K12 Open Ed

One of the most exciting OERs I’ve seen was recently launched: Free-Reading.net. This resource from the well-respected Wireless Generation (a for-profit company) is a collection of resources for early literacy skills development licensed under CC BY SA license.

The reasons I think this is notable are many. First, it is a resource targeted at primary education, an area almost wholly neglected by OER to date. Secondly, it is a very solid collection of research-based tools that are immediately usable to any early literacy teachers. In visiting this site, it is immediately obvious that the content has been developed by knowledgeable educators. It features student-directed activities and includes multimedia audio and video.

Another interesting thing about this site is that the Florida Instructional Materials Adoption Committee for K-3 Supplemental Reading Programs has recommended that this be adopted. This would be the first time an OER has been officially adopted by a government agency here in the US. (Note, however, that the requirements and surrounding politics for supplemental programs is much different than that for core materials. Still, this is a first step.)

Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger says “Schools still spend a huge chunk of their budgets – nationally, approximately 7 to 8 billion dollars per year — on textbooks and instructional materials. That leaves a much smaller pie that schools must stretch to purchase formative assessment, professional development, and other initiatives that help teachers do their jobs well. Free-Reading.net is a step toward changing these economics and freeing up funding for things that improve teaching and learning.”

FreeReading has also done an interesting job of moderating wiki collaboration and community building with the need for solid “quality-assured” content. While there are many places that visitors can add ideas of their own, everything is not editable. The core of research-driven content that has been written by educational experts is not open to visitor editing.

I think that this is essential for resources that are going to be used in public education. The potential for occasional senseless vandalism and the harsh consequences that educators (not to mention kids) could face as a result of inappropriate content is just too high. There are ways to moderate this, and Free-Reading provides a good model for this.

The one part of the readings on learning objects that resonated with me was the talk of the “engineer invasion” of standards, metadata, taxonomies, systems, etc. The bottom line is that there is too much focus on structure, technology, and systems and not enough attention on learning, learners, and content.

Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to learning objects, but seems to be just as prevalent in OER.

In OER, there are more discussions about licenses, standards, and metadata than there are about content, learners, and outcomes. I believe that this needs to change if the OER is to be successful in fulfilling its enormous potential.

How can we change this? I am still looking for answers to this. Please post any ideas.

I work in K-12 education, and in that area, I think that a part of the solution is to build awareness. Very few primary and secondary educators know about Open Ed. We need to involve more classroom teachers that really know content, learners, and effective pedagogy. To do this, we need to increase the awareness for the OER movement and its potential. I think that if more educators know about OER, they will participate both as consumers and as producers.

QUESTIONS: Some people believe that open educational resources “fix” many of the problems experienced by those who work with learning objects. Why do you think they would say this? Do you agree? Why or why not?

After doing the reading for this week on learning objects, I am struggling to find something meaningful to say.

My primary thought after doing this reading is that if all the time spent discussing arcane definitions of learning objects and complex formulations of common sense observations was instead spent developing some useful educational resources, the world would be a better place. But then I never was much for academia.

As nearly as I can tell, learning objects are any reusable learning resources, which would include every textbook, lecture, video, web page, piece of software, etc. that any of us have ever used in a classroom or in an informal learning setting. I don’t see OERs to be fundamentally different except that they are open and sharable. How then would OERs “fix” the problems that people have experienced with learning objects? I don’t see any basis for this. Perhaps others in the class will shed light for me.

In my own work, I have created a library of what I suppose could be called “learning objects.” They are items like ebooks, mini-movies, audio recordings, activities, assessments, etc. for K-12 students. Some are licensed under open licenses; most are not. I don’t think their licensing has much bearing on their instructional value. I can see how the ability to customize learning objects can affect their value; however, in my work, we permit (and even facilitate) this regardless of how materials are licensed.

The reality is that 98% of instructors I have worked with choose not to customize materials even if they are given the option of having the work done for them. I think this is unfortunate, but it was been proven true over and over again in my experience.

I’m curious if any research has been done on to what degree existing OERs are actually modified for reuse. My suspicion is that not many are. In informal interviews with several experts in this area, I have heard several times that the overriding problem with most OERs is that they are not reused much at all.

Beyond this, I don’t believe that problems like a lack of common terms, the technical nature of specifications and standards, the lack of attention to pedagogy, and irrelevance of much of this to education are solved by OER. To the contrary, I think that the OER movement suffers from many of these same problems. More on that in the next post.

This is a good article on OER in education. It is interesting in that it ties into several of the books on the Open Ed reading list.

I’ve been doing some work on the idea of creating a free open kids simple dictionary. Two questions that have been central are:

• What open dictionary would be best to use as a starting point?
• How could this be hosted to best facilitate mass collaboration?

To look at the first question, I started by putting together a list of what’s available. As it turns out, there are not as many choices as I had thought. There is the WordNet/Princeton one, Wiktionary, Webster’s 1913 dictionary, and then a variety of adaptations of those. (If anyone knows of a gem I missed, PLEASE let me know!)

I then chose 10 words basically at random that should be in any good elementary level dictionary and looked them up in each of these dictionaries. The results are here. Ugh!

The bad news is that only a few of these definitions are at all usable for a kids’ dictionary. Almost all would need significant editing. (I’ve used Noah on the Palm, but have steered clear of it with schools because of the objectionable adult language. I didn’t really realize until now how completely inappropriate the general language level/readability is for kids though.)

Wiktionary and Webster’s 1913 are the most verbose and would need the most editing. WordNet and the Online Plain Text English Dictionary both seem more reasonable as a starting place. However, the amount of editing required will still be mammoth. We really will need mass collaboration to do this….which brings me to the second question.

In some ways, I would really like this dictionary to live in Wikibooks. This is because (1) I like Wikibooks; (2) I think Wikibooks is an effective platform for mass collaboration; and (3) I would like to bring more people to Wikibooks for the benefit of other projects there. However, there are some issues. One of the big ones is that as a school-appropriate dictionary, we would want at some point to “freeze” a copy to ensure that we are putting out a safe, accurate, high quality product. Wikibooks isn’t really set up for this (though wikis can be designed to accommodate this). In addition, MediaWiki doesn’t handle version control or forking (though it does handle revision control very well).

A tentative solution to this that I had thought of was to put it in Wikibooks and then at some point slurp it off to a database hosted on K12 Handhelds that would be restricted to a small group of editors for final editing and publication. Interestingly, this is similar to an idea that xixtas has proposed in a letter to the Wikimedia folks. He goes a step better though by suggesting that the “controlled” copies be hosted on a Wikimedia site www.wikijunior.org. I think this is a great idea for all kinds of reasons. I hope that Wikimedia gives this serious consideration. Of course with all the content being GFDL, I guess we could do this ourselves if we didn’t mind hosting it.

So that’s where I am with all this. Any thoughts?