Having spent a little time with the demo now, I think there are many possible uses of the CoP functionality within the dotLRN environment. Here are a few that stretch beyond LORS:
- In SUNY's home-grown environment, we enable instructors to assign grades to student posts (and other contributions/assignment) and automatically import those grades into the grade book. Ratings would be good scaffolding for that.
- The "clipboard" function, combined with a simple text field, would be great to allow students to take notes on content items in a class. Likewise, you could use it to enable students to move content into a portfolio, or even to use it as kind of an improved, dotLRN-internal version of trackback. (I think Drupal may have something like this latter function.
- It seems to me that it would be fairly simple to wire together a couple of the pieces here to add del.icio.us-like folksonomic bookmarking, which is very hot right now in the edublogosphere. Let the students organize the content according to their own knowledge needs.
I'm sure there are more possibilities. These are just the ones off the top of my head.
Very cool.
