An Educational Open Source Development Model: From Cooperative Synchronicity to Intentional Collaboration

As educators, we have a long tradition of sharing materials and ideas. Another professional community has almost as long a history of idea and materials exchange and revision: an international network of open source software developers connected by the Internet. Working primarily as volunteers, this community has produced and fine-tuned many pieces of software, including the Internet’s most popular Web server, the Apache Web server.What if talented software developers could work with educators to develop and customize educational software? In addition, what if a mechanism were in place to help educators share the materials that they create in this virtually collaborative manner