Authoring

I recently challenged students in one of my classes to build some educational materials primarily from existing, openly licensed materials. The results are in and the work is crazy / excellent / inspiring: Learn about how to use wikis and blogs in education at wikiblogedu.org. (Don’t forget to pick up a Rick Noblenski t-shirt afterwards). Learn how to prepare for and carry off an effective job interview at Interviewing Basics. Learn how to find or make clean water after a natural disaster at the Open Water Project. ...

Too hard to figure out how to make this all run inside the blog at the end of the day… Hop over to http://opencontent.org/tagging-as-authoring/ for some thoughts on making it drop dead simple to collect, reuse, and contextualize existing resources, and find out when tagging can be authoring. Brian, thanks for teaching me to say “small pieces loosely joined.” :)

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? ...