Wisconsin Union Blend

One of the early challenges of the project we now call LessonShare was finding a name. Among the most prevalent of the working names we used in the early stages of development was the “lesson plan repository.” We weren’t really fond of calling it a repository, but we were having trouble coming up with anything better.

I was reminded of this search for a name, and the vague discomfort I had about the word “repository” in the “Hot Topics Discussion” Institutional Repositories. Much of the debate in this session was around the tension between our emerging ideas of collaborative, social space and the need for persistent and organized document preservation and archiving. Everyone, it seemed, agreed that both these areas were essential, and that clear paths must be made for content creators to move their work from collaborative areas to areas for storage, preservation, and distribution. The disagreement came, however, as to how connected or integrated these spaces should be. More than a few attendees made the case for a dynamic repository - an area for collaboration, improvement, and discussion as well as preservation - that sounded similar to our efforts with LessonShare.

A couple of the participants in the discussion brought up the question - is there really such a thing as a finished product? Since many documents evolve over time, should we dismiss the idea of a repository as a storage mechanism for “finished documents frozen forever in their final state.” Another participant conceded that there are certainly things that do reach a “finished state” (an image of a Matisse painting, for example, would need to be preserved without modification) but that “a finished project doesn’t mean that the conversation is finished” (the archival Matisse image could be connected to remixes, responses, and reinterpretations).

While LessonShare does perform some of the functions of a repository, the very nature of teaching and learning objects is that they will change and evolve over time. I’ve always hoped that LessonShare would encourage creativity and innovation, rather than facilitate the recycling of the same materials and approaches year after year. In that respect, the hope is that LessonShare is more about collaboration than storage. And in that sense it is both a database and a social space.