The JISC-funded Rights and Rewards Project at Loughborough University has made its proof-of-concept PEDESTAL system public, which uses Web 2.0 concepts in a learning repository.
Here’s an excerpt from the About: PEDESTAL page:
PEDESTAL is a demonstrator teaching and learning material repository. PEDESTAL is a service, which has been developed by the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (EngCETL), for Loughborough staff to share their teaching material and expertise with other peers. . . .
PEDESTAL is not just about the sharing content, each user has their own blog which can be used to capture user’s thoughts and interests. Links to useful documents or webpage’s can be recorded, which also may be of interest to many others.PEDESTAL boasts a search mechanism. Within PEDESTAL, a search may retrieve more than just content. For example, a search using the term ‘Digital Photography’ may return;
- Items to embed in to teaching (textual resources, diagrams, images etc)
- Items to inform the teaching and learning process (teaching exemplars, how to guides)
- A list of people who are interested in ‘Digital Photography’
- A list of blog postings that have the term ‘Digital Photography’ within them
PEDESTAL is much different than a Virtual Learning Environment (Learn). The latter is structured around course modules and is a mechanism which delivers teaching material (usually specific to a course or module) to students. PEDESTAL is structured around people—i.e. the users. Each user is given a personal profile page which can be customised to show their teaching and research interests.
For further information, see the About: 10 Things About PEDESTAL page.