I’ve previously written about the adoption of Web2.0 in various spheres in India – ecommerce, media, arts etc, but not education. Whereas the defining character of web2.0 makes it very suitable for integration with education- open exchange of ideas, free sharing of resources, community based learning etc. I am glad to be finally giving education its due on this blog.
Educatorslog.in is an online space for Indian teachers & educators, where they can share or discover teaching resources, learn exemplary best practices and initiate meaningful dialogue on issues of shared interest. It is intended to work as a combination of a blog, an online library, a discussion forum and a marketplace for items of interest to the educators community. And it straddles across the entire educational spectrum (pre-K through higher and adult education). The site is built on drupal, and has web2.0 features like group blogging, commenting, organization by themes & tags for easy search. Educatorslogin is a commercial venture; it is angle funded by a technology incubator that invests in early stage consumer internet ventures. Though currently ad free, advertising could be a possible revenue stream in future. The classifieds section of the site (currently non-functional) is intended to be a space for people/institutions to place ads for resources/services that are offering or in need of. Its FAQ section details the different ways by which teachers could gain from the site.
The website is run by Shuchi Grover and a team of IIT-K alumni who are doing the technical development. Shuchi is a teacher educator based out of Bangalore. She is an alumnus of Harvard Univ and has worked extensively at the intersection of technology and education.
While I am no expert in education, here’s some spontaneous feedback to Shuchi and her team. I feel that the site (in its current form), is under leveraging the true potential of multimedia in education. The vast majority of educational content is text based, but that is changing. And the internet in its role as a repository and means of sharing different content types- videos, images, audio (podcasts), animations, documents etc is a catalyst in bringing about that change. So there is a case for enabling better sharing of multimedia realted educational content on the site. Multimedia has another advantage- it is more involving than plain textual content, hence increasing the site’s stickiness.
So if you are an educator, check out the site, or if you have friends or relatives who are in the teaching profession, do let them know this; this could be their date with Teaching 2.0.
Thank you, Amit, for this profile. We do like your moniker “Teaching 2.0”! 🙂
Just a clarification regarding the ability to share multimedia. Perhaps your visit to the site did not reveal too obviously some of these features. While the site is largely textual (it follows the usual design of a community “blog” or forum), the site does allow one to share links to videos, podcasts…(though these will open in a new browser window) – do see some of the latest resources on films on animation made by NID students, as well as some wonderful films for educators.
Also, the posts can and do have attachments which could be documents of any type – word docs, pdfs, image files, powerpoint slideshows…In fact several elogs and resources do have attachments where teachers are sharing posters, lesson plans, pdf files of graphic organizers etc.
Hope this helps give a better picture of educatorslog.in to the audience of this blog.
Just to add another dimension to what has already been said, this is a portal for Indian teachers, across the country. Therefore, it must be designed keeping in mind the access the teachers across the country (and not just urban areas) have to internet. I would not be surprised if a significant proportion of Educatorslog.in’s audience comes from class 2 towns – internet usage is booming, and many teachers I know are turning to the Internet for help.
My point is, a multimedia centered site (as opposed to a site that uses multimedia extensively but is not ‘dependent’ on multimedia, the direction in which educatorslog.in is moving) requires a broadband level of connectivity and infrastructure to communicate effectively. Given that broadband penetration in India is still low, a broadband intensive site might exclude a significant portion of India’s teaching community.
Ofcourse, assuming that the free broadband access proposal (by the now ‘ex-‘communications minister Dayanidhi Maran) comes through, then there is no excuse for a site that does not leverage the strengths of multimedia.. ! 🙂