San Francisco, USA

Last month’s meeting with the Unlimited Potential team helped me frame this question in my mind: how do use the collective intelligence of teachers on the ground to evolve and improve curriculum? This living curriculum issue is an urgent one for telecentre.org. We need to work this out both for telecentre manager training materials and for curriculum that local telecentre people use to train community members.

Yesterday, I had a chance to drill down on this issue with Helen King from the Shuttleworth Foundation and Larry Page from Sun‘s GELC program. Some of the questions that emerged:

•    How are telecentre managers and teachers using and innovating curriculum they are downloading from the Internet (or getting on CD)?

•    How do you create incentives that encourage people to share their innovations? And can you?

•    If you can, how do you control quality, focus, brand? Is it possible to make ‘good’ curriculum using collective effort?

With these questions in hand, we’ve agreed to embark on a small applied research project looking at the question of living curriculum. We all have real world projects that can serve as inputs to this research. The plan is to hire a researcher who can frame the issue, and then to convene people from our projects to pull in real world experience. If it works, we’ll at least have a roadmap to help guide future experiments in this area.