Software Platform Ideas for Paragogy.net

Ideal software for paragogy.net? Re-mix of OER Bit, Khan Academy and the Nethernet

At the time of this writing, paragogy.net is built off of Mediawiki, the popular wiki software used on Wikipedia. It is perfect for the current moment as it tracks all the new writings Joe and I do, as well as providing a slick internal website to connect everything together.

Currently its only open to edits from Joe and I. At some point we may allow other peers to edit, although part of me would prefer to not, allowing the wiki to be an ongoing account of our research. Everything is licensed CC0 anyway, so peers could take what's here and move it to their own or a public mediawiki install whenever they please.

What I would like, though, is to develop a seperate software designed to let users learn paragogically. I envision a re-mix of the University of Michigan's OER Bit (OERB), Gamelayers's Nethernet (Nnet) and the Khan Academy learning platform (KA). The overarching framework would be Nnet, a firefox plug-in that is not on all the time, but which users can flip on when they want to “learn”. It keeps track of a user's progress around the internet, and allows them to create missions or other web activities for peers to complete. Thus, Nnet would track all their users time and history as they browse the web, allowing them to tack notes for themselves or others on a give web page.

The next component OERB would be the home of the paragogy.net repository of OER. It is a slick modification for Drupal making our internal OER easily findable, viewable and usable with clear indications of copyright licensing and related concerns. This would also need an easy way for users to upload their own, new OER.

Finally, the “learner profile” would be built off the Khan Academy software as a place for learners to track and display (if they chose) their education with the world. It would intertwine seamlessly with Nnet tracking their web history, plus missions completed and created. Similarly it would highlight how they have been interacting with OERB, whether it be what percentage they watched of a video lecture, what E-books they have downloaded and/or what they have uploaded. There would also be some peer ranking system (including badges earned and made), where their skill in paragogical learning is assessed.

Beyond those elements etherpad should also be installed and within the paragogy.net domain all user contributions to individual etherpads should be noted and tracked. Etherpads are the best way I've found thus far to work collaboratively online, the only frustrating part being contributions are often lost or sorta floating out there in the internet, disconnected from a larger body of work.

Furthermore within community norms I would like there to be definitive goals: i.e. we are going to assemble an Accounting textbook for peers to learn from by this specific date, and then deliver a polished, finished product with an ISBN and have it be something someone who'd never heard of paragogy.net could use, learn from and respect. Obviously free versions of the books or whatever would be available, ideally there would also be an option for people to buy a print textbook as a way to fund our activities.

The big idea would be to track all the paragogical learning a user does online as a way for them to see what they have done, and to get as many analytics as possible about their learning to analyze. Once the data reached a suitable threshold, it would hopefully yield measurable insights into how peers learn together and how they do it well.