Want to stop buying textbooks?
Posted by karen on April 25, 2009 in Uncategorized
I was on a panel discussion on open content in K-12 education and was asked “What advice would you give to a superintendent, principal, or curriculum director who would like to stop buying textbooks? ” Here is a response to that question. First, you need to ask yourself some questions to evaluate your readiness for this endeavor. Here are some issues to consider:
- How useful are your textbooks currently?
In many successful learning environments I visit, textbooks are absent or unused on a shelf somewhere. If textbooks are not useful to your teachers and students, this is a good reason to abandon them.
- Is your current vision and direction in curriculum and instruction well-aligned for this kind of shift?
The use of open resources involves not only free and shareable materials but also an “open pedagogy.” (Future post to come on this.) Think about where your current practices fit in on this continuum:
The closer you are to the right side currently, the more feasible a shift toward open resources is likely to be.
- Are your staff, parents, and community ready for this shift?
- Are you prepared to provide the support needed to effect this change?
Any major change like this requires a great deal of planning, professional development, and support. This is likely to be a multi-year project and will only be successful if a long-term commitment is made. (Schools are notorious for their inability to stick with projects like this, resulting in millions of wasted dollars and classically low morale.)
In a project like this, you are likely to need support in terms of curriculum research and planning, curriculum development, and software development. (More on this below.) Don’t undertake this project if you can’t devote resources to this.
You should also think about how the curriculum will be delivered and facilitated. Because most OERs are electronic, for most, the answer will be electronically. Make sure you have or plan for the infrastructure to support this. (The new sub-$300 mini-laptops are a good solution for this.)
This is related to the above question, but a shift to open pedagogy and open resources requires a teaching staff that is open and willing to use a variety of resources and instructional practices. Staffs that rely on tight pacing plans, scripted lessons, lots of direct instruction, and textbook readings may not thrive in an open education environment.
Also, to be successful, this kind of staff needs to be driven by the curriculum and instruction staff. While driving this from the technology side (where most open initiatives start) is laudable, it is not enough.
It is also important to make sure that parents and the community (not to mention your school board) understands the rationale behind abandoning of textbooks and what the new approach offers. While I personally think this is an easy case to make, it does need to be planned and presented thoughtfully. To many, school and traditional textbooks are integrally linked.
If your answers to the above questions lead you to think that a move to getting rid of textbooks in favor of open resources is a good idea, here are some recommendations I’d make:
- Formulate a guiding vision.
It is important to write down your vision for the project, including specific goals and objectives, and to get stakeholder buy-in on this. After this vision is developed, make sure to do periodic checks against it as you move forward.
- Plan a phased approach.
This is not a project that should be implemented in all grades and subject areas at once. Identify which areas are most appropriate instructionally and which have the most opportunity to profit from this gain.
- Develop a budget and schedule. This is an obvious part of any project, but an important one. While there may be significant savings in terms of savings on textbook expenditures, there will also be additional expenses, which might include professional development, curriculum development, software development, and technology infrastructure. Ways to fund these costs include state textbooks funds, cross-district or – state collaborations, and grants.
- Identify where high quality resources currently exist (both at your school and in the world at large), where holes are, and how you’ll fill them. This work can be done by school staff, by expert consultants, or, most likely, by a combination thereof. Make sure to include a legal review of copyright issues to make sure the resources you adopt are all appropriately licensed to do so. Also, make sure all the tools, content, formats, etc. are truly open.
- Develop a support plan.
Make sure you include adequate staffing and funding for professional development (on open pedagogy, copyright issues, curriculum implementation, technology skills, etc.). This is critically important.Make sure you also include on-going support to develop and refine curriculum resources as needed. Don’t expect your teaching staff to become curriculum publishers without additional time or compensation.
- Be bold, and GO FOR IT!
If anyone has comments, I’d love to hear them. If this is an idea you think fits your organization and you’d like help thinking it through and/or executing it, please get in touch with me.
Tags: open | oer | textbooks | mozopenedcourseOpen education discussion tonight
Posted by karen on April 23, 2009 in Uncategorized
There is a discussion of open content in education tonight on the Future of Education.
Hope you’ll join us there, but if you can’t make it, a recording will be posted.
Tags: open
Dictionary hits 20% and 5,000 words
Posted by karen on April 18, 2009 in Uncategorized
Thanks to the hard work of a dedicated group of contributors, the Kids Open Dictionary has hit 5,000 words, marking 20% of our total word list.
If you haven’t stopped by and defined a word, give it a try. Your contribution will be appreciated by educators and learners worldwide. And check out the glossary builder for your own projects.
Tags: dictionary
Vote yes for licensing sanity
Posted by karen on April 16, 2009 in Uncategorized
Image © Brianna Laugher. CC BY SA.
If you qualify (25 or more edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15), consider voting by logging in to your favorite Wikimedia site.
Tags: creative commons | wikipedia | licensing | mozopenedcourse
Word choices
Posted by karen on April 14, 2009 in Uncategorized
So apparently the Oxford Junior Dictionary has been making some tough decisions about which words to include and which to drop in its dictionary. Acorn, bray, and canary are out. Attachment, blog, and chatroom are in. (There is a whole list I’ll be checking against our own Kids Open Dictionary.) Various groups, including Christians and naturalistists/scientists among others, are unhappy at their choices.
This brings out one of the great benefits of wikis (especially open wikis) — you can have your cake and eat it too. There are no arbitrary limitations on page counts because of printing costs, and if one group or another doesn’t like the selection choices, they can also fork off and do their own subset.
I often talk about this with students when we’re talking about Wikipedia (something I’m long overdue for a post on). Kids seem to have a very intuitive grasp of the advantages (as well as the detriments) of having a resource that “anyone can edit.” They get that this means a greater diversity of ideas and that a theoretically unlimited amount of information on any given topic is a good thing.
I wish more adults (especially teachers) got this. What is encouraging is that most people are open to these ideas and hearing kids talk about it seems to open adult minds.
Mozilla in education and an idea for open ed dev
Posted by karen on April 7, 2009 in Uncategorized
I just listened to Dave Humphrey’s description of Mozilla project there. (This was posed by Mozilla as a model for their involvement in education.) It was very interesting. Here are a few notes:
* Seneca College began this project looking to do modifications to Firefox for UI and touch devices.
* This evolved into two courses at the university focused around working with Mozilla to make modifications and turning them into a shippable product.
* They are looking at opening the course up to other students worldwide. [Based on my experiences with Wiley’s open ed course, I think this is a great idea. Just make sure you have the resources to manage it…and/or that you are willing to have the students take it over.]
* Be experimental. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know something. You don’t’ have to be an expert in everything you teach. It’s ok for students to know more than you about aspects of things. It’s also important to show students how to fail and how to move on from that.
My thoughts….This sounds pretty much like a technical product development course. I’m thinking of how you could adopt this model for education. Take the “open pedagogy” approach and have a grad level ed course on developing open educational resources collaboratively. This could use parts of both what Wiley did with his open ed course and parts of WikiEducator’s Learning4Content idea…but with a more practical project-building focus.
To be most effective and to produce something really usable, I’d like to see this with a specific focus, e.g. writing a middle school bottle biology curriculum wiki or something equally fine-grained.
The problem with having a very diverse group (like in the mozopenedcourse as well as in every other open ed course or project I’ve been involved in) is that it is very difficult to form workable groups and/or actually produce anything, because everyone has such different focuses.
Awareness building is great, but the open ed world (or maybe just me) seems ready for a more cohesive collaborative development environment.
Tags: mozopenedcourse | mozilla
Are you a writer? - Video vignettes for the open writing space
Posted by karen on April 7, 2009 in Uncategorized
I’m brainstorming ideas for short video vignettes for the open writing space. The idea is to have short (1-2 min.) interviews with writers of all types on a variety of topics, ideally topics that would help inspire or develop other writers.
Here’s what I have so far:
- Are you a “writer”? Why or why not?
- How do you see yourself as a writer?
- Why do you like writing?
- What makes a good writer?
- Where do you get ideas for writing?
- How do you organize your writing before you begin?
- What are important editing skills or strategies?
- How does reading make you a better writer?
- Do you journal? If so, what do you write about? How does it add to your life?
- What is the “writer’s craft” and how can it be developed?
- How can being a good writer help you in life?
- What is blogging and how can it make you a better writer?
- What is “voice”?
- How can you find your “writer’s voice”?
What other questions would be good?
Also, this is an open invitation for anyone to video short responses to these questions and send them to me. Note that all of this will be open-licensed under a CC-by license.
Tags: open writing space | writing | mozopenedcourse
MozOpenEdCourse Week 1
Posted by karen on April 2, 2009 in Uncategorized
Just got off the initial web conference for MozOpenEdCourse. One initial impression is that both the course content and the group participants are very diverse. Of course, this has its pluses and negatives. In a six week course, though, I would like to see more focus.
My own goal for the course is to work more on my open writing project. Even if the course just gets me to work on that for a few hours a week, it will be well worth it. And I am hoping to get some collaboration from others on it as well.
———–
Notes from the web conference:
Mozilla
- Mozilla education repository
- My comment: The OER world does not need another repository (especially one that is not screened/QC’d).
- Would be nice to have more specifics on what the Mozilla education (”suite”?) actually is. (I’ll read more on the case study.)
[Revealing my own ignorance in my previous comments…the MozillaWiki is not new wiki s/w; it’s a MediaWiki wiki set up for Mozilla to house education-related materials.]
- Personas
ccLearn
- Very clear goal statements. I really like the inclusion of exploring “better pedagogical models.” This is sorely needed.
- “Formative feedback” (instead of “assessment”)
Course
- Sketch template for project blueprint [waiting for the link?]
(Here’s my prelim sketch.)
Open Ed course - Mozilla/ccLearn
Posted by karen on April 1, 2009 in Uncategorized
I am participating in another open ed course, this one co-organized by Mozilla, ccLearn and P2PU. Here are the various course pages and forums for anyone interested in following along:
A few interesting things about this course include that it is limited to a small number of participants (approximately 20), it uses several proprietary tools for delivery (e.g. Google Groups, WebEx), and the collaborative conference sessions are synchronous. (I wondered how this would ever work with my travel schedule, but they’re going to at least rebroadcast all the sessions.)
One of the course goals is to “test and assess the online course method being developed by Mozilla Labs.” (Did you know that Mozilla apparently has their own wiki software? I didn’t. It looks for all the world like MediaWiki to me.)
The course includes a project that each student will work on (though at a course length of only 6 weeks and less than one week’s notice of the start date, I’m not sure how much progress we’ll make). I have decided to use this as an opportunity to move ahead on my open writing idea. Wherever I am at the end of this course with it, I will keep forging on. (I often find it useful to declare such goals in writing, so here we are.)
The first class web conference is tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say then.
Tags: MozOpenEdCourse | writing | cclearn | mozilla
Making publicly-funded work open
Posted by karen on March 17, 2009 in Uncategorized
The 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act signed by Obama this week includes a provision that makes permanent the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. This policy requires NIH-funded research to put electronic copies of their peer-reviewed research into a publicly accessible and searchable online database.
(Thanks to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access for this news and work in this area.)
This is a smart policy that benefits everyone and is consistent with the idea of public access to government-funded work.
This is a policy for the education community to consider emulating. There are many great publicly-funded projects in education that exist in isolation and unknown to others. If these projects were publicly accessible and sharable, the benefits would accrue to the community at large. I don’t know any educators who would object to that.
Even more interesting, if publicly-funded curriculum were open licensed and centrally housed and managed, this could be an important step to beginning a revolution in the textbook industry. If a large portion of the money that is spent on textbooks were redirected toward professional development, customization, and alternative delivery systems, the benefits for teachers and students would be great.
Tags: open | oer | curriculum | textbooks
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