K12 Open Ed

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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:

•  Course outline
• Course discussion group

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.