Curricula Sharing
Community-based curriculum development
As the laptop project will roll out to large groups of people at once, an effective mechanism for collaborative curriculum sharing and development will prove indispensible.
Design Challenges
Sharing data among distinct archives
At this time, several teams are engaged with the creation of curriculum sharing websites. This multi-faceted approach should be encouraged as each site will be able to focus on a different subset of user needs, bringing sharing and collaboration behavior to the largest possible number of educators. However, in order to maintain the value of this situation, we need a flexible system for sharing data from multiple archives.
One such solution may be found in the "sample pool" API being developed by the ccHost project. This has allowed media sharing between Archive.org and ccMixter.
We will also need a way to sync up the data coming from communities with less reliable access to the Internet.
Evaluation
Among the challenges in creating a useful system for curriculum sharing is the design of an evaluation tool. The best solution will balance the limited time of an educator with the need for meaningful data.
There is an on-going conversation happening on the TeachForward discussion list titled The Evaluation Element.