Enjoyed an excellent chat with Ian Grove-Stephensen of Chalkface (a company which publishes online courses, lesson plans etc.) over Jabber today (using psi, which I’m swinging towards, explain more soon). All sorts of stuff came up but what particularly resonated for me was this age old approach of storing and sharing plans / materials and alike.
One of the first things I ever did with education technology was to try and construct on an internal directory a hyperlinked selection of Word .docs that the teachers where I was working could open (via the index.doc :o), review, add to and save for interesting websites / web lesson plans / ideas about how to use them in a class. Of course now I’d just set up a wiki, but I didn’t know that then….
So, not thinking about putting Ian out of business, but I’m sure that people will have attempted a kind of open source lesson-plan / resource wiki kind of thing, but they can’t have been that successful because otherwise, I guess, I’d know about. Am I right? Do you reckon there’s wikipedia-esque potential for this kind of work?
I tried, a bit back, to publish a chunk of lesson plans through the old blog but that kinda ran out of steam. Perhaps plans could be tracked back, or aggregated rather than wikid?
I know that most people cringe at plans but for me when I was starting out teaching stuff like Rinvolucri’s Grammar Games and Penny Ur stuff was absolutely invaluable. I’d take their plans and ideas and play with them , reshape them to fit the class, mix them up etc. etc. I would have been in a heck of a mess without them.
I don’t think you’ll put me out of business just yet (my reasons here, if interested) but that doesn’t mean your wiki/aggregator idea is without merit. In fact, look for some rather interesting initiatives from Chalkface in the next few months ;-)