NDRC's Design for Learning 2012 Competition.

I absolutely have to give this National Digital Research Centre competition a quick mention for a number of reasons:

Firstly it combines a number of my favourite things, education, innovation, invention and technology.

And secondly because I was lucky enough to be involved briefly in the NDRC's Swequity Program this summer. Unfortunately I felt couldn't continue with my involvement as I was going to be away from Dublin for much of the programme. But the swequity finals are on tomorrow and I intend being there.

I got involved with Swequity by entering a few ideas early in the summer. Although my ideas didn't make it into the 16 selected, the process was very informative. I then joined a team and the idea was that the 16 "idea owners" would present to the teams and the teams would then bid to work on the various ideas in exchange for an equity stake.

I'll certainly be hoping to enter Swequity again.

For more info see the NDRC's website - http://www.ndrc.ie/events/swequity-exchange/

The "equity for sweat" exchange model is a very interesting approach - could there be something here that might feed into the Design for Learning Competition itself?


I say this because I've been working with a large group of teachers within a Community of Practice for a few years now. The idea is that teachers come together and create and share digital curriculum content - so that by virtue of creating and sharing, each teacher ends up with loads of content.


This sounds simple but in practice is quite difficult to implement for many reasons. Perhaps it's time to look beyond the Creative Commons model  - to a model where content creators get a little more in return than the kudos afforded by ones colleagues' appreciation of ones work.

For more on the NDRC's Design for Learning Competition see - http://www.ndrc.ie/events/designs-for-learning-2012-2/