Thursday, March 30, 2006

MOODLE & EVOCA: Wiki Community Builders

Moodle is a wiki for building a community of teachers/learners. It is an open source alternative for Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Blackboard. Content will be created by the community of users and their involvement with the subject can extend beyond the traditional boundaries of course dates. Although it is relatively new, Moodle is already widely used internationally in a number of languages.

For my purposes, I am exploring Moodle as a a platform for WebMusicing or EMusic. As the idea evolves as to how we can extend our musical growth and experience through connecting with likeminded individuals and musicing on the web, I am trying out different strategies and premises for building community. Moodle may be a step in the right direction. I came upon the idea through a news source on the Musicing News and Views newsblog.

And somehow, my search for Moodle brought me to a intriguing site, Evoca, a community of individuals connected by sound. This site approaches creating soundscapes and soundbytes like bloggers approach creation of text-based sites. You might call it Audacity on Line, except that you can't yet edit sound files---but if you have a mic, you can record on the spot from anywhere on the Internet.

Evoca is emerging as an audio sharing community, an audio version of Flickr that is in its infancy, but representative of a new generation of applications for users who are interested in sharing work with each other. You can get a sense of this new perspective since often new versions of software provide a new option for saving or publishing called "share."

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