[IAEP] RFC: Supporting olpc-ish Deployments - Draft 1

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Tony Anderson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Actually the model for the website/wiki already exists. It is DART at
> the Bering Straits School District. They have married mediawiki with
> their own software to provide a killer tool. The standards, lesson
> plans, etc. are in a wiki. DART maintains a data base which allows
> teachers to see/record the status of each of their students in each area
> of each subject/strand.
>
> Having the curriculum standards in a wiki makes it trivial for each
> deployment to set that up for their own requirements cross linked to
> anything relevant.
>
> Tony
>
> Berry wrote:
>
> >From Michael's questions:
>
> > > * Is there anything we could spend our time on which would yield a
> > > greater
> > > return on investment?
>
> The most helpful thing I can think of right now would be a
> special-purpose website/wiki only for curricula. Each curriculum should
> map to a course in moodle.sugarlabs.org. We need to start the process of
> mapping standard curricula to the open-source resources (quizzes,
> readings, activities) that are available in some sort of intelligible
> order. Then an interested developer or educator could start plugging in
> the holes.
>
> Really, all is needed is some kind of special-purpose wiki mapped to
> moodle. No special software. The hard and incredibly *unsexy* work is
> uploading the n curricula from X states/countries and mapping it to
> sequenced materials. We can talk about quality, pedagogy ad infinitum
> but the vast majority of teachers don't have a starting point to even
> provide mediocre education beyond what they are currently provided by
> their own governments.

This is *exactly right*.

I've hoped to have more time to devote to this effort, but my day job has 
be stretched pretty thin.  But this is exactly where we need to go.

--g

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