Collaborative Lesson Planning

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• What are some good methods and techniques to encourage peer collaboration?
  • Make it easy. The best example of this is Wikipedia. The reason it has been so wildly succesful is that it is extremely easy for people to make it better. The same idea is necessary for improving Open Educational Resources, but it hasn't yet found its medium.
  • Make it rewarding. Reward people for their contributions to the community by acknowledging their efforts and spotlighting a variety of contributors as well as types of contribution.
  • Make it fun. Offer contests, challenges, and incentives such as points to keep creative energies flowing.
  • Make it social. Facilitate the formation of organic groups so that community members con congregate around ideas, concepts, activities, and other phenomena.
  • Keep it flexible. Follow the gestalt concept that "the sum is different than the whole" to allow new and novel approaches to emerge out of the process.
  • It's not totally thought through yet but the idea of "paragogy" is something I will try to use in the future: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Arided/Paragogy -- the idea here is to stay aware of how the learning context facilitates learner participation in shaping the learning context! (Or blocks it it some cases.)  Ideas that flow from context to context seem to help.
  • One idea derived from the reflections on "paragogy" is to  think about the participants of a course as all being co-facilitators --  if participants look to the facilitator as if that person is the  "teacher" they will wait for instructions.  If they know they have to lead themselves, might they rise to the challenge more? 
  • A related idea would be to not have courses run unless enough people had signed up and expressed a willingness to commit at a given level of commitment  (via a social contract?)
  • Individual emails from the facilitator seem to have helped get people engage with this course, leading to peer interactions later -- but by itself they aren't enough, because they are not recorded within the course site and cannot be used/learned from by others later (one of the goals of p2pu).
  • See http://ideastoinspire.co.uk/primarypad.htm (c/o John McLear)

• What are examples of online communities that promote collaboration on, peer review, and reuse of educational resources?
  • Connexions - Online community of educators creating and re-contextualizing Open Educational Resources.
  • Community College Open Textbook Collaborative - Peer reviewed college textbooks, licensed for re-use.
  • CK-12 Foundation FlexBooks - Collaborative textbook platform that encourages reuse, remixing, and the creation of custom textbooks by combining multiple existing resources.
  • Wikiversity - A community dedicated to learning and teaching on any subject. Its a young un-organized community with a lot of freedom for new explorations, but not yet a formalized system for creating quality resources.
  • Creative Commons Open Educational Resources (OER) Wiki - Attempt from Creative Commons to create a central point for the OER community.
  • Peer 2 Peer University?  I think yes, but a lot of the discussions seem to happen mainly between facilitators and old hands in the mailing lists, and I'd like to see some more traces of this conversation for others to get involved (if that makes sense).  I'd also like to see more sharing of ideas across classes.  (E.g. my own Aunt is teaching a class on "changing consciousness" and I'm not totally sure what they're up to!)
  • Twitter - Although not a direct location for editing/collaborating on lesson plans, with 140 characters and the ability to post links to other websites it can be a great tool for connecting with others around the world and opening up those lines of communications.  (C Huckeba)

• Possible audiences for these ideas
  • p2pu people
  • wikiversity people
  • google search for "open educational resources" +"journal" (I think there's one based here at Open University UK...) ... http://tinyurl.com/23n78gu