Looking for open ed stories
Posted by karen on May 16, 2008 in Uncategorized
A group at COSL and WikiEducator is working on an OER Handbook for educators. As a part of that, we are looking for stories from educators or learners who have used or created open educational resources. If you or anyone there would be able to contribute a short blurb for this, it would be much appreciated. Examples of the kind of thing we’re looking for, as well as the wiki where these can be added, are available here:
Please circulate this request. Anyone who has used Wikipedia as a part of a lesson or used music from ccMixter for a classroom video has a story to share!
I think that the OER movement is one of the most exciting things going on right now and hope that this and other projects will help spread the word!
Dictionary on the eeePC
Posted by karen on May 15, 2008 in Uncategorized
So in exploring my eeePC, I saw that there’s an offline dictionary on it. This was immediately of interest to me, because a) it’s obvious use in the classroom and b) we’re building an open dictionary (which I imagine at some point will reside on all kinds of devices like this).
The dictionary on the eeePC is from Longman. Unfortunately, it was the same problems as WordNet from Princeton and the free Noah dictionary — adult language that renders it unusable in the classroom.
If you’re not easily offended by bad language and want a big laugh, look up the f word and read all the variations and definitions they give. The synonyms are a riot too.
(By the way, if you have an eeePC and want to remove the Chinese, an update is available through the add/remove tool.)
Tags: eeepc | ulpc | dictionary
Don’t forget the “non-techies”!
Posted by karen on May 8, 2008 in Uncategorized
One of the great things about OER is that most people in the community are so tech savvy… but that can also be a limitation. It’s a concern that those who aren’t as tech savvy (as is the case with many teachers and subject matter experts) aren’t being included. In some cases, those who are less tech-comfortable are even being scared off by overly-aggressive tech geeks who are more interested in tech perfection than in good content.
This week, as a part of my reaching out to find user stories about OER users and creators, I had the good fortune to meet Cheryl Johnson. Cheryl has contributed illustrations to the FreeReading site. In emails back and forth, Cheryl mentioned that isn’t very “computer literate.” She loves drawing though and has an interest in education that goes back to her mother who was a teacher.
Here’s what Cheryl told me about getting involved in FreeReading: “I was told that [FreeReading] was in need of artists willing to contribute illustrations of short passages as a resource for teaching literacy to young children. I checked online and saw what was required in the way of art and decided to devote some time to the site. This was the very kind of artwork that I have enjoyed drawing most of my life especially as my own four children were growing up. I have always liked doing line drawings to color in and have spent many happy hours with children, mine and their friends, drawing on demand so that they could color in my pictures. It’s very exciting to read the passages and have a mental picture immediately pop up in my head. I hope to continue to contribute artistically to this wonderful site.”
Artwork is an important (and potentially expensive and difficult to source) part of any OER. What a treasure to have people like Cheryl willing to contribute.
If you’re involved in OER, think about someone you know that could contribute but that may not be tech savvy. Invite them in, and help them feel welcome and comfortable. Everyone will benefit.
How do you use/find/remix/create open resources?
Posted by karen on May 6, 2008 in Uncategorized
A group at COSL and WikiEducator is working on an OER Handbook for educators. As a part of that, they are looking for short stories from educators or learners who have used or created open educational resources. If you or anyone you know would be able to contribute a short blurb for this, it would be much appreciated. Examples of the kind of thing they’re looking for, as well as the wiki where these can be added, are available here:
Creating OER
If you’ve ever used a Wikipedia article as a part of a less or downloaded music from ccMixter to create a podcast, you could contribute to this.
I hope that this and other projects will help spread the word about OER. Thanks for your help.
The down side of mass collaboration (guest post)
Posted by brad on May 1, 2008 in Guest Post, SPAM
[This is a post from Brad, K12 OpenEd’s technical director.]
As much as we love the idea of mass (open) collaboration, there are problems inherent in any collaboration. You expect people to argue, and you expect different ideas regarding direction and approach. You really have to consider these good problems. The bad problems… Well, vandalism. Ugh.
We’ve had a rash of WikiSPAM lately. It’s obviously a targeted attack from some kind of botnet. All the posts target the same page and come from wildly different IP addresses. Also, the SPAM replaces its own SPAM over and over again. When we first noticed it was happening, there were fifty or sixty edits in a row from the SPAMbots. Each edit replaced its own SPAM with new SPAM.
What to do?
First thing, don’t get too down about it. Don’t turn off your wiki, and go home. Don’t hire investigators to track down and harm the monsters. Take a deep breath and…
Start watching the page on your wiki that shows recently changed pages. I visit this page several times a day. As soon as I see pages being replaced with SPAM, I revert the changes.
You can use the History section on a page to revert changes. Look back in the history for the newest good version of your page and restore it. Depending on your wiki (and version), you might be able to select it as the new page, or you may need to edit the page and save it as the newest version.
In our case, there was one page in particular that was being targeted. Once we restored the page, we temporarily disabled edits to that page. Generally, it’s safe to allow logged in users to still edit the page. It’s annoying that you have to basically turn off parts of your wiki for periods of time, it’s an expedient choice.
After you’ve dealt with immediate problem, start looking at technological solutions. Especially in the case of botnets, if you are having problems, others are too. This means that once a type of SPAM is identified, others can start looking for it and prevent it.
We use the MediaWiki software. It’s free and pretty well known. Also, there is an extension for fighting SPAM: SpamBlacklist. I had to upgrade our wiki to the latest version of the MediaWiki software before we could use it, but that was a good idea anyway. The nice thing about this extension is that it uses a shared database, as well as your own list of rules, for rejecting SPAM edits. One way to identify SPAM is by the URLs it inserts into your wiki. Once people see SPAM from a particular source, the URL gets added to a shared list, and then it’s blocked by all the wikis using the list. If you are having a specific problem, you can add the URL to your own private list.
You can also block IP addresses that have SPAMMED you. We do this, even though I think it’s better used against annoying individuals.
We would be very interested in hearing the ways you fight wiki SPAM.
Good luck!
When share alike doesn’t work
Posted by karen on April 29, 2008 in Uncategorized
In discussing licensing options for open education items, I suggest that the CC BY license is in many ways the most open license. While share alike sounds like a great option, because it prompts sharing down the road, it is sometimes overly restrictive. It’s not always easy to envision how this might the case, so here is an example.
I am working with a school district to create a series of movies that highlight vocabulary and essential questions in their social studies curriculum. The essential questions come from their textbook, and the publisher has given permission to include these in the movies. Because this material is copyrighted, however, we cannot “share” the movies we are creating beyond this district (or others to whom the publisher has extended permission). As such, we can’t include any share alike images. This eliminates a lot of great material.
Tags: oer | licensing | creative commons | semantic web | share alike
Wikis - Building content vs. displaying and using it
Posted by karen on April 22, 2008 in Uncategorized
In education, we often run into objections to wiki-based content because of the potential for objectionable content. This kind of problem mostly stems from spam, and you don’t have to spend much time in wikis to see some pretty awful (and juvenile) examples of this.
We’ve wrestled with this problem a fair amount with our kids open dictionary project. We want this to be a mass collaboration project, but know that if there are instances of obscenities or other inappropriate content, it won’t be usable by schools.
Our solution is to separate the building — which will be done in a wiki — from the final version — which will be in a variety of “frozen” formats (ebooks, uneditable web pages, print, etc.). While the approach may sacrifice a bit in terms of ongoing updates (which still could be submitted by admins or emailed to admins by others), the upside, in terms of being able to ensure quality content while minimizing maintenance work, is high.
I think this is a good solution that many other wikis might find useful.
Tags: dictionary | wikis
Sight word videos
Posted by karen on April 18, 2008 in Uncategorized
I am working on creating some sight word videos from the word lists at FreeReading. (If you haven’t seen this site, it is a phenomenal resources for early literacy.)Before I crank out more of these, I’m looking for input from early literacy teachers.
- How is the music? Too distracting or ok?
- How is the timing?
- Does the “pointing finger” idea work?
Any input anyone has is appreciated. I’m hoping to produce a whole library of these to match the FreeReading lists over the next few months.
Tags: reading | literacy | freereading | free | oer
Quotes about OER
Posted by karen on April 3, 2008 in Uncategorized
I finally got around to redoing the home page for this site, and in doing so, I put together this gif of quotes I think express what OER is all about. (You may need to wait a second or so for it to load.)
Let me know if you know any quotes that should be added to this.
Also, as with other content on this site, feel free to use this for any purposes you like (with attribution to K12 Open Ed please).
Kids dictionary update
Posted by karen on March 26, 2008 in Uncategorized
For those of you interested in the progress on the open kids dictionary project, we are moving ahead, and so I thought I’d give you a quick update:
- Starting point — After reviewing many open dictionary sources out there, we didn’t find any that met our needs in terms of content and licensing terms. As such, we decided to start with a public domain word list (which we are editing heavily) and write our own definitions. It is my hope that as a mass collaboration project, this will be a feasible endeavor.
- Infrastructure – We looked at a lot of different platforms to use for this (Wikibooks, WikiEducator, etc.). Our hope was to use one of these to capitalize on an existing community and to help build it. However, the issues of licenses and process (see below) ultimately caused us to decide to host this ourselves. And so, Brad has been busily working to create a platform for this using MySQL with a robust revision control system. The result looks a lot like a wiki, but with the advantages of more robust searching and some other nice benefits. For example, we’ll be able to easily export versions for a variety of platforms (handhelds, iPhones, Kindles, print, etc.).
- License – To give the maximum flexibility in how it is used, we are going to license this under CC-By (or possibly even public domain). We don’t want to restrict people with non-commercial or share alike requirements. (This obviously affected which content and platform we could use as well.)
- Process – User-created collaborate content is great, but for schools, it also poses problems. In the US, much user-created content is blocked/filtered because of concerns about inappropriate content. While I don’t agree with this approach, I do sympathize with the problem of community pressures against inappropriate content, which wikis certainly breed through vandalism. As such, for this project, we will at some point be publishing a “frozen” version that has been screened for appropriateness.
The goal is to have working version of this up in the next month or so. Stay tuned for more info, and let us know if you’re interested in being a part of this project.
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Unless otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
