “lesson” — this would allow us (in most cases, anyways) to aggregate posts in that specific keyword.

All imported lessons are full-text searchable, and, when possible, tagged with keywords that describe the lessons

Organize the lessons by content area

Possibly, add in rating mechanisms to allow site members to rate content

All posts imported into the site can be printed via a print-friendly page, and exported via rss.

As a further development, possibly create a mechanism where site users could clone and revise imported content, or create new lessons to be published within the site. This lesson development would leverage content already created and imported into the site, or could be used by interested people to develop learning resources from scratch. For this type of curricular planning, we could incorporate wiki-type functionality.

As noted by David Rothstein here, we could incorporate a “request a lesson” feature

What is missing? Please add any necessary details/suggestions in the comments.

I did like David’s point #3. I think that’s a much missed feature.

It seems you’ve got two groups (in your terms)- the non-web-savvy who are less likely to put content up and the web-savvy who are putting stuff up already but probably on their own sites. Motivating the first and convincing the second to shift will be hard. If you could create a way to allow you to pull in already published content and then add/annotate/expand it I think that’d make things far easier.

I do feel like most attempts to consolidate things fail as it’s far trickier than it seems. I’d really look into the community building side of things. That’s what seems to make/break social sites like these.

Tom