After reading this and your two subsequent posts, I’m an intrigued with your situation as much as I empathize with your challenge. Where do you start?

The first step may be finding comfort in the fact that you will almost certainly not hit a homerun. It sounds as if you are hoping to A) find the best learning environment B) map out the process through which it will be built C) convince the faculty that it provides the type of learning experience that is worth their time.

The discussion regarding the solution to “A” revolves around the personal preferences of the teachers who use them the most. The Drupal, ELGG, Moodle, Joomla, merry-go-round may be not unlike the platform fight; people go with what they know. The key for Moodle is a virtually flat learning curve. The ratio of time invested to tools gained for the teacher-user on Moodle rocks. Personally, I don’t want to talk to teachers about training, I want to talk about the best lessons for forums, wikis and blogs. Creating the collaborative environment is small change, the powerful learning experience that utilizes it is the payoff.

Although I am tired of hearing, “Are we going to get in-service days to be trained for this?”, I developed a qualified sympathy for these folks. The tools should be so easy to use that they shouldn’t need training. What they should be doing is lesson planning.
You are absolutely right about HTML, and my days of promoting the ease of FrontPage are over. Believe it or not, I even avoid the “T” word, all this stuff is “communication and information tools.”

For the record, our chosen environment is Moodle, which is attached to ELGG. Students can forward their work directly to an e-portfolio in ELGG.

As for the “B” of mapping out how it is created, that should not be your job any more that it is the job of the teacher to learn the coding necessary to create the forum or wiki they are going to use.

And lastly, to tackle “C”, have you considered establishing the necessity of creating a learning environment that includes collaboration and information management tools? Perhaps such a motivational approach that will not take up a great deal of your time, but you can show how the Scientific Revolution, Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment are a direct result of humans’ change in their relationship with information resulting from the printing press. If changes on that order of magnitude happened from printing, what is going to result from our current change in our relationship with information? Saying that here is preaching to the choir, but you must take that message to the masses as well.

Good luck, you are not alone
Steve

Brian, if I was the sort to foster wikis, your comment would be the first edit of the Best Practices for Teaching Teachers Wiki. Just a lot of good words there on how to approach any group with any sort of persuasive speech.

It’s worth noting here that my experience with 21st-Century Education has been largely frustrating, my reading weighted heavily on enthusiastic jargon and lightly on practical implementation. (Comments here excepted — thanks a mil, team.) Part of this is the relative infancy of the technology but whatever the case, this presentation will be as you describe it. My skepticism and manic insistence that this be worth our time makes me somehow an ideal presenter.

John, thanks for dropping such a detailed post. I find myself falling quickly out of my technological comfort level here, but I’d rather be inundated than dry.

To anybody else with something to contribute, please do. You’ve gotta see this for the sound investment it is. Whatever presentation I put together will be fully remix- and remashable. I have no interest in keeping it. Moreover, if I can work up even a fraction of the enthusiasm y’all seem to possess, I’ll ply my limited motion graphics skills towards a Machine Is Us/Ing Us / Google Master Plan – style video along the same lines.

Neat.

I will say you are on the right track with whatever you choose; a weblog-type cms is a great way to go because it releases people from organizing files. Plus they benefit from port 80 not being filtered by our district’s firewall. This means people can work on their slice of the website anywhere at anytime. When I chose to implement a weblog cms last summer, I investigated WordPress, WPMU, MT, pMachine, ExpressionEngine, MediaWiki–you name it. In the end, I went with MovableType.

I did this for three reasons:
1) Sandboxes. The idea that each person/group/department/project gets their own place to use that won’t interfere with another.
2) Flexibility. The great thing about a complete set of template tags is that you can roll out new sandboxes that are customized to meet the needs of the audience/users. This means the complexity of the sites teachers interact with can change as they become more confident in their abilities.
3) Static files. Our last solution was based on dynamic publishing. When the database went down or whatever, so did the site. It’s hard to “break” serving static files. Although there are trade-offs to this one.

For the success of our school and getting people to maintain an active web presence, number 2 was key. I’ve been able to scale the website along with the staff’s abilities just by editing template files. Our online homework customized so it is drop-dead-simple for teachers to use. It took about an hour to develop by tweaking templates.

Right now, it’s mostly teachers, administrators and office staff that publish online. Since we’ve acquired a laptop cart, I’m now attempting to get students publishing to the web for a new/different audience than their teacher. If all goes well that will come to fruition next week. (fingers crossed)

Last bit (I promise!). Last summer, WPMU wasn’t baked yet, so I reluctantly crossed it off my list. But in managing a WPMU installation outside of school, I’m glad I did. In my WPMU installation I have to worry about splogs or fake users appearing; not so in MovableType because I’m in charge of blog/user creation. Also in MovableType there are site-wide views of posts and comments so I can see what is happening across all the sandboxes at once. This is important when considering that I have a desire to see everything without visiting each blog for comments. One downside is that I can’t force a site-wide rebuild of the static files (the aforementioned trade-off).

Now I’m sure someone can come along and say well WP/WPMU can do that, too. It probably can, but I have personally found MT to be easier and faster to manage. As a math teacher that moonlights during one period as the “Tech Guy” that is important to me.

Sincerely,
John Simms