On Tuesday, I attended a very lively presentation on H20 Playlist by Jonathan Zittrain, Molly Krause, and Hal Roberts.

H20 Playlist has been inspired by internet-based information sharing projects such as Amazon.com book reviews, Wikipedia, del.icio.us,  and iTunes.  The logic is intriguing:  if untold numbers of netizens are willing to spend untold hours classifying their knowledge, online resources, digital music, and web links to share online with strangers, then with the right tool (and a certain amount of persuasion) educators of all kinds can share their curricula, syllabi, and other resources.

I see this as a tool that has great potential for nearly every mission-based organization that includes education in its long term strategy.  However, the project is still in its infancy, and my sense is that it hasn't reached the point where it would be easy and intuitive  enough to engage those over-worked nonprofit professionals who are not intrinsically facinated by the underlying technology.  So my advice to most people in our sector is to keep an eye on H20 Playlist, but let someone else be the beta tester.
For some, these cautionary words will merely inspire greater eagerness to forge ahead with H20 Playlist.  For that group's benefit, I've created a playlist on "free ICT resources for philanthropic, nonprofit, and community-based organizations." You are very welcome to add comments or to use my H20 Playlist as a starting point for creating one of your own. Many of the items I've listed will be very familiar to readers of this blog, and are therefore not new and exciting, but I predict that as H20 Playlist accrues more educational content, it will be exciting for mission-based organizations to compare notes - not only with traditional academic instructors, but also with each other.


For more on the conceptual framework, see Molly Krause's  Playlist, "The Philosophy of H2O."