So we’ve been taking a good look at Q&A 2.0, or more like Q&A 2.1, and I’m really please to see that’s it’s a lively area of development on the web at the moment, with our friends at Aardvark, Hunch doing some really interesting things. As is so often the case, simple problems are sometimes the hardest to solve and we’ve been really grafting hard to produce something that’s as simple to use and robust as possible. Usability is everything. We’re more than interested to talk and share with anyone in the field, so feel free to get in touch. As usual, our starting point is education, tutors and tutoring, but we don’t expect it to end there.

Academic Earth (these guys certainly like the grand names!) is a startup coming out of the US that pulls together open courseware from  a number of top universities and displays them according to topic with the option to comment and converse around the videos.

So far so good, however Academic Earth is a business and as such has commercial aims for its site which is pretty firmly against the Creative Commons terms that some (not all) of these videos have been released under and some of the institutions involved are unlikely to sit back and allow their content to be reused in this manner.

This is likely to be an interesting test case as I think alot of people are eyeing the increasingly high quality education audio and video content coming out of universities like MIT, Stanford, the Open University etc and wondering how they can spin a money making opportunity out of this increased open attitude.

It would be a pity if these academics started to retreat into their ivory towers if they felt their content was being misused but it also opens up the possibility of a consortium of universities with strong open access models pooling their resources and building their own web based repository of content with community elements.  That would likely shake this space up quite considerably.

To be fair to the team at Academic Earth they seem fully aware of the tightrope they are walking and are trying to work with the institutions so as not to step on anyones toes while still retaining a business model.  I think it will be quite the achievement if they pull this off!

The growth of the open learning is undoubted (with the UKs own Open University a leading player with initiatives like OpenLearn and its iTunesU content) but despite the claims in the article I believe peer-to-peer learning remains unproven in many ways (though I do believe it is a useful concept and one that will only become more popular over time) and the reliance of a mish-mash of retired professors, MA level students and volunteers as a kind of virtual faculty does not sound hugely thought out as yet (though there is probably a workable solution in there somewhere) .

Mr Resef does have a history of running successful education themed web businesses, including his current start-up Cramster.com an online homework support network, so he well placed to have the skills and contacts to make this happen.

I’ll be watching this one closely as its an idea I’m really interested in and I think there is a business to be built around the rise in open education that also widens access to higher education, I’m just not quite sure this is it yet.

Spore has been gestating for several years, Will Wright the creator first talked publicly about at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. You can watch a 35min video of his talk on YouTube, below.

So what does all of this have to do with e-learning? Well nothing directly, but it was announced while I was working on Ecolibrium with Futurelab. Ecolibrium was always designed first and foremost as a tool to learn about evolution, the dynamics of predator–prey populations and systems thinking. When I first heard about Spore I thought that it would be great to leverage it’s undoubted popularity by making Ecolibrium a place where Spore creatures could be left to run wild.

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

Although a US-based project, they do say: This is an international project, and we will be working with open educational sites and resources from around the world. They are part of the wider Open Educational resources Initiative, which also seems to include the Open University’s OpenLearn initiative.

Looking around the internet at what is available online there are an increasing number of resources being made available.

Most notably:

• Teacher-based sites. There is an excellent site which includes a series of podcasts for history. Mr Alsopp is a teacher at King College for the Arts and Technology at Guildford, and has produced (to date) 17 podcasts covering a range of subjects from revision skills to Weimar Germany.
• There is also a podcast directory with 440 educational podcasts — albeit with a fair amount of US material.

There has been a greater take-up by teachers in the US — but quantity hasn’t necessarily been matched by quality.

Wouldn’t it be great if:

1. There was a much greater range of UK-based educational podcast material available on the internet;
2. They were easily findable in a UK educational podcast network linked to the National Curriculum;
3. Teachers could find a place where they could learn how to podcast;
4. Someone stepped up to the plate, put their money where their mouth was, and paid for some podcasts to be produced, to show teachers what could be done and to spur on others to do the same!

Well, we have decided to put our money on the line, and sponsor a short series of podcasts. We have arranged for an experienced television producer to work hand-in-hand with teachers to create something special. If you are a teacher, or know of one, who would love to work with us on this, email me direct on jon@jivatechnology.com.

Oh and by the way, we will create a National Curriculum linked educational podcast network too!!

See also: Sanako mobilizes class management with Nokia.

They seem to be making good use of social software tools themselves, including a wiki and a blog. And the site itself is built using Ning.