K12 Open Ed

The open dictionary has reached a milestone of having 15% of its words defined.

One thing that has helped move it along is the glossary  builder, which many people have expressed an interest in. Research demonstrates that explicit instruction in vocabulary is worthwhile and provides students with skills for success. The glossary builder tool lets you create a custom glossary that can then be exported in a variety of formats (text, rtf, wikitext, PPT, ebook) and used as a part of a classroom unit, online course, web site, book, etc.

If all the words in your glossary aren’t defined, you can add definitions for the ones you need. You can also email us your word list,  and we’ll prioritize getting them defined.

Before too long, we’ll have enough of  a critical mass that we can start thinking about outputting a whole dictionary. :)

This is an interesting article about a group putting together social networking with open courseware to “global, tuition-free Internet university,” University of the People. They say they will apply for accreditation as soon as possible. Whether or not they are successful in getting it will speak volumes about the future of higher ed.

This kind of leveraging of open resources and collaboration is a subject we talked about a lot as a part of Dr. Wiley’s open ed course. What is the future of open education? How relevant is a traditional higher ed degree in the modern world?

I’m wondering if anyone’s looking at opening a charter/home/alternative K-12 school based on open resources? The new Open High School in Utah is one example. I hope that they will be successful and that they won’t be crushed by the forces of the educational-industrial complex.

I just went to the web site of a large ed tech conference and was very happy to see a special promotion for all the Open Source activities they are featuring at their conference.

I was less excited to see that many of the sessions they were highlighting as a part of this were not Open Source at all, but instead were focused on Web 2.0. These included UStream, Voice Thread, Google Docs, Delicious, and a variety of other Web 2.0 apps.

OPEN SOURCE DOES NOT MEAN FREE. Open Source means FREE and OPEN.  The difference is immense.

#4 – Be knowledgeable about copyright, what is legal and what is not, and what your open options are.

Many people in education play pretty loose with copyright rules, figuring that “educational use” gives them the right to do whatever they want with copyrighted property. While everyone has to make their own choices about this, certainly we should make sure our students know what is legal and practice this. This is an important 21st century skill that all students need.

Here are some good resources for brushing up on copyright and various open licensed content options:

Copyright basics

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

Learn More About Creative Commons

About Open Ed

(This is part of an on-going series on what you can do to help grow the OER movement.)

#3 – Post your lesson plans on an open sharing site.

Many of us post lesson plans online with the intent of sharing with others. Posting lessons with an open license ensures that they can be shared (legally).

One of the sites for this is Curriki, a site for sharing lesson plans under an open license.

Another option is WIkispaces, a wiki site that includes a CC license on all content. (I use this site a lot, but one downside for lesson plans is that it’s not really a “destination” site for folks looking for lesson plans.)

Finally, regardless of where you post (or even if you just distribute in print), you can always add a CC license that tells others they can use your resources. The simplest way to do this is to just write “licensed under Creative Commons Attribution” on the site. Or if you want to get fancier, use the CC license wizard. This tool will give you a CC piece of artwork and also some code that will get your lessons into CC search engines.

Free and open sharing is great for everyone!

Thanks to Nathan Ketsdever and Steve O’Connor for the inspiration for this post.

(This is part of an on-going series on what you can do to help grow the OER movement.)