Ed Week recently published an article about Open Ed.
I thought it was a pretty good article (aside from misquoting me twice* and misspelling my name :). This article definitely shows the growing attention to Open Ed in K-12.
Here are some things in the article I thought were interesting:
- It’s interesting how other tangential issues and technologies get associated with Open Ed — in this article, it’s wikis. True that some OERs are created or housed in wikis but that’s almost coincidental. OERs don’t even have to be produced through mass collaboration (which is where the wiki connection comes from). Many OERs are produced by subject matter experts and cannot be “edited by anyone.”
While I love wikis and mass collaboration, I think that confusing them with OERs leads to some unfortunate misconceptions, such as the idea that OERs can’t be scholarly, accurate, or high quality. The comments after the article bring those misconceptions to light. As I point out in my own comment, there are many OERs, including FreeReading, that are research-based, quality-screened, and then “frozen” to maintain that quality. - I like the way from AAP discounts OERs. (Yes, these are the same people who, when asked about the problem of textbooks being too heavy for kids, suggested the solution of buying two copies for each kid so they never had to carry them.) Their rep then goes on to say “If digital formats are what teachers want…, textbook publishers have, over the past six or seven years, added digital materials to supplement print textbooks.” First, if he really thinks that those materials reflect the best of application of technology in instruction, I’d love to spend a couple hours with him showing him what is possible. More importantly, though, what we really want isn’t “digital formats”; it’s instructional materials that are accessible and relevant to students and that lend themselves to differentiation. We’re just so tired of trying to get publishers to address these real needs that we can’t wait any more (and our kids can’t wait) so we’re doing it through other channels. (This message is also a relevant one for Microsoft. I hear that they are not being so flip about denying the trend toward open source though.)
- I thought that some of the comments made online by readers were quite interesting. I hope that the readers of the print version of Ed Week get to see them. (This really points out how web-based journalism changes the dynamic of information delivery.) Here are a few:”Free Open Content materials help students around the world rich and poor to get access to great educational content. Our own Schools have been so economically strapped that about the only media materials that are available to teachers are Text Books and that is only because the Text book companies over the years have arranged for special funding for text books that is separate from the funding the schools get otherwise. Free and Open educational resources may one day break this expensive and inefficient monopoly.” – Herb Schuchard”The fact that textbooks are still a piece of school’s budget is a travesty. I can’t think of a more outdated educational learning tool.[and in addressing the concern about “scholarship” and accuracy]
…Open source materials are valuable not b/c they’re ‘always right’, but because accessing the information is an educational experience in and of itself. Students are no longer looking up the ‘right answers’ in a textbook; they’re doing real research, weeding through the admittedly massive amounts of data out there to find the answers to their specific questions. It’s a matter of student-centric learning, as opposed to students learning what textbook publishers deem ‘valuable.'”
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* One of this misquotes was “teacher-based” instead of “research-based” in regards to FreeReading. Here’s the other:
After talking about the kids open dictionary and the decision to put it in the public domain (something we are very proud of) …
Interviewer: Aren’t you afraid people will just rip it off?
Me: No! We hope they do. We want people to use this in as many ways as possible. That’s the whole point.
This got translated into:
“‘We’re hoping lots of people will rip it off and do what they want with it—it’s one of the most basic needed resources,” Ms. Fasimpauer [sic] said. ”
[sigh]