You probably know about Structured Blogging, a WordPress plugin for easily creating human and machine readable posts of specific kinds. (This is a screenshot of the authoring interface.) You can see the results under my book reviews tag. What I want to know is this – why haven’t we created a WordPress plugin for creating learning materials and presenting these as human and machine readable resources? Better yet, why stop with a simple authoring system like WordPress+plugin, why don’t we put something like AFLAX on the front end?
What would the authoring interface look like? What information should we capture? Drop your thoughts in the comments section and we’ll get something hacked up.
I’ve just installed the Book Review template – which I like the look of…
I’ve also been looking at the screen shots of Warwick’s Book Review postings ( http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/elab/services/webtools/blogs/faqs/entry/bookreview/ )
If you were to have a Learning Materials type posting, then I guess having quite a few drop down lists (as they have) would help increase the searchability.
One of the problems of course that will exist is the great difficulty of tagging … I’ve looked at the Reload software, ( http://www.reload.ac.uk/index.html ) which seems quite good, though you have to decide which set of metadata you are going to use.
I suspect those sort of usage problems will be far greater than the technical challenge of developing the plugin in the first place. …
You wrote, “Why haven’t we created a WordPress plugin for creating learning materials and presenting these as human and machine readable resources?”
Because it’s easier to -talk- about why people are doing it, or not doing it, or debate definitions, or IP, or DRM, or which learning theory the pedagogical approach is based on, or blah, blah, blah…than it is to simply do it.
Just do it.