The problem of sharing designs

Gráinne Conole
10:53am 8 July 2009

Here is a summary of some of the discusions at the Design Bash, 8th July 09 on solutions for sharing learning and teaching ideas

• There are three levels of sharing: Simple description, generic design and specific instantiation
• How do we make connection between expert design community and generic learning and teaching community?
• James Daziel described what works and what doesnt work so well in the LAMS community. Most successful is the technical forums community (postings every day etc), there is also a repository of LAMS sequences ca. 440 and ca. 12000 downloads, however there isn't  a detailed level of commenting on them much, and not much evidence of sharing and repurposing, what hasn’t taken off perhaps as well are the generic educational community for discussing issues.
• One idea is to put the LAMS Activity Planner  on its own hosted site and create quick design, quick runtime and enable them to share easily, want a embed function for LAMS – slideshare type behaviour for LAMS sequences
• Martin Weller suggested that successful web 2.0 apps are some argue for things that people are already doing – like sharing pictures, but he wasnt sure this is always the case – Google maps for learning – here is a really good set of things/route through
• Activity Planner is attempt to step you through a process, downside is that it takes time to walk through
• What’s the benefit to me to share a sequence? I put up presentations in slideshare to get wider audience and so I can embed in my blog
• Do people want to discuss designs enough?
• Juliette Culver mentioned the stack overflow site – interesting the way it works, very addictive!
• Is it an egotistical (like blogs) or altruistic (like the open source community)?
• How do we let people see LAMS stuff within Cloudworks?
• How do we suck things in automatically?
• How do we make the LAMS community, the DPD and Cloudworks work together?
• What we need is an instant runtime embed for designs?
• How do we do the embed: Screen shot the image as a static picture, click on it, it would load a learning environment or a LAMS authoring environment,
• Could be that the embed design movie is not editing…
• Could we look to writing up an API to describe how you could show link to other systems; if you want yours stuff to go in Cloudworks here is how to do it

Alex Hardman
11:34am 8 July 2009

Can we apply some agile design principles to this issue and write some use cases for a potential system?

I'd probably start with the problem of a teacher/ designer (TD) wanting to create a new course. What do they need to do? Below isn't meant to be a definitive list more a starter for 10 :)

Problem scenario: Teacher/Designer wants to create a new learning design

• Use case 1: TD Sets up work space for new design
• Use case 2: TD searches for resources related to subject (perhaps in an OER repository)
• Use case 3: TD adds (OER) resources into workspace
• Use case 4 TD uploads own resources to repository and adds to design
• Use case 5: TD searches for designs (search could be based on:
  
  • Designs with a similar subject area
  • Design that have also used the OER's collected in this design
  • Designs created by friends/ followers/ collaborators
  • Designs that employ certain patterns
  • Designs that have a high community rating
• Use case 6: TD looks at discussions that relate to designs found and appraises their value
• Use case 7: TD inserts elements of other designs that suit their style
• Use case 8 TD: inserts their own elements into design and creates a representation of the learning journey (can click on pattern library help wiki for inspiration??)
• Use case 9: TD publishes design to the design library, socialises that deisgn with friends/followers/collaborators
• Use case 10: TD can embed disign into own blog/ site etc

etc etc ad infinitum :)

Juliette Culver
4:39pm 8 July 2009

@Alex Interesting idea to make everything centre around the space for a new design. I think there are various sites doing some of these use cases but certainly not all of them. Use Case 6 is the one that grabs my attention, because I don't think there really is very much discussion related to designs at the moment and it's not obvious to me how you encourage the generation of discussion.