The 4th edition of 'Education and Care in the Early Years' by Josephine Donohoe and Frances Gaynor has just been published by Gill and Macmillan.

The FetacResources community is thriving, with its now 2226 registered users, over 764 posts to the forum, 237416 forum views, 204 files in the database for sharing, and an astonishing 210828 downloads, and 1183996 hits to the site. Collaboration such as this is one of the main philosophies driving the new web or Web 2.0 as it is called.

Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics does a fantastic job explaining this and I highly recommend it. Don has completed a 5 million dollar study of the internet and how business is done on it. He explains where the internet is going and how it is being driven mainly by the New Generation, those born between 1977 and 1996. Their philosophy of interaction, mass collaboration and self organisation is driving the Web 2.0.

The generation proceeding them spend hours passively watching TV. The New Generation spend the same time online, but the key point is that they are interacting with the medium. These kids see emailing as antiquated, a formal method of communicating, something for keeping in contact with your granny! For them it’s all about social networking on sites such as Bebo, MySpace and FaceBook. These sites are highly interactive and the users themselves create the content. The old web was based on HTML and was all about presentation. The new web is based in XML and is about interaction. If you are teaching kids and want to understand how they use and drive the web, you really need to read Wikinomics.

Collaboration is one of the key ideas of the Web 2.0. Due to the internet collaboration is cheap and simple. For example if I want to share my notes, I don't have to post them to you snail mail or even print them out; I can simply upload them to this site. This site follows those same philosophies; the software used for fetacresources.com is called glFusion and is itself a project in mass collaboration, freely available, the work of hundreds of programmers and thousands of hours’ collaboration. I think FETAC could use online collaboration effectively in the creation of new modules and the revision of older ones. The internet is perfect for this type of collaboration to create information.

How does Self Organisation work on this site? Each person will contribute in the area in which they are uniquely qualified. I can’t contribute notes on horticulture as I know nothing about it. Maths is my area, so maths notes are my contribution. In this way the knowledge base self organizes itself.

Why do people bother contributing? We are all teachers and creating notes is an extension of the teaching process. We love explaining and helping people to understand the ideas. Being part of this project also brings exposure to other tutors delivering the same or similar courses. There is no hierarchical management system telling people what do to. The contribution is self motivated, which is far more powerful.

Level 3 FETAC maths notes have been made freely available here. They are a set of notes which I have been working on for a few months. These notes are really a textbook for tutors and learners. The notes contain full explanations and presume the learners knows nothing about maths, although this is never the case. There are many questions with answers which allows learners correct their own work. At the end of the notes there are assessment sheets covering every single Single Learning Outcome (SLO) and all Performance Criteria which is the exact standard required by FETAC.

I think it is important that tutors have all the material necessary in one document so that they don't have to go researching and can put their time and energy into delivering the course instead. Also learners should be equipped with a full set of notes to allow them to work on the course in their own time.

Many of the learners I have are adult learners and find themselves using the notes as reference material when helping their own children with their homework.

Many people find the concept of sharing notes difficult to grasp and ask the question, "Why should I share my notes?" My answer to that is, "Why wouldn't you?" Once notes have been created it makes no sense to keep them to yourself. Sharing notes takes no extra effort, it only adds to you.

I personally created an almost 300 page set of notes for FETAC level 3 maths. I certainly don't expect an effort on that scale, but I hope people get the idea. Knowing others would use my notes resulted in me making them to a higher standard than I otherwise would have done. This benefited my own learners and those who use my notes. Also I am delighted people use my notes and often hear from such tutors.

Should anyone wish to have their notes removed at any stage from this site, they just need to email the admin and this will be taken care of immediately.