Empowering students to drive their own learning
Posted by karen on July 10, 2008 in Uncategorized
I recently read the Reading Next report about adolescent literacy by the Alliance for Excellence in Education to the Carnegie Foundation. I think the lack of student engagement that is leading to unbelievable drop-out rates is a national calamity. I am astonished that there hasn’t been more of a national outcry. How can we spend so much on education and get such abysmal results? How is it that neither of the major presidential candidates have a substantive educational platform? How will our nation thrive (survive?) if the majority of our students are not literate, let alone versed in 21st century skills? (OK, I’ll stop now.)
In this report, the authors outline 15 major elements that are viewed as being critical for a program seeking to build adolescent literacy skills. These 15 elements are broken into instructional issues and infrastructural ones. The instructional components are things like direct, explicit comprehension instruction; content-embedded reading and writing; strategic tutoring; and differentiation. These are all research-based and also intuitively obvious.
The infrastructure issues outlined in the report include:
· Extended time for literacy (2-4 hours per day)
· Meaningful professional development
· Cross-curricular team teaching
· Strong instructional leadership
· A comprehensive coordinated literacy program
· Summative assessment
OK, these are all optimal, but with the exception of the last item, these conditions do not exist (or could not easily be made to exist) in most middle or high schools. The culture of secondary education in our country today is just not geared this way.
I think these issues – most importantly, the lack of strong instructional leadership at the building or district level – are at the crux of a lot of problems in secondary education.
Having said that though, I do not believe that we can tie our children’s education (or our nation’s future) on the infrastructure failings of the educational establishment.
What is the solution? Perhaps, it is empowering students to drive their own learning through open resources and web-enabled tools. With the right tools and strong motivation, adolescents may be able to do a better job at this than we as “educators” can.
What are your thoughts on this?
Tags: oer | literacy | Reading Next | CarnegieWikitravel rocks
Posted by karen on July 7, 2008 in Uncategorized
Wikitravel was recognized by TIME as one of the 50 best websites this year. Everyone who has been a part of building this site should be proud. I know I am.
COSN report on Creative Commons and Open Content for K-12
Posted by karen on July 3, 2008 in Uncategorized
COSN has published a new report that includes a chapter called “Creative Commons and Open Content: What K-12 Schools Need to Know.” It’ s a good concise discussion of the relevant issues.
It is an awesome world… or How Web 2.0 Came Through for Me
Posted by karen on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized
I had a weird experience today. I was at NECC, sitting at the back of a big room waiting for a session to start. It was on open content, something I am very passionate about and am always looking for new information and perspectives on.
The time of the presentation came and went, and there were no presenters. I could see concern mounting, and people starting to shift around, getting ready to leave. I approached the person coordinating things and asked if they needed a “stand in.” They said sure. (There were over 100 people in the room, and I hated to see that many people interested in the topic leave empty-handed. I think OER is such an important topic that everyone needs to know about… and I’m mostly not very shy. :)
Lately, I’ve been putting up all my presentations and workshops on the web with a variety of tools such as wikis, Slideshare, etc. Because of this, it was super easy to stand up and use any Internet-connected computer to present. (Bizarrely, it was probably the first time during the conference that I didn’t have my own laptop with me.) Considering what a weird situation it was, I think the presentation went really well. This is something I wouldn’t even have dared attempting without technology. It is an awesome world we live in.
And best of all, some great new people know about the kids open dictionary and are helping up build this important tool.
Thanks to everyone who attended the session (even though it may not have been exactly what you expected :). Special thanks to Randy Orwin and Brad for helping with the tech setup to make this happen.
…and yes, for those of you wondering, I did verify that the small intestine is approximately 7 meters long!
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How much food has changed
Posted by karen on June 25, 2008 in Uncategorized
In working on the kids open dictionary, I expected to find out a lot of interesting things. (This is one of the things I love about working in education.) Here’s one that came up today. Our eating habits have changed enormously in the last 80 or so years. These are all words that did not appear in the 1913 dictionary:
pizza
hotdog
hamburger
sushi
teriyaki
bagel
croissant
meatball
naan
burrito
taco
quesadilla
cheesecake
I’ll leave out all the kinds of coffee…. :)
Thanks to FoodTV.com for helping with ideas for this. What others can you think of? If you find any that aren’t in our dictionary yet, email them to us.
Dictionary goes live — come play!
Posted by karen on June 23, 2008 in Uncategorized
The Kids Open Dictionary builder is now live!
Please try it out and enter a word or two. Whatever you do doesn’t have to be perfect; others will jump in and refine as we go.
In case you missed it, this is the first completely open, public domain-licensed dictionary designed with kids in mind. We intend for the final product to be used by a variety of OER producers, web sites, book publishers, hardware manufacturers, teachers, students, and others.
In a lot of ways, this is one of the most needed components for many OER projects and is a great mass collaboration project. Please join us!
Tags: dictionary | oer
License info for images - metadata
Posted by karen on June 20, 2008 in Uncategorized
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to record information about an image’s license, attribution, etc. In the past, I have used not-very-efficient techniques such as recording this info separately in a text file and sometimes trying to include it in the file name.
A friend recently recommended storing this in the Properties Summary. (Right-click an image; choose properties; click Summary tab and Simple.) What a simple and useful idea. I am going to start recording the following (slightly modified from CC suggestions; see below):
- License: [include license and license URL]
- Attribution URL:
- Attribution name:
Here’s an example. (You can download it to view the properties.)
That reminded me that I’d heard that Creative Commons suggests a standard for metadata. They suggest something called XMP — Extensible Metadata Platform. In reading more about this, it appears that you need special tools, both to create and to read this. (I’m not entirely clear on this though; I spent almost an hour looking for an example image and couldn’t find one. If anyone knows of one, please post a link.) Possibly not very feasible for the “mass” audience. The good news is that doing this makes content machine-searchable as open content.
For now, I think I’m going to stick with using properties for this.
What other ideas do you have?
Tags: oer | metadata | licensing | images | photos | clip art
What is most important about OER?
Posted by karen on June 12, 2008 in Uncategorized
I am facilitating a series of hands-on workshops to help educators to learn about the value of OER. What topics do you think are most important to spread this movement? Licensing issues? Available resources? Wiki editing skills? Open source tools?
Tags: oer | licensing | wikis
Kids dictionary goes beta!
Posted by karen on June 8, 2008 in Uncategorized
We’ve released the beta of the kids dictionary builder. Yay! The tool is a sort of combined database and wiki, with functionality to “freeze” final definitions at some point and output the actual dictionary in a variety of formats (ebook, web, PDF, etc.). It was written in a combination of mySQL, PHP, and Python.
If you would like to help beta test this or participate in the building (even writing one definition will be a helpful contribution), you can sign up here or send us an email.
There have been a few days this month when I’ve wondered if creating a free, open kids dictionary was an overly ambitious project, but mostly it’s been very rewarding, and I have high hopes that lots of people will participate, and we’ll produce a great tool for anyone who wants to use it.
The dictionary builder will launch more publicly in late June. So stay tuned for another update then.
Tags: dictionary | kids dictionary | oer | open
Kids and copyright preso
Posted by karen on May 23, 2008 in Uncategorized
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Unless otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
