Copyright

Andrew Montford

Summary

Design and share your own curriculum and find suitable learning materials to support it.

Description

The use of social bookmarking tools like de.licio.us, where webpages can be indexed under descriptive ‘tags’, has become widespread in recent years. I believe, however, that there is a need for a social bookmarking tool which

• is focused solely on learning materials,
• can return age appropriate results, and
• is more structured in its approach, making it more relevant to a learning environment
• returns the most appropriate result rather than the most recent.

Curriculus would capture a user’s date of birth at registration, and include this as one of the tags. This will enable searches under a particular ‘tag’ to be prioritised by appropriateness for a particular user. Users would ‘file’ bookmarked webpages within a structured hierarchy of headings which would represent their curriculum. Eg a page on ‘The Spanish Armada’ could get bookmarked under ‘History/English history/Tudors/Elizabeth I’. (Another user might file it under History/Warfare/Naval/). This structure would function as a record of what the student had studied, which would enable them to demonstrate their learning interests to others.

These curriculum structures could also be shared with other users, so that someone who wanted to study, say, Ancient Greece, could download a section of somebody else’s curriculum on Ancient Greece, together with its associated bookmarks.

How it might be used

Let’s imagine someone using Curriculus for the first time. We’ll call them ‘Joe’.

Let’s say Joe has heard about the Spanish Armada and wants to find out more. He enters ‘Spanish Armada’ into the ‘Search Curricula’ box, and finds that it appears in ten different people’s curricula. Joe finds that the top ranked result was posted by Sally, who is roughly the same age as him. She included it in the ‘Tudors’ section of her history curriculum.

Joe decides that learning about the Tudors as a whole sounds interesting and he therefore copies the whole of Sally’s Tudor Curriculum to his page. Then, by clicking on a curriculum entry (say ‘Spanish Armada’) he gets a page of Sally’s links to suitable resources – web pages, books, video, games, animations, and so on. He can start learning.

Joe doesn’t have to use only Sally’s pages. He can click on ‘All Users’ to find out if there are any materials bookmarked by other users that might be of interest. He can add these to his own page if he likes. And he can add his own materials too.

Contact

Andrew Montford

30-32 New Rd, Milnathort, Perth & Kinross, KY13 9XT
01577 865001
amontford@tiscali.co.uk