The paper will discuss theoretical, methodological and technical aspects of the community based Methopedia wiki (www.methopedia.eu), which has been developed as a part of the EU-funded collaborative research project “Community of Integrated Blended Learning in Europe” (COMBLE; www.comble-project.eu). Methopedia is a wiki and social community aimed at facilitating knowledge transfer between trainers/educators from different institutions or countries through interactive peer-to-peer support, and sharing of learning practices.

We describe how Methopedia has been developed though engaging practitioners in workshops with the aim of collecting known learning activities, designs and approaches, and how the models for sharing learning practices have been developed by drawing on practitioners' experiences, ideas and needs. We present and analyse the outcome of the workshops and discuss how practitioners have informed the practical design and theoretical issues regarding the design of Methopedia. The workshops have led to redesigns and also a number of important issues and problems have emerged. In the paper, we therefore present and discuss the socio-technical design of Methopedia, which is based on open source Wiki and Social Networking technologies. We describe the issues, functionalities and needs that have emerged from the workshops, such as metadata (taxonomy & tags), localised versions (multi-lingual) and the need for visual descriptions. Furthermore, we discuss the templates trainers/educators can use to describe and share their learning designs or learning activities, e.g. what categories would be helpful? How much metadata is relevant and how standardised or flexible the templates should be? We also discuss the theoretical considerations underlying the descriptive model of the templates by drawing on research within learning design and the educational pattern design approach. In particular we focus on exploring designs and descriptions of singular or sequences of learning activities.

Furthermore, we discuss some of the tools and concepts under development as part of the work on Methopedia, such as a flash based tool to structure learning processes, a pictorial language for visualising learning activities/designs and how we aim to connect to existing networks for educators/trainers and initiatives similar to Methopedia.