K12 Open Ed

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?

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 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.

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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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.