Noting similarities to the project I proposed, Dennis G. Jerz draws our attention to the Commontext Library:

Commontext is a completely new concept: a publisher of freely shared classroom texts. Its goal is to allow unrestricted, free access to a vast collection of learning materials produced at the highest level of excellence, including academic peer review and fact checking, and professional editing and proofreading.

Read the FAQ, which states that “‘beta’ phase” materials were to be available in Fall 2003, with “[f]inal, professional-quality course materials” available in Fall 2004. On first blush, however, there doesn’t seem to be much content available. I also don’t find the site very intuitive to navigate. Put yourself in the shoes of a non-expert web user: how easy would it be to find the information you’re looking for?

It appears that the site runs on Drupal, “an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites.”

How is Commontext different from what I’m proposing? Well, I don’t really know, but I would return to these questions:

• What have you created that you’d like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What’s on your wish list?

The answers to these questions would be a good starting point for this project. A user-friendly website that would allow users to act in response to these questions easily is what I’m imagining.

A couple of distinctions might be helpful here. On the one hand, I’m imagining contributors might share things like handouts, assignments, exercises, and syllabi. Feedback and refinement would ideally make these materials better. But on the other hand, contributors could also collaborate on building web-based resources like the ones that were mentioned before (e.g. Guide to Grammar and Style, Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms, Guide to Literary and Critical Theory). In addition, discussions of how to use these materials would be useful. A site that facilitates all of these things is what I’m thinking of.

Five years ago when a few savvy instructors rushed to integrate the Web into their teaching and put their syllabi online the idea exchange so crucial to academia was alive and well in the teaching realm of our work. A few years later, witness how various password-protected courseware adopted by so many campuses is making it increasingly impossible to see othersí teaching materials. Sure, some people may not want to share their syllabi, but I suspect many wouldnít mind. Regardless, the increasing proliferation of these services makes the teaching side of our work less and less visible to a wider audience.

Eszter Hargittai, “The un(?)intended consequences of courseware“

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

The Open Source Initiative

In terms of web resources, what do those who teach courses in English need that a committed group of bloggers might create? I’m not talking about software, mind you, but I’m agreeing with the assumption that the open source philosophy can be successfully applied to all kinds of projects. We’re all going to be coming up with course materials anyway. Why not collaborate or at least share?

Jack Lynch, who doesn’t have a blog but should, has an impressive Guide to Grammar and Style that might prove useful as well as an unfinished Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms. I have a brief guide to the mechanics of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing in MLA style. Of course, materials like these are widely available in print, but when so many of us are creating websites for our courses, it is more than a little convenient to be able to link directly directly to information that students will find helpful.

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

• What have you created that you’d like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What’s on your wish list?

Can we work to make these things available without taking an inordinate amount of time out of our already busy schedules?

Update 1: And if you think this is a good idea, please mention this post in your blog to increase the chances that potentially interested parties, who may or may not read my blog, find out about it.

Update 2: Okay, possibilities for format include a database (like DISC: A Disability Studies Academic Community, using MySQL) a blog (like the many group authored blogs out there using MovableType), a Wiki (like the Wikipedia), or some combination of such things.

My classes start on the 13th. I’m updating one syllabus and writing another one from scratch.

I have tweaked my explanation of the rules (PDF) for “Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation,” an unconventional assignment that I blogged about earlier. I’ll be having my students play Ivanhoe in my Spring section of Introduction to British Literature, 1

If you were a student, would this make sense to you? What might seem unclear? What questions would you have?