Help+wanted

Overall aim

This is to bring about a point of access that provides children with opportunities for learning in variety of subjects. The wikids project, [], can be seen as a prototype, giving some flesh to the sorts of concept I have in mind. I've created a separate space, [] for contributors, to help manage the project. Please look around the wikidia space if you haven't already done so.

Current sub-aims

Recruitment: I'm hoping to find other potential contributors who share my interests in providing similar free educational content on the web. I'm looking for anyone who can contribute to the existing project, or who has their own special area of interest/expertise. Wikispaces provides an environment for facilitating the development of such material, and it is offering advertising-free spaces for K-12 educational purposes. It is difficult to manage several topics and age-levels in one space, due to limitations in the file management and style control facilities. I presume that there is a limit to the number of 'spaces' that I can create using my own account. Anyone with a genuine reason for creating an educational space may do so. I would like to see more spaces created by other people, using a navigation method that seamlessly integrates the different spaces. My proposal for such a navigation system is described in [], and I can provide assistance to anyone who wants to implement it in their own spaces.

Publicity: Anything that publicises the space would be welcome, in order to cast a wider net for recruitment and also to gain exposure to 'consumers', and hopefully gain feedback from them. Placing links in other websites and passing details on to potentially interested parties would be helpful.

Technical assistance: Expertise in HTML, JavaScript, CSS and other web technologies would also be welcome. There is plenty of scope for interactive and personalised content. This is where I see the quality and effectiveness of the learning experience being maximised. Wikispaces provides a good degree of control of content via its 'themes' and 'embedded media' (escape to markup and scripting) facilities.

Resources: I'm looking for sources good free-license textual and visual material.

Ideas: I'm also looking for good suggestions relating to any aspect of the project. Of particular interest is the question of user participation. I envisage a sort of tiered system, where students are able to provide feedback and input using facilities beyond those provided by the discussion pages. I think this requires some thought about structuring. So far, I have only come up with the notion of sister spaces where students can complete assignments and submit ideas, articles, artwork etc. for possible adoption into the more restricted-for-edit 'reference' sections of the system.