Sounds like a great project there in Pittsburgh. I’ll be interested in how it goes for them, and appreciate your insights.

As an administrator in charge of an ongoing school effort with teachers and students specifically to collaboratively build curriculum with wiki tools, I highly recommend Mediawiki. It has power, stability, and a wide range of plug ins provided by a very active and committed Open Source developer community.

In BSSD, our users have had very little need for training, and have created over 11,500 pages of content to support our standards-based model of education. This includes text, documents, videos, audio, multimedia projects.

Most recently we have partnered with the wonderful folks at the Palo Alto Research Center to pilot PARC’s WikiDashboard tool for visualization of collaborative work being done in the system. This promises to be very useful, and is working like a charm so far.

I’d be happy to exchange information on our experiences with other like-minded school districts. My work email is jconcilus@bssd.org. I have also blogged in more detail on open content curriculum issues, and Mediawiki at my personal blog:

http://www.teachers4schools.com/open/

Regards,

John

I’ve looked into this on our internal version of sites, and it’s true…there is not a good way to limit someone’s access to one page and not to another. The workaround here is to use a Google Doc or Spreadsheet for content on a particular page, and limit people’s access to edit that way. Such that they could only view the page, not edit the document.

Jordan

I’m happy to use this comment thread to discuss the more general goal of supporting Pgh Sci-Tech with online collaborative systems.

I would argue that you don’t have to choose one system for all the ~3 needs that Stephen enumerated. The collaborations in (1) sound like basic business needs and would be satisfied by online office suites such as Google Docs+Calendar or Zoho Office. Better to use tools designed for each of those tasks than to make a wiki do everything. As for (2a), I think a wiki is right on and the options I describe above are best. (2b) covers a lot of ground, but depending on the specifics you have in mind, the above are still good choices. For (3), I also think wiki is the right choice and the above are the best options.

Moodle is a platform to definitely bear in mind. It’s a popular way to author and deliver courseware. To my knowledge though, it does little to support collaboration around that authoring. I think it’s wiki module is for embedding a wiki within a course. Moodle may be appropriate if you will be having teachers author materials that students will use online, but doesn’t cover full curriculum design. If I am wrong, I’d love to be corrected.

Based on my understanding of your needs, my recommendation is to use one of the wiki systems above in combination with an office suite. In particular, I would lean to:
- PbWiki for curriculum development
- Google Docs for spreadsheets and word processing documents such as mission statements
- Google Calendar for calendaring

And if appropriate, consider:
- Moodle for authoring online activities for students and teachers

PPS has an established network of users, growing in number, and the application has proven to be robust with a large number of participants.

Course sites support proprietary versions of WIKI, forums, audio player for podcasts, journals, and other classroom-related activities.

Lastly, it is available for free.

1) Use by our administrative / project team to collaborate on everything from budgets, to mission statements, to calendars.

2a) Use by teams of curriculum developers.

2b) Use by teachers as an aid to teaching the developed courses. Student worksheets as attachments, a place to organize instructional videos and links, space for students to create their own projects, and so on.

3) Use by professional development (PD) staff to deliver ongoing PD. For example teachers might video tape themselves teaching a lesson. That would be part of the curriculum for future teachers to see the enactment of the curriculum, but could also be analyzed by the teachers themselves to improve their own practice.