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This page is for posting ideas/reviews/notes regarding online communities - intened to be used by core SRI team as we develop the L2TD space. (this page an any associated children are restricted to core SRI Trails team members.)
Communities worth looking at:
Merlot http://www.merlot.org/Home.po
- Online teaching and learning resource
- Peer reviewed with some community
- OERL, PALS, and TappedIn are all listed in Merlot. :
SMETE Digital Library http://www.smete.org/smete/
Shodor Foundataion http://www.shodor.org
- Has a K-12 focus, so might not be directly interesting
- Has a focus on objects - a repository of sorts - an less on community
As we explore these other communities, we need to determine what role they will play in our project. Will we use Merlot, the SMETE Digital Library, Shodor Foundation, and others as a way to spread the word about our community?
In addition to exploring the other communities, we need to define what we want to do in our Online Community. I am posing some questions, based on our previous two discussions and hope that Anders and Chris will help answer them here so that we have the questions and answers in a shared place.
Will we have a workspace like Confluence available on the TRAILS web site for people outside of SRI and the TRAILS project to work e.g., share ideas and document?
Do we imagine that people will discuss ideas or post documents more? What will be more valuable? (Question for SIGCSE conference attendees. I'm going to start another page where we can discuss what we will be taking to the SIGCSE conference.)
Will we have any process for accepting documents or will all documents be accepted? (Documents such as syllabi, course project ideas).
How open will the community be? We will most likely be targeting CS Professors, but can graduate students and undergraduates join?
Will they have full membership?
Will there be different levels of status in the online community? The more levels in a community, the more a community manager has to do to organize and enforce things.
More soon, but feel free to start filling in some answers.
Literature review: Check in with Judy regarding online learning communities. Deb has Roy Pea's reader which might be a good resource. Mark - ACM has lots on capstone courses, but need to be more specific on group projects. Take a look at informalscience.org. Their NSF grant is running out - they want to create a sustainable online community. They have been collecting information, data, etc - might be worth taking a look at. Deb says this is a good source - they are trying to do what we want to do.
Posted by From the Partners Meeting Feb 2006
Demo and Feedback on the L2TD confluence site
Shelly - have a 3-time a year lecture series.
Judi - podcasts are easy
Interaction Design (book) - has an online website. Chris Hoadley pointed it out. Well designed, but not well maintained.
Do we have to have the blogging piece turned on?
It should be an interactive website, not necessarily a community site.
We need to have someone that can do minimal monitoring over a long period of time.
Important to keep connection to book.
Gorp should show up here too? What about the public Trails website? Chris H likes the idea of keeping the public website going - it serves a good purpose outside of the book, like GORP, student resources.
Chris D - maybe we have a GORP website and the L2TD site. The Trails project is going away - do we want to keep it going even though we won't be supporting it?
Link it off of the ISLS website. Send Chris Quintana an email
Chris - August release date.
For SIGCSE - need to set up guest passwords right then and there, get an email from them, then send them a real login later
Alex - the SIGCSE folks will want to see real stuff. The website is kind of hiding this. They want to see real examples
Chris H - maybe show people the Trails website right now.
Alex - folks need to see the concrete stuff. Maybe links to applets.
Is the book going to be the centerpiece of the website? If so, the book is incomplete, so the site looks incomplete.
Chris D - maybe the model for our site is the Norman-Neilson alertbox site. Good resources, but references to books, workshops. We are something more than a book site, but we are not a full community site. Useit.com! A fresh content, newsletter type site. Maybe not the best model.
Chris D - we need to rethink our metaphor
Judi - we are resources plus a few extra features. We have some level of login - but with open read access. Login required for posting, commenting. Over the next year we will add content, moderate, get bugs worked out and content up.
Chris D - not sure if this site will be the place to go for book discussion, other book-related features. Not sure what this will look like - lots of details.
Chris H - Very occasional, one-shot usage model we might consider too (another scenario). Think the Interaction Design book
Shelly - Great books: The Social Life of Information, The Design of Everyday Things (although the design of the book itself is not that great)
Take a look at euro-cscl.org
Some things we need to be thinking about:
What will folks be getting when they come to our site? Get resources? Asynchonous?
Talk to folks at Merlot: this is the stuff that we have, where would it go? What gets contributed to Merlot - a link to our site and/or stuff from our site like projects, computer programs? Can we have different things reviewed? Maybe just start with our whole site being listed, but then try to individually post "gems" from our site.
We are thinking that the computer science professor is the audience. We are not a site for teachers per se.
Learning Object Repositories - these have failed, we don't want to be one of these (nor fail!)
National Library of Original xxx - chris mentioned this as a resource to look at.
How many people do we want to have involved in our site? If we had on the order of 100, would this be successful? ("yes" according to Chris)
It might be a bit ambitious to assume that our site will be a space that instructors will bookmark. It will probably be more the case where an instructor is in a panic and needs something fast. Folks dropping in very occasionally, very fast, with a targeted need. This scenario is one that we should be looking at.