elearning for music

What is so good about the ning community Classroom 2.0?

I joined a few weeks ago and have found the discussions fascinating and the interface tres cool.  Yet in my quest to find web 2.0 music educators I’m still drawing a blank.
The ning  interface is my ideal; it’s easy to set up and smoothly integrates the key features of blogging, images, video and audio – a great personal space!  That’s apart from the networking / collaboration / discussion features.
But it’s the attitude in their that makes it such a great ’staff room’ or social space or whatever it is.  There’s no whinging (though there is honesty about challenges) and talking about learning technoloqies is de rigeur, whereas in one’s own institution it might be seen as a bit of a sideline and something that ‘old nerdy features’ (that’s me at my place!) bangs on about!
A ning space would make a great VLE – indeed I saw a comment that one teacher was going to run a course from a ning page.  Perhaps blog facilities will move this way, as the integration of media becomes more important.  Looking at ning compared with moodle I realise how many features I miss for my learners – the personal page in particular, with upload features of all media for all users.
The community was set up by Steve Hargadon and I sure hope it’s a business model that is paying off for him as he’s put an enormous effort into it!
This has made me think more carefully about some sort of business model for the musicbridge project I’m hoping to get involved with.  User generated content is a key feature – potentially useful resources are no longer enough.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.