Thread:Educational Resources and Quality Learning Material (1)

(Am I in the right place?) I feel like I am tho only one here? Are people sneaking in and having a look and not posting? Am I talking to myself?

What is open authoring?
I'm not sure what you mean Wayne by an open authoring approach.

Three sort of stories about writing teaching materials by teachers/facilitators

GOOD STUFF: Is this a bunch of teachers getting together to develop materials to use in a class, maybe a bunch of physics teachers writing stuff for a Year 12 unit of work. I've done this. We had a lot of fun. It was productive and happy, based on some shared history, mutual respect.

NOT SO GOOD STUFF: In 1990 I participated in a one day workshop on ABA. We all started to work on things in groups of two, resulting in about 15 or so unfinished results. I helped collect the material in over the next month with the plan: "If you submit your work, you get a copy of all the work". Result: it was poor quality, unfinished, ALL the results being unuseable. No problem. Most eachers adapted finished off stuff for themselves. (Except me, I was more cunning). You can see how this was a wasted time and effort result.

RECENT CASE: I worked on a project (actually a moodle site and a wiki) to set up a teaching experience for a face-face workshop I was involved in. There were 19 of us from 9 countries. A few of us knew one another. This was fun, and really cool. We used Skype, a wiki as incubators, and then the final result in Moodle.

OK, even without a clear definition, I think I'm probably in favour of open authoring if it's set up right.