I will add my tiny two cents worth: what you are doing is building a community of practice. You are using email, newsgroups, and have considered wikis and blogs. In today's Web 2.0 world, interactivity is paramount for all involved. The opportunity to incorporate multimedia is also needed. To build your Ed Tech Museum, you have given many examples....build out of the box. This is a new house for a new kind of learner.
Respectfully submitted,
BJ Berquist
Associate Educator, Tapped In
bjb@tappedin.org
I do hope you're right about building a community of practice. One of the things we've found in our research with instructional designers is that there is a profound sense of "local" community, but not much of a connection or identification with a larger, more distributed community.
Okay... let's break the walls of the box.
Okay... let's break the walls of the box.
Actually I think SCoPE has been a larger community for many of us that are regular participants. Many of us went from here to Facebook (before I was kicked off 
) and Linkedin.
) and Linkedin.
I took the liberty of splitting off BJ's observations about how important "interactivity" is for all involved. She is encouraging us to think of this project as "a new house for a new kind of learner" -- possibly a community of practice? Richard then challenges us to "break the walls of the box"!
Perhaps we have been taking the museum metaphor to extremes: venues, exhibits, curators, centrally organized...
How can we make this living history of educational technology a lively, interactive, and sustainable resource? What are the many ways we can develop, contribute, organize, and discuss content?
Perhaps we have been taking the museum metaphor to extremes: venues, exhibits, curators, centrally organized...
How can we make this living history of educational technology a lively, interactive, and sustainable resource? What are the many ways we can develop, contribute, organize, and discuss content?
Sylvia:
Two recent emails seem to be leading us in a similar direction...and perhaps becasue I have my curriculum hat on so firmly today....I wonder if we should be starting from the end and working backwards on this project.
- What's the final outcome?
- Who is the target audience?
- how will we assess whether or not we have met the outcome?
- how will we assess whether or not we have met audience needs?
I think when the fundamentals are determined, we can then determine how best to knock down the box.
Cheers, Chris
It's good to have someone with a curriculum hat on firmly! Let's see if we can gather some points that characterize the final outcome:
The "Virtual Museum" will:
And as usual one thing leads to another. I wanted to add something about quality but wasn't sure how to word it. How do we deal with quality?
The "Virtual Museum" will:
- constantly grow and change
- continue to create collaborative opportunities
- provoke discussion
- be something anyone can contribute to
- be of value to the general public
- be used as a curriculum resource
- be used in curriculum projects
- be freely available
- have an fun entertainment factor
- showcase major as well as lesser known events, innovations, and well known people in history
- build on existing resources
- be easy to use and contribute to
And as usual one thing leads to another. I wanted to add something about quality but wasn't sure how to word it. How do we deal with quality?
Sylvia:
One item to add to the virtual museum list:
- users have to be able to easily/quickly locate the resource.
Sylvia, your question about quality is particularly relevant to me right now because I'm helping pull together an informal learning objects repository (LOR). As this is a small, informal (and unofficial) repository, there's no fancy design or database. Right now, to encourage instructors to participate and contribute material, there's no quality control/selection criteria. However, I anticipate that before too long we'll be looking at having to impose some sort of quality control on the objects.
So, I'm hoping to be the beneficiary of this particular conversation.
As I have been giving some thought to quality control, and in case my musing are of any use to this conversation, ......
- Would some sort of self-assessment check list work?
Items might include check boxes for
- copyright clearance,
- software used,
- identification of the resource,
- brief explanation of the items value
- My next suggestion would be incredibly time consuming, but validation of an object might come from some sort of peer/juried review.
Cheers, Chris
We might also want to ask ourselves:
What are the learning goals for this musuem?
What kind of resource could this become?
What purpose could it serve in the context of other similar resources? Could we build alliances with them?
What would differentiate it from others? The way it behaves and build its relationships -and/or- the way it presents its content - and/or- the way it embeds itself into other systems. More like these kinds of differentiations.
What are the learning goals for this musuem?
What kind of resource could this become?
What purpose could it serve in the context of other similar resources? Could we build alliances with them?
What would differentiate it from others? The way it behaves and build its relationships -and/or- the way it presents its content - and/or- the way it embeds itself into other systems. More like these kinds of differentiations.
This is something that came up several times with my students too, when we started to discuss the nature of the museum. I think we should start a discussion thread that deals with:
1. purpose(s) of the collection
2. audiences for the collection
I also like your notion of how we tie it into other similar initiatives, and how we differentiate it in a way that makes sense.
Thanks, Colby!
1. purpose(s) of the collection
2. audiences for the collection
I also like your notion of how we tie it into other similar initiatives, and how we differentiate it in a way that makes sense.
Thanks, Colby!
Oh the benefits of working in different time zones! Richard offered some good suggestions for moving this forward. We have a start on the "audiences for the collection" discussion thread here. While we were sleeping Colby from Amsterdam has also nicely wrapped the question about purpose around the audience topic in that thread:
What purpose could we serve for different profiled groups?