Please help me to celebrate these heroes.

Hi, I need your help to spread best practice in authoring for elearning. Yacapaca's Author of the Year award has just been won by Ralph Holmes, of Langley School in Norfolk, UK for a really excellent courses of Physics assessments.

Ralph put in a huge amount of work on these, for no external reward whatsoever. The course has been used over 11,000 times by schools around the world and he really deserves far more praise than I can give alone.

But it is about far more than that. One of the biggest challenges in elearning is getting good, user-created content, in volume. If we are still stuck with commercial content then we continue to suffer a top-down approach, limited choice and no democracy. OTOH, good quality, appropriate, user-created content renders the old publishing model obsolete; Wikipedia showed that.

How do we do that? Lots of teachers produce their own content, but rewarding them for going that extra - very long - mile to producing consumer-grade content has traditionally been the preserve of commercial publishers. I believe that reward can come a non-financial way - through peer recognition. If the community (that's us in Classroom 2.0, amongst others) consistently makes heroes out of the most dedicated authors, then more, more committed, authors will come forward. The end-point of this virtual spiral is the emergence of Publishing 2.0.

Now I am asking your help to celebrate Ralph and his fellow nominees. C2.0ers are an influential bunch and it really will make a difference in promoting peer authoring. I am hoping you will write a a post in your own blog (thanks Patricia, you beat me to it!). If that is not appropriate, web 2.0 offers dozens of other ways to create heroes!

If you want to find out more and the announcement is not enough, I'm ian_gs on Skype, or you can message me here.