Imagine if the Department of Science Education and Training bought a couple of very big servers, installed free and open source software on them and allowed every person in Australia (why not the world) to publish eLearning content to and/or use that content for self directed learning.
It would run a bit like Blogger, but with extra features to make it better for Teaching and Learning Online. Everyone would be given free access, with at least 50 Meg of space to save stuff to. The communities of teachers and students, parents and other players would rate the content, that in turn would be reviewed by DEST for possible use in Institutionalised learning programs. And all this content would be stitched up with category hyperlinks much the same as Blogger does.
Geeks could get in there and tweak the source code to make it run better, teachers and students would be free to use it the way they saw fit – reviewed by their peers and community. The only thing different to Blogger would be the Department’s own little banner would run across the top of the user’s elearning blog – something like the one I have knocked up above this post, in the same inconspicuous size dimensions as the blogger banner above this page.
Of course DEST would have the rights to use all content on its servers for public educational purposes… what a way to grow eLearning in Australia…

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