Blogs

On April 6th, at Meriwether Lewis School, in Portland, OR, we will be hosting an open content authoring event. The event will be run unconference style, where participants will be able to work with peers as they research, create, and revise educational material. The day is free to attend, and lunch will be provided.

Based on past events we have run, we anticipate that most participants will be interested in one of five related tracks:

• People looking to revise individual lessons;
• People building/creating complete courses;
• People supporting teachers/departments as they create their learning resources;
• People who are not working on anything specific, but want to help convert existing openly licensed content into a more usable format;
• People looking to learn more about open licensing, and how transitioning to open content can save money, increase teacher effectiveness, and be incorporated into ongoing teacher professional development.

If you are currently working on any curriculum, bring any resources you have collected, and we will work on these resources during the day. While there will be opportunities to discuss the philosophy behing open content, the main focus of these days is on the work: how can people get more benefit from the same effort by using a more open approach to their content?

If you are not working on any specific project, but want to work with a community of educators on creating open content, please come! There is a huge body of information that is high quality, but is not in a format or structure that supports reuse. With some time and work, we can fix that.

If your role in the educational world is to provide a vision for your organization, a portion of the day will also be dedicated to looking at how using open content can serve as a catalyst for transformation within a school. One of the things we will focus on is a recurring theme that we have seen as we have talked with teachers about open content: the planning process that every teacher does as they prepare for class is nearly identical to the the planning process for creating open content. The benefits of open content, however, accrue over time. Working with open content creates the implicit expectation that collaboration with peers is a normal and expected part of the preparation process.

This day is being organized by Bill Fitzgerald, Jeff Graham, and Andrea Burton, from FunnyMonkey. Tim Lauer has graciously allowed us to hold this event at Meriwether Lewis Elementary, and Rachel Wente-Chaney has arranged for lunch for all participants, sponsored by the Oregon Virtual School District.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up to let us know you are coming, and we look forward to seeing you there!

On a project that is still in development, we recently did a core upgrade as part of our pre-launch preparations. The project involved a data migration of tens of thousands of nodes and users; part of the migration involved manual cleanup of image data to account for a responsive design in the new site and different use of screen real estate between the old site and the new site.

However, as is noted on the 7.20 Release Notes, there are some issues that can arise on sites using the Insert module after upgrading to Drupal 7.20. The diff on the release notes page for the 7.20 release gives a sense of how the ramifications of these issues are still evolving; given that there are a little over 42,000 sites reporting use of Insert in D7, there will likely be other people affected by issues similar to what we experienced.

What We Experienced

After we upgraded, none of the images that had been inserted into text areas via the Insert module were displaying. The images were still present in the file system, but given that they were derivatives created via imagecache, it would have taken a single flush of imagecache, or a modification to an image style, and poof! the stored version is gone, making the pre-existing path to the image even more useless.

As is noted in this issue, older versions of the Insert module don't work cleanly with Drupal 7.20. As several commenters posted in that issue, all relative links no longer worked. This issue led to the creation of a sandbox project that begins to address the issue. However, cleaning up pre-existing content is heavily dependent on the site in which that content was created or edited.

Next Steps

After researching the issue, Jeff developed an update script that we tested in dev prior to rolling live on staging.

As mentioned above, the specifics of updating content will vary based on your precise site configuration, so the chances of this script working cleanly on your site with no modification is virtually nil.

However, in the interest of saving the next people to face this issue some time, the script is on GitHub; please fork away and have at it.

I'd love to see a Stats or Data Analysis course powered by selected elements of the following data sets:

• 2010 Census Data;
• American Community Survey datasets;
• Data sets from the National Center for Educational Statistics; and
• Anonymized data collected on teachers and students from schools within specific geographic regions.

This course could help develop an incredibly broad range of skillsets, and cross-curricular learning opportunities. In addition to learning the basic statistical skills required to make sense of the datasets, students could also learn the work required to clean up datasets to the point where they are usable.

The data analysis work could also tie in to learning about mapping, or other visual means of representing the stories suggested by the information we collect. Increasingly, data literacy helps shape media literacy, as many claims within the media are predicated on a specific interpretation of data.

Finally, an increased awareness of data would empower learners to use the data collected about them to become the architects of their own learning. Students would learn the skills necessary to analyze the data collected about them by the various systems that track them. Part of this course could include professional development for teachers, delivered by students within the course, to support teachers interpreting the data collected about their school and the learners within their school.

Given that the amount of data collected about people is likely to continue to increase, we have an obligation to give people the tools needed to make good use of the data.

Over the last few years, a group of Internet Service Providers, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording Industry of America came together to create a system they are calling Six Strikes. Under this system, anyone can be accused of infringing copyright, and once a person has been accused, they can appeal the accusation for a cost of 35.00 US.

If a person/household/school gets accused six times, they can face a series of penalties, including reduced access to the internet. Ars Technica had a good article on this yesterday, and has some good additional background on the issue.

Regardless of what you think about Six Strikes as corporate policy, however, you have to admit it's a gift to people looking to steal credit card information, and other personal information.

I've included an image of one of the warning notices below (pulled from an Ars Technica post):

Note the button pointing to a login screen, and the text inviting you to log in to your account. Replicating the look and feel of these alerts is a simple task, and editing the text to point to a fake account creation page is equally simple.

And, given that Six Strikes allows "offenders" to contest the charge for 35.00, in this context, a link to a "Contest this Charge" page, complete with a credit card form, would actually make sense.

It's unclear whether this corporate policy masquerading as a legal response will actually do anything to address copyright infringement, but the phishers and identity thieves have been given a gift.

Over the last couple weeks, This American Life has had a couple of amazing episodes looking at Harper High School in Chicago.

This excerpt from the second episode - where a hungry kid gets some food - stuck with me. Ben Calhoun is the journalist reporting the story, and Marcel Smith is a staff member at Harper.

Ben Calhoun: ...I spend a couple mornings with a staff member named Marcel Smith. Marcel works on a program that tries to rescue kids who are failing out. Harper has a lot of initiatives like that. There's mentoring programs and enrichment programs, all boosted by turnaround.

So on paper, that's what Marcel does. But if you walk around with him, you see what Sanders sees, all the little things that would never be considered part of his job. The day I was with him, in the morning, Marcel came across a young man standing in the hallway.

Marcel Smith: What's going on, son? How you feeling?

Ben Calhoun: The kid was keeping a straight face. But he was clearly upset. It turned out he'd been asked to leave his class. As Marcel turned to deal with him, he asked me to turn off the recorder, so I did.

They talked for a minute. Marcel took the kid to his office, sat him down, told him to wait. And we walked away. He didn't want to use the student's name. But he explained what was going on.

Marcel Smith: Apparently, the students were given an incentive for being on time. And it was food.

Ben Calhoun: Cookies. It was cookies. And this student, along with everyone who'd gotten to class on time that day, was allowed to go up and take a cookie. But this particular student was dealing with a difficult and maybe dangerous situation at his house. So he hadn't gone home the night before. And because of that, he hadn't eaten.

So when he went up to take his cookie, he took two. The teacher told them to put one back. Not wanting to reveal his situation to the rest of the class, he didn't say anything. He just refused.

He told Marcel he was just so hungry. That's why he'd been kicked out. Marcel had a box of cereal in his office. And I walked with him as he zipped down to the cafeteria. They were out of regular milk.

Marcel Smith: Ladies? Ladies, how y'all doing? Can I get two chocolate milks, please? Thank you.

Ben Calhoun: Back in Marcel's office, the student sat quietly, staring down, and ate a plastic bowl filled with Honey Nut Cheerios and chocolate milk. Then he got up, politely washed the bowl and spoon, said thank you to Marcel, and the two went back to his classroom. You see situations like this all the time at Harper, situations that could so easily unravel.

And without thinking anything of it, they get addressed because someone is there and makes the effort to figure out what's going on. It's stuff that'll never show up in a school budget. But it can be the difference between a kid going back to class or getting suspended.

And it's these small, quiet successes - like getting a kid some food so he can go back to class - these are the things that adequate staffing makes possible. This is one of the ways that success in schools, and successful schools, get started.

Staffing matters, in large part because as a teacher you can't predict when you will be needed. Relationships can't be built without time, and without the time to spend with students when there is nothing wrong you will not be able to be as effective during times of stress.

And when I read about DC allowing Rocketship Education to open eight new schools against a backdrop of three existing charter schools failing, I think of the fragmented learning experience of the students within those schools. It's also worth noting that a central piece of RocketShip's model involves students spending a significant amount of time in front of a screen taking computerized adaptive tests, with limited staff contact.

According to Brian Jones, the outgoing chairman of DC's charter board:

Part of the genius of the charter model is it does allow for a certain innovative churn, where you close low performers and thereby create space for new innovators to come in and try new models

Unfortunately, "innovative churn" - here celebrated as "genius" - sounds a lot like anticipated failure. Innovative churn means closing schools that some kids likely see as an extension of their home. The low performers here are the people selling innovation that fails kids, and leaves kids taking the brunt of the consequences. I'm not going to hold my breath that these low performers will ever be held accountable.