Technical implementation of the learning environment
Tools/ services
- The "environment" could and should be using several tools & services that best suit the participants needs, skills and experience
- Important to create a sense of community, a sense of belonging to the Swing Tribe, being a valuable part of the Swing ecosystem. This will provide a sense of ownership and thus motivation to learn
- There could be an aggregated space, where for example Youtube Video -contributions would be gathered/ aggregated (with moderation--> by whom?)
- Ning is one possible option as a service, or a hub, that could bring people together, allow them to share their contributions, ideas, bring out their expertise & goals in their profile pages etc.
- Should there be a dedicated "swing journal", e.g. a blog for people to write about their progress (with videos etc. included of course)?
- A dedicated Youtube channel for people to post videos of their progress. This could be done just by using tags (there are fitness programs such as P90X that work that way) or something similar to Youtube Symphony Orchestra. This would need support from Google, I assume.
- Swing could also use experimental technical implementations that deal with for instance interactive coaches (that give feedback on your singing) or augmented reality, as in Youtube Symphony.
The Learning Hub
The learning hub would be the centre of the SwingToWin Learning Ecosystem.
- Participants create their profile pages
- They have their own blogs, where they write about their progress, participate by commenting, advising, asking etc. on other participants' blogs
- They embed media about their progress, for instance Youtube videos, pictures from Flickr etc.
- There is a Swing discussion forum with different Swing-related discussion areas.
- A possibility for the members to create their own groups.
- An area for delivering and linking to interesting learning materials
- Possibility to aggregate other Swing-channels in to the hub (e.g. the twitter stream, youtube channel etc.)
The ideal platforms to make this happen would be Ning and Elgg. Both cost about 40-50$ a month.