XplanaZine

As I worked on my review of open source courseware this week, it became clear that the success or failure of all these wonderful projects hinged on community and collaboration.
My four recommended picks, CHEF, LON-CARA, Moodle, and fle3, are all testaments to inclusive development. openness to suggestion, and empowering the user community to have an active say in the process.
The CHEF team collaborates with other development groups through the OKI initiative, offers training and information seminars for other universities both in Ann Arbor and on the West Coast, and actively recruits internal partners on campus.
LON-CAPA, out of Michigan State, began in 1992 as a project out of the Physics department. Over the past eleven years, a group of people have worked together with others in the University to extend its usage to almost ten thousand students. They have also partnered with other schools and are working closely with the OKI initiative to ensure that their product is usable by the broadest group possible.
Moodle and fle3 are both driven by unique philosophies of collaborative teaching. They deviate from some of the traditional course management models by focusing primarily on online collaboration instead of traditional classroom dynamics. Both of these programs have grown and expanded through intense participation by large, international communities.
The most important thing is that all of these products are the unique expressions not only of their developers, but also of their users. These products are good because there is a collaborative community surrounding each of them in which people listen to the ideas of others and are willing to change.
Of course, this is true with any “successful” software development project. The most apparent successes of this sort have come recently from the open source community because their survival is entirely dependent on the participation of the community that supports their efforts. It’s not that non-open source software developers don’t do Q&A, market analysis, or use focus groups, it’s just that those are usually done to fine-tune their products rather than define them. For those companies, it seems, there is too much money at stake and to many commercial variables in play to allow community-driven evolution of products and features.
But this is not an argument against the commercial model. I participate in both open source and non-open source development projects and see the validity and purpose of each. What does interest me, however, is the value of community-driven software development as a template for education in or outside of the classroom.
Here are the elements that go into the making of good, usable software:

• Abundant dialog — the conversations occur and proliferate at every level, not just top-down. There are active, grass roots discussions that are just as important as the formal conversations taking place;
• Quality listening — since information sharing and product evolution are the goals, listening is the most important element in every stage. Every detail can be important and people stop talking hen they do not feel they have been heard;
• True positive feedback — positive feedback in the sense of a positive feedback loop — information that actually causes a change in or modification to the system;
• Openness to real change — positive feedback is a design feature that means the process/system is open to change, in fact, that it is expecting change to occur;
• Open-ended inquiry — a driving force in quality developments is the asking of questions that have no set or pre-determined answer.

These elements create a group process that is dependent on asking questions, allowing new information to alter previous plans, and listening to the input of others, regardless of their specific association with the project.
These are also, it seems to me, the precise elements that make up positive learning and teaching experiences. Not that such should come as any surprise. Because as anyone who has ever worked on a software development project can tell you, it is an humbling learning experience.