We’ve had a lot of new activity at the Kids Open Dictionary this week, largely because of several posts others have written about it. New people have been coming to the site every day, adding words, creating glossaries, and helping making this a richer resource. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.
As with anything on the Internet, I suppose, we’ve also heard some criticisms. Some of these have not been surprising to me (such as the seemingly incessant debate on which license is most “open”); others have come out of left field.
The most unexpected to me has been the suggestion that already-available, print-based commercial dictionaries are more than adequate, and that an open dictionary is unneeded or somehow even dangerous. I so adamantly believe in the need for differentiation in education and the necessity of a mix-up culture for creating appropriate learning resources, that this is an anathema to me. The whole point of OER is to provide better learning resources.
Textbooks are incomprehensible to many students. Vocabulary is a stumbling block for many learners. It is all well and good to tell students to look up words in a dictionary (if they have one available). My experience as a teacher, though, is that unless a kid has a dictionary right there in-hand, they are unlikely to do so.
Context is everything. Research shows that having definitions linked directly to the reading material increases comprehension. We have seen this in classrooms with the interactive ebooks we have created. Providing students with linked glossaries has helped with reading comprehension and built student confidence and enthusiasm for reading.
Commercial dictionaries don’t provide teachers the opportunity to mix content to provide this kind of context and interactivity. Legally, their definitions cannot be copied and pasted into other materials or edited to suit the context at hand (though we know many teachers do that anyway for the benefit of their students). Beyond that, commercial dictionaries often have definitions that are written at a language level that is not accessible to kids. (We’ve already heard a few adults say that a kids dictionary would be a useful resource to them.) These are just a few of the reasons we’ve started this open dictionary.
Beyond all this, I guess I don’t understand criticizing something that is free, open, and motivated only by creating a resource to improve education. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If you do, come write a definition or two. We know that kids, teachers, and learners around the world will benefit.
Along the way to modern education, we have encountered a major stumbling block. It is called “plagiarism” and does damage to students when they knowingly copy text verbatim from a source. However, big however, standing on the shoulders of our predecessors is the best way to make progress. Students need to have sources that can be gathered together and presented as what they are: a mashup which effectively illustrates the concept being discussed in the “research” paper. I suspect that the younger a student is, the less strenuous the effort of the teacher in chastising plagiarism. Of course, the level of writing expected of young students is not very high. Educators gradually ramp up the expectations as the years in school advance. Effective mashup is rarely, if at all, encouraged. Because each individual student needs to develop his or her writing skills, contributing to a group writing project probably isn’t very often encouraged by teachers.
Teachers, the educators we are trying to get involved in these group projects, the dictionary, textbooks, etc. are a product of the current education system. Writing this comment has made me wonder if our educational system has begun to fall behind the availability of information. When teachers were the “smartest” people in town and books were difficult to access, the process of enlightening children relied less on research papers, I would bet, and writing was assigned that asked students to tell about things they knew (think 4H, perhaps).
Today, the volume of accessible information has grown beyond the ability of teachers to easily verify the students’ sources, much less quickly check to be sure long passages are not quoted verbatim. Of course, we want to have students explore beyond their neighborhoods. We say students should be “citizens of the world” and this DEMANDS that students study and write about more than they used to. Naturally, we want students to explore, but are we up to the task of keeping up with the explorations of the best of our students?
Finally, will contributing to open education attract teachers who have been “kept in line” by their own teachers in the past and whose own current school districts define the acceptable curriculum, especially in states with high stakes testing like Massachusetts, USA with its MCAS?
Well, there will be some, rebels who challenge the norms. It feels good to be a rebel. Let’s get to work.