C3MS

Definition

• C3MS stands for Community, Collaboration, Content Management System, i.e. portal software that allows to manage a community, collaboration between members and contents. C3MS can refer to either a existing portal that includes several usually simple modules or to portalware (i.e. the toolkit) needed to install and configure the portal.

• DSchneider claims to have invented the term in the Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems: Socio-Constructivist Scenarios for the Masses? short paper presented at Ed-Media 2002. The idea was enable tracing the impact of our ideas on educational designs using this kind of software. On october 2004 for "C3MS education" there were 380 hits on Google, on march 14000 hits (a typical growth pattern). If you don't like "C3MS", just use something like "modular portalware" or "community portal".

• Variants: "Community, content, collaborative management system", Community, Content, and Collaborative Management System", "Communicate, Collaborate & Coordinate Management System".

C3MS compontents

Here is a table of typical C3MS components along with a list of functions useful to activity-based pedagogical designs.

Function	C3MS modules (tools of the portal)
Content management	News engine (including a organization by topics and an annotation mechanism) Content Management Systems (CMS) Collaborative hypertexts (Wikis) Image albums (photos, drawings, etc.) Glossary tool or similar Individual weblogs (diaries)
Knowledge exchange	News syndication (headlines from other portals) File sharing (all CMS tools above)
Exchange of arguments	Forums and/or new engine Chats
Project support	Project management modules, Calendars
Knowledge management	FAQ manager Links Manager ("Yahoo-like") Search by keywords for all contents "top 10" box, rating systems for comments "What's new" (forum messages, downloads, etc.)
Community management	Presence, profile and identification of members Shoutbox (mini-chat integrated into the portal page) Reputation system Activity tracing for members Event calendar News engine

C3MS in education

While one can observe a boom of interest for e-learning in the last 2-3 years, current e-learning systems rather focus on content delivery, as opposed to supporting students to solve more complex and open-ended tasks. We are convinced by the effectiveness of socio-constructivist pedagogies in education and struck by the apparent lack of widely deployed supporting tools. We would like to argue that a large number of rich educational scenarios can be supported at reasonable cost by the emerging brand of modular Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems (C3MS). In order to explore this hypothesis we started deploying such architectures with a few selected teachers and we are working on our own custom modules."

References

• Daniel Schneider with Paraskevi Synteta, Catherine Frété, Fabien Girardin, Stéphane Morand (2003) Conception and implementation of rich pedagogical scenarios through collaborative portal sites: clear focus and fuzzy edges. ICOOL International Conference on Open and Online Learning, December 7-13, 2003, University of Mauritius.

• • Several similar articles from DSchneider and al. are available (also one in french and german)

• The [ Tecfa SEED Catalog]