A Tale of Three Sites: Resource and Knowledge Sharing Amongst Computer Science Educators

Computer science educators, especially those in schools, often work in small departments which allow little support or sharing. This problem can be alleviated via virtual online communities that allow educators to support each other and share knowledge and teaching materials. Virtual communities experience varying levels of success or failure, and it is often not easy to determine the causes for these differences. Factors include social and technical aspects, and it is typically not trivial to attribute community behaviour clearly to one or the other. In this paper we describe the “ColourRoom” software, a web-based platform to support virtual communities of educators. This software has been deployed to three distinct communities – educators using BlueJ, educators using Greenfoot, and UK computer science school teachers (regardless of software) – which affords a rare opportunity to analyse the usage of the same software in different communities, providing insights into both the communities and the design of software to support them.