<jamess@rdiu.anglia.ac.uk> <jamess@rdiu.anglia.ac.uk> wrote:
Secondly I think the Wiki or website or whatever should be focussing as much on the idea of sharing knowledge and resources, and the philosopy of openness in education as it does on the technology of open source, or freely-distributed or whatever you want to call it software/solutions. I
I agree, but there are already a lot of places for non-software resources out there. That's not to say that we shouldn't have more, but I think it will be useful to harness the existing resources and act as a jumping-off point to other sites when appropriate. At the moment, those resource sites are islands, lacking any coherent way to travel between them (ICBW). That's a problem: I don't want to search 7 UK sites looking for lesson materials. Those sites all seem to want to help people make the most of their time, so they should be receptive to bridge-building to make things easier. The other problem with some of the resource sites is the restrictive copyright on the material. What is the point of an "All Rights Reserved" lesson plan, for example? Your students are not my students. These seem to be dying out, but we should try to persuade any that are still using total copyright restriction to relax it. Finally, some resources are only available in proprietary software formats. Where possible, it would be good to convert them to transparant formats and persuade resource sites to ask people to do that when uploading if possible. I guess that everyone on this list can see the benefits of doing that? All of the above will support the aim of bringing the "scientific method" to bear on these resources in many ways, on many levels. -- MJR http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ IM: slef@jabber.at This is my home web site. This for Jabber Messaging. How's my writing? Let me know via any of my contact details.