Outside Examples
From Oneville Wiki
Comparison to Existing 'Network' Attempts
- DO SUCH NETWORKS ALREADY EXIST? MARK AND SETH, THIS IS WHERE I NEED YOU. I HAVE THIS (edited slightly) FROM THE FORD LANGUAGE. THINK IT'S TRUE?
Existing web hubs, like the “What Works Clearinghouse” or “Edutopia,” house useful but undistilled knowledge, and they are hard for the public to search and easily use; most sites also allow for no public input into defining or naming “what works” in local places. While the Network will link the public to these existing knowledge “hubs,” it will focus on linking the public to examples that both researchers and the public find particularly useful for increasing young people’s opportunities to learn.
Review of other networks
School Victories
Mark's review
Our review: This site may be useful but it isn't getting much use and doesn't have many catalytic functions designed in. Doesn't help groups join forces to pool resources around a common nationwide event day.
It's not very inspired or imaginative. The "feel" and personality are more institutional than lively warm community in nature. I don't think, as a media specialist, that this site is designed to spark interest and cross-cutting partnership. It's mostly listing driven. Plus it seems text-driven rather than graphically driven; more Internet-past than Internet-present or future. It would be interesting to compare a search here to a search in the standard google window or in the edutopia site.
Based on the sparseness of entries, I'm guessing the site is not actively scraping other sites and aggregating and tagging that info here. Nor are there tools of emergent awareness: a tag cloud, for example, of entries and activities and group missions.
Taxonomy
While School Victories tries to segment the audience of the site via the right curricula (source group, target group, group/class size, geographic location and others), they fail to allow for emergent grouping (folksonomy) and focused data analysis.
- Example
- Group size ranges = 1-10, 11-25, 26-50, 51-100, 100+.
This is insufficient for focused analysis of the resulting data. Compare two similar cases; (A) had 27 students, and (B) 47 students. (A) was successful but (B) was not. This data entered into the School Victories system, the difference in group size would not be present in the data as both would choose '26-50'.
This problem could be avoided by allowing for entry of data with limited restrictions. In this case, entering any integer number would allow for far richer data analysis.
Question of geographic scope
Another manner in which an ideal network would differ is in scope of the project. While this project makes appeals to groups outside of PA (by allowing members from all US states), there are more affordances for PA projects than outside. If non PA projects do participate, they enter into the system on unfair footing.
Incentives
The stated appeal of the SV site is viability for submitters/participants. This incentive is desirable to some, but there are missed opportunities for other incentives to participate.
Other incentives could include:
- site rewards
- Reward users with progress bars and successive site kudos when they accomplish certain goals in documenting their activities.
- social esteem among peers
- Allow for positive commenting and discussion around good activities, or 'like' buttons that allow peers to express positive esteem for projects without criticism. 'Liked' projects could rise to extra visibility.
Using analog methods in an online space
In the SV calender, users are requested to email a site maintainer to add content to the group calendar. This doesn't take advantage of communication technologies in several ways, there are numerous ways of automatically collecting (scraping) calendar information, Gmail provides a good examples of this. And second, the correctly efficient technological solution involves a form on the website for date-organized information. Lastly, a human bottleneck suggests authority on the individual's part to filter calendar content. This is a traditional hierarchal and centralized method of organization, with no community participation or discussion.
Publicity
The ideal network would be publicized online to teachers and educators that already engage in online spaces. The goal would be to encourage the spread of positive stories (School Victories), and to increase adoption/submissions.
Via a cursory search of social media and search engines little evidence of a social media campaign
- http://twitter.com/#search?q="school%20victories"
Edutopia
Edutopia is a traditional publishing system for collecting and disseminating information about 'what works' in education. Their site isn't substantially different than that of a print magazine. The only element that they make use of in the online space is that of transmission. Consensus generation, authorship, research, data analysis and even choice of author happen backstage and we consumers only view the final product of this work.
flatclassroom
Flatclassroom is an example of a project that would submit information to an ideal network. I see no indications that is a storehouse for more than one approach to education, even if there have been multiple examples of their recipe applied many times.