For my Educational Software Project Design class I'm pairing up with Rob Lucas to help him continue his work toward developing a kind of "Wikipedia for Lesson Plans". The idea is to outline the features of an educator collaboration community that would allow teachers to share and augment lesson plan ideas.
We'll have to back up feature and design decisions with appropriate research. Rob has already posted an early demo of this idea at teacherslounge.editme.com.
The vision for a community environment like this might include features along the lines of:
- Profiling that creates for the user an authentic sense of identity in the community a la Friendster or Facebook.
- The ability to post and search for Lesson Plans.
- The ability to tag entries a la de.licio.us and Flickr and rate items a la Amazon.
- A collaborative development environment that allows educators to jointly develop or edit Lesson Plans. Elements of this might include asynchronous discussion boards a la Yahoo Groups, synchronous chat rooms, and shared development space where collaborators can edit/augment/improve posted Lesson Plans as with Wikis. Later-stage features might also include mechanisms to facilitate actual physical meetings between members a la Meetup.
Rob has been thinking about this stuff for some time and clearly I'll be learning alot working with him. You'll find me re-posting lots of his ideas and sources here :)
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