All posts in textbooks

Open Educational Resources, Professional Development, and Public Money

Posted April 21st, 2013 by Bill

Yesterday, Darren Draper put out a post expressing some concerns with Teachers Pay Teachers. Shortly after putting out that post, Darren was forced to don his flame-and-troll-proof suit, as the comment thread got, well, interesting.

I'll get to the discussions in the comment thread later in this post, as a majority of the comments are illustrative of a small part of a larger problem.

OpenWashing, Teachers Pay Teachers Edition

Teachers Pay Teachers markets itself as "An open marketplace for educators where teachers buy, sell and share original teaching resources." In this context, Teachers Pay Teachers (or, TpT) provides a clear example of how the word "open" has been mangled beyond recognition.

For those of us working in open source and open content, our notions of openness generally share some common pedigree with the four freedoms of free software, the definition of Open Source, and the Creative Commons licenses. It's worth noting that, even within these broad definitions, there is often vehement disagreement as to what constitutes open. However, even while acknowledging that there is no universally accepted definition of what "open" really is, it's still safe to say that TpT isn't it.

"Open" does not equal "being on the internet."

TpT is a marketplace, and this is fine, but a marketplace that anyone can enter isn't an "open" space, at least not in the context of Open Educational Resources. TpT puts technically unneeded barriers in the way of reusing content; the most obvious of these barriers is the need for a login even to download a free resource. The business need of TpT (collect contact info) is in direct conflict with greater openness, and TpT lets the business need trump the tendency to be more open.

And, of course, this is fine - it's just not open. If, however, your actual practice conflicts with your marketing catchphrase, that's not good.

I'll return to the TpT at the end of this post, but now, we're going to jump into Darren's post.

Private Time, Public Money

Darren lays out seven reasons why he struggles with TpT. I'm highlighting 5, 6, and 7, below:

5. Public school teachers are paid by the taxpayers - with public funds - to work during specific hours of the day.
6. The computer and other equipment used by public school teachers were all likely purchased by the taxpayers, using public funds.
7. It is my belief that classroom activities, assessments, games, handouts, outlines, posters, printables, research, worksheets, and the like - that have been created by a public educator during work time or with school-owned equipment - belong to the public and should therefore be licensed with an appropriate, open license. Resources created with public funds should neither be bought nor sold by teachers because they were never the teacher's to sell in the first place. Because these resources were created with public funds, they belong to the public.

I checked the comment thread on Darren's post before staring to write this response. When I looked, there were 34 comments - 19 of those comments focused on when content was created - and this is illustrative of the larger problem.

The question of who owns teacher-created content - and the nuances of the time of day and equipment used to create the content - came up in several of the Open Content Authoring events we ran over the last several months.

Our advice to this question in the short term:

Work on your curricular material outside of school hours, and use your personal account. Store a copy on personal hardware (an external hard drive, a personal blog, a personal Google Apps account, etc);
Let your district know that their policy on intellectual property creates an unnecessarily adversarial relationship around curriculum planning;
Let your district know that their policy on intellectual property creates a disincentive to you doing your best work, as the only way you can maintain ownership over your work is to do it outside "normal" working hours on your own equipment;
If you belong to a union, bring this to union leaders as an issue that needs to be on the table as part of contract negotiations;
Incorporate a piece of Creative Commons Licensed content into EVERYTHING you do for your work - make sure it is licensed under the Share-Alike clause. This means that your District can claim ownership of it, but that due to the nature of the license, you (and anyone else) is free to reuse it under the terms of the CC license.

In Darren's comment thread, the fact that so many commenters were fixated on the timing issue flags the reality that people are having a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. Fighting about the time of day when you are allowed to maintain control of your creative output means that you are living in the box that people laid out for you. Fighting about the time of day when you can do your work means that your perspective is limited at the outset. This comment illustrates the predicament perfectly:

I was so with you on this post, until it hinted that items were most likely being created on school time and/or with school equipment. I would encourage you to spend a week with me to see that I don't have enough hours in my "school day" prep time to make my weekly schedule, copy/assemble resources, grade papers, record grades, communicate with parents, and supervise my students during additional remediation opportunities. I consider myself lucky to sneak in a second bathroom break each day! :)
All of my TpT products are made by me, at home, on my personal equipment with software I've purchased myself (my classroom computer is a desktop that is over 8 years old) .That's *after* I have spent numerous additional hours per week grading papers, inputting grades, and emailing parents (from home, on my own computer). My dear husband can attest to the hours he has spent helping me cut, laminate, recut, and assemble centers for my kiddos.

The workload issues here sound very typical of most teachers that I know. There is not enough time in the workday to cover their professional responsibilities, so work comes home. Work spills into weekends. Budgets for supplies have been slashed, so teachers buy supplies out of their own pocket. School equipment is outdated or locked down to the point of unusable, requiring much prep to take place outside of school networks, on non-school machines. Teaching doesn't fit into the hours defined in most contracts, and teachers put in significant time outside of traditional working hours, in addition to spending their own money on class supplies.

And this is the conversation we should be having: why are teachers expected to power the underfunded mandates of increased reporting in the era of high stakes testing, with fewer resources, less support, in a work day that doesn't have room for all the demands on teacher time? Districts that have policies that claim ownership of teacher intellectual property are perpetuating that absurdity, and this absurdity needs to be addressed and clarified in employment contracts. Unions need to make this an issue as well.

Lessons Are Not The Ultimate Goal

The problem - and a shortcoming - of both traditional textbooks and content silos like TpT is that they treat a lesson as the stopping point. This makes sense for them, because both textbook companies and TpT make money from distribution. If there is no sale, there is no revenue. From a business place, this makes perfect sense.

Creating and using open content approaches the same problem - how do I get the best possible material to my class - from a different place. Teachers can use open content exactly as they would use a textbook, or a piece of content purchased from TpT; for many people, that is where their understanding of open content ends. However, that vision of open content is incomplete, and rooted in our habits of using material with restrictive licensing.

There are different levels of using open content; teaching lessons that use open content is the starting point. Remixing material that incorporates two or more openly licensed sources is a next step. Releasing that remixed version is the next step. Collaborating with other people to edit and remix content is an additional level of involvement.

And, if you look at the trajectory of using open content, it resembles the trajectory of learning. It's not a transaction (go here, buy this) - it's a series of interactions of increasing complexity, each of which requires judgment and expertise. Over time, building and using open content develops a professional network and a collection of domain level experts to work with. Working with people to create open content is some of the best ongoing professional development out there, and districts would be wise to embrace and support this reality. Rather than make absurd claims over ownership of teacher IP, they could divert some professional development money into supporting teacher time in a facilitated authoring process that spanned the course of a year. The resulting material could be released under a Creative Commons license, ensuring that teachers and the district were given the appropriate credit for their role in creating and funding the work, and material created with public money would remain available for public use.

Image Credit: "Money, get away!" taken by kiki follettosa, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

Talking About Textbooks

Posted February 4th, 2013 by Bill

As we work on open content, I try and separate my notions of the textbook from my notions of the textbook industry.

At its most basic, a textbook provides a starting point for the processes of learning. Textbooks can be used well, or used poorly, but this is an implementation issue. In the same way, some textbooks are better than others. But, the right text in the right hands can do a world of good.

However, the textbook industry gets into political, economic, and public policy issues. The means by which the Common Core standards came into being, and came to be adopted by 48 states, 2 territories, and the District of Columbia illustrates the issue.

On July 1, 2009, the working groups charged with "determining and writing the college and career readiness standards in English-language arts and mathematics" were announced. The initial working groups consisted of 28 people; 14 apiece for Math and English. Of the 28 people, 7 worked for ACT, 8 worked for Achieve, and 7 worked for the College Board. Or, in other words, fully half of the people on the initial working group worked for testing organizations. Achieve is an interesting organization, dedicated to advocating for college and career readiness. Their board includes no educators, and as far back as 2002, their executive vice president observed that 4 companies have a monopoly on the testing industry, and that this was a problem solely because these companies might not be able to create new tests quickly enough.

Additionally, both the Math and English Language Arts working groups had representatives from an organization called America's Choice - and yes, this is the America's Choice that was acquired by Pearson in August, 2010.

A look at the original endorsing partners for the Common Core (retrieved via archive.org, because this information is no longer available on the Common Core site) reveals more of the usual suspects: Pearson, Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, EdisonLearning, McGraw-Hill, and Wireless Generation, to name a few.

So when people are talking about textbooks in the era of Common Core, we are talking about a landscape where a select few people and organizations with both a vision and a business interest in education got together to write new standards, write new textbooks that "meet" the new standards, and write the assessments that determine whether these standards are working. Simultaneously, the narrative around teacher effectiveness began to include (not for the first time, but certainly in a more concerted way) calls for measuring teacher effectiveness and school performance against performance on test scores.

However, there is a political dimension as well. A quick look through the federal lobbying records shows that the same organizations that are writing the Common Core standards, writing curriculum for the Common Core Standards, and writing assessments for the Common Core standards, are also spending millions to affect laws about education.

And the links above just show lobbying at the Federal level. It doesn't show any of the expenditures at the state level, or how spending is being dumped into local school board elections.

Textbooks are both a political and an economic issue. The requirements for new curriculum and new tests to meet the manufactured need caused by widespread Common Core adoption can be seen as corporate welfare on an overwhelmingly large scale, and as a way of funneling public money into private entities.

But, textbooks are also a learning tool, and the role of the textbook in the learning process can be considered separately from the large companies that currently dominate the textbook space. We need to reclaim the text as part of how we work. Open content provides a way to do that, but to work effectively it helps to understand the landscape within which we work.

A Word For Those Who Say Textbooks Are Hard To Create

Posted January 16th, 2013 by Bill

Some follow up thoughts on this earlier post on open content.

As we talk about open content, one of the refrains we hear pretty regularly goes something like this:

Creating a high quality textbook requires skills in marketing, sales, web design, [fill-in-skill-here], and that is too much to expect from people who aren't professionals.

A similar, related objection to open content is that the resources created and released under an open license don't come with any test banks or evaluations.

I generally nod politely when I hear these objections because they have nothing to do with the process and value of creating open content, and everything to do with the business model of selling access to content. These are two different things.

If you look at content as a product that needs to be sold (ie, as a fixed entity, like a textbook) then your sales channels, your product marketing team, and the skills needed for marketing become necessary for your business. But, this perspective takes a narrow approach on what open content can be, and reduces it to just a replacement for a textbook. This perspective misses how the value of open content accrues over time. Or, in other words, open content should not be blamed for the failure or success of business models that need to sell content.

In response to the people who feel the need to have assessments packaged alongside open content as a pre-requisite for a broader adoption of open content: first, if you want assessments, write assessments. Nothing is stopping you.

Second, the question of assessment -- and the related questions of how, what, and when to assess -- is a larger, and very open, question. Arguably, one of the ways to view the new goals of the Common Core standards and the "next-generation assessments" they appear to require is as a form of corporate welfare carefully sculpted to the large textbook companies that played a guiding role in writing the standards. Making the claim that open content needs to be packaged with ancillary tools that address the unanswered question of assessment is a bait and switch; it can be a well-intentioned bait and switch, but it's not relevant to open content adoption, as assessment can be defined in many ways in many places. The fact that textbook companies package texts and assessments together shouldn't actually confuse us into thinking that the assessments sold are actually good. Convenience doesn't always come with quality.

Third, making the claim that a set of learning resources must be tied to a set of assessments in order for the resources to have value puts too narrow a focus on what learning can and should be. This view of assessment is generally found among those who see open content as just a replacement for a textbook, rather than a way to reimagine the role of texts in our learning and professional development.

In closing, lest anyone get the wrong impression, I agree that quality content is hard to create. It requires work, and time, and attention to detail, and review, and fact-checking. But, textbooks used in classroom settings are commonly adapted to the needs of the classroom, with chapters ignored, replaced, and/or augmented. At least with open content, these modifications can be edited back into the resource so that future classes don't need to reinvent these modifications. However, the fact that texts are commonly modified or only partially adopted serves to prove the larger point: people working in classrooms at any level commonly make adjustments to their texts. Open content makes it easier for that modification process to be recognized as what it is: a domain level expert adapting a resource to meet a specific educational need.

Image Credit: "OER" taken by Open.Michigan, published under an Attribution license.

If We Outsource Standards, Curriculum, and Assessment, What's Left?

Posted October 15th, 2012 by Bill

In the NY Times this weekend, they ran a story about parents in New York City schools boycotting field tests, or standardized tests written by Pearson that test what questions should go on the actual test.

The standardized test review and update is needed because the current standardized tests don't align with the Common Core standards.

From the article, a couple details emerge:

Pearson charges the city to give sample tests that will then help them write the test; in other words, the school district is paying for kids to act as free labor and lose instructional time so that Pearson can write a test that the district can buy;
The current tests aren't accurate enough to reliably indicate progress, and Pearson doesn't have enough information to make them accurate without using kids as subjects. From the article:

The existing standardized tests no longer reflect what New York’s children are learning and do not accurately assess instruction, according to Adina Lopatin, deputy chief academic officer in the New York City Education Department.
The new tests that are in the process of being written (the ones that don't have final form yet) will supplant the old tests (the one's that aren't accurate enough) as a means used to measure a school's progress. In other words, the means to measure progress isn't anchored to anything real, as comparing the old to the new is a rotten apples to unripe oranges comparison.

The school district is paying Pearson to have kids lose instructional time and act as unpaid market research subjects so that Pearson knows enough to write the test that will then be used to determine whether the schools are doing their job teaching the new curriculum that aligns to the new standards.

Taking a step back: Pearson was part of a small group of textbook companies, pharmacuetical companies, for-profit educational companies, and technology firms that were the original endorsing partners for Common Core. This information is no longer readily available on the current Common Core web site, but it is still accessible via the Internet Archive of the Common Core web site. Pearson also lobbies at the state and national level around education bills, and actively courts educational decision makers with junkets and other perks.

To put it more succinctly, Pearson helped write the standards. Pearson paid lobbyists to help shape the laws. Pearson sells curriculum and assessments designed to help schools meet the new needs that they helped create, while actively courting educational decision makers with "fact-finding" trips. The fact that a school can use a Pearson-written to prepare for a Pearson-written exam, and that the results of that exam determine how successful or unsuccessful that school is doing, is troublesome.

And in fairness, other textbook, media, and technology companies are in the education space are doing similar things. Pearson, however, is one of the biggest, and they also provide a good example of how companies can inject themselves into multiple points of the supply chain to meet a demand that they helped create.

New standards require new curriculum - this curriculum must be bought or developed.

New curriculum requires new assessments - these assessments must be bought or developed.

New laws tying school and teacher performance to scores on tests raises the perceived importance of standards-aligned curriculum and assessments - schools ignore the standardized approach to instruction at their peril. Or, like so many others, when faced with mounting external pressures in a system that measures test scores as opposed to learning, they cheat.

And, coincidentally, companies like Pearson who were at the table when the standards were written just happen to offer curriculum aligned to those standards, and assessments aligned to the new curriculum. Given the number of states who have adopted Common Core, we are talking about a lot of money that schools and districts now need to spend - or, in other words, given the timeline of Common Core standards adoption and the penalties for "falling behind," many school districts now have a large incentive to play it safe and just buy the curriculum. The fact that this is also a way of funneling huge amounts of public money into private companies? Meh. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?

So, to the parents in New York keeping their kids home: kudos. Keep it up.

In Our Time

Posted October 24th, 2011 by Bill

Over the weekend, I stumbled over my first copy of In Our Time. I picked up this copy nearly thirty years ago; I was travelling in England playing soccer with a high school team, and as we meandered over the UK in a variety of busses and trains, I read and re-read the book. On the same trip, I had also picked up a copy of Blood on the Tracks, and this provided a good soundtrack for the Nick Adams stories. Yesterday, having stumbled over the text, I carved out the time, and wandered aimlessly through the pages. After a few hours, craving trout, I re-emerged into my life.

The first computer I ever used was a Sinclair ZX 81; since then I have used countless desktop and laptop computers, phones, and tablets (and yes, Apple fanboys, an iPhone is on the list). I recently read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen on an iPad. It's a great read, and I tore through it, but once I had finished it, I was done, despite the fact that I carry the book with me on the iPad.

And maybe this is relevant, or maybe this is maudlin, or maybe this is more a reflection of personal taste, but none of the technological devices I have experienced carry a fraction of the emotional weight of this thin paperback - bought used nearly thirty years ago for pocket change. We do a lot of work around digital texts and open content, and in the next few months we'll be doing a lot more. As we do this work, we will make sure that we incorporate the things that resonate with people, and stick with us over time.

Bring Open Content To Your School

Posted May 15th, 2011 by Bill

Fred Bartels put out a post this morning on the ISED Listserv about how independent schools (aka private schools) can play a greater role in creating open content that could be reused anywhere, by anyone.

If we can get some leadership then it would be fairly straight forward (hard but not particularly complicated) to combine our strengths to create wonderful and brilliant online open-source textbook replacements that could serve our students along with all the other students in the US and the rest of the world.

Why aren't we doing this?

Fred's thoughts are worth reading in their entirety. Peter Gow also posted some thoughts on the idea.

This is something we have been working on and thinking about for a while, and it's hard to say whether this is more a failure of leadership, or whether organizations lack the commitment (both financial and philosophical) to truly opening their process to a larger world.

In any case, independent schools (or really, any school or school district) could make an incredible contribution here simply by encouraging teachers to publish individual lessons under an open license. This would cost nothing, as teachers are already generating original materials as part of their daily work.

The piece of this that requires resources (time and money) would be having a collection of subject-area experts curate and repurpose these openly licensed materials into coherent units.

These units themselves would also need to be made available under an open license, so that they could be remixed and reused.

The challenge here is that it requires an organization or school to step up and commit to doing this - and "doing this" means both supporting the work to create open textbooks, and then using those textbooks to deliver courses. In a time where there is increasing pressure to get students into the "best" college available (ie, college admission is the goal of school, as opposed to learning) doing something that deviates from the norm is a risk. It's more convenient to use the language of progressive education than to actually educate progressively.

But the actual work of creating these resources would not be difficult. Many of these resources already exist, but not in a format that is easy to reuse or remix. Some content would need to be written, some editorial work would be required to ensure that the units and content held together as a coherent whole, but these are issues that can be solved with time and attention to detail.

The challenges here are not technical, nor are they related to not knowing how to proceed. The only barrier here is getting funding to support people to do the work.

Image Credit: "Free Range" taken by Phil King, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

Energy Tour, Brought To You By Scholastic and Climate Change Deniers

Posted May 15th, 2011 by Bill

Recently, the publisher Scholastic Inc. has been getting some publicity for the way they have been distributing a slanted curriculum favorable to the interests of the pro-coal lobby.

In addition to the Rethinking Schools article, the subject was covered in a NY Times editorial, and Mother Jones article.

Scholastic issued a statement describing their position:

"A tiny percentage of this material is produced with sponsors, including government agencies, non-profit associations and some corporations."

The Scholastic statement continues:

We acknowledge that the mere fact of sponsorship may call into question the authenticity of the information, and therefore conclude that we were not vigilant enough as to the effect of sponsorship in this instance.

So, given that Scholastic is aware that the "mere fact of sponsorship may call into question the authenticity of the information" I was surprised to see Energy Tour, a complete learning resource on energy use and consumption sponsored by the Institute For 21st Century Energy (a sub-group of the US Chamber of Commerce). Moreover, this material is all copyrighted by the US Chamber of Commerce. To be clear: Scholastic appears to be delivering an energy curriculum that belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, under the Scholastic brand.

Screencap of Chamber of Commerce Sponsorship

By way of a brief refresher, the folks at the Chamber of Commerce have a spotty record on climate change, and have been among the leaders in denying climate change. Among other things, they wanted to put the science of climate change on trial:

"Chamber officials say it would be 'the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century' -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

'It would be evolution versus creationism,' said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. 'It would be the science of climate change on trial.'"

Why is an enormous textbook publisher and distributor working so hard to distribute the message of people who are attempting to distort the scientific record?

As issues like this arise, it continues to make the point that Open Educational Resources are essential to the future of learning. Corporations have an obligation to make a profit, which is fine, but when the drive to make a profit trumps the obligation to provide unbiased learning materials, the people responsible for helping people learn have an obligation to seek out and create better material.

There's This Thing. It's Called The Internet

Posted January 3rd, 2011 by Bill

It looks like iPad magazine sales are down.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's not about content, it's about interaction and the ability to find and remix the things that matter to you.

With the declining magazine sales on the iPad, it's hard not to see this as another nail in the coffin of the "you will pay for my content tethered to my device" business model.

And it's fun watching the music industry and the publishing industry flail about, largely because the textbook industry is next. The textbook industry has been able to buffer their fall because they have a captive audience. Textbook industry involvement in the development of new standards can be seen as a way for the industry to play a role in designing the cages in which they want to lock districts, schools, teachers, and learners for the next several years.

But the internet solves many of the logistical issues related to distribution. And people can learn without traditional textbooks. And people are voting with their feet - by running away, fast - from delivery models that tether content to a specific channel or distributor.

There's this thing. It's called the internet. It works.

Image Credit: "It's the internet" taken by Robert Jagger, published under an Attribution-Share Alike license.

Does Anyone Know More Details About The CME Project?

Posted December 22nd, 2010 by Bill

I came across the CME project recently while reading through the comment thread over at Dan Meyer's place.

At first glance, this project looks very interesting:

CME Project is a four-year, NSF-funded, comprehensive high school mathematics program that is problem-based, student-centered, and organized around the familiar themes of Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Precalculus.

And further down the page:

CME Project standards-based mathematics curriculum and CME Project content-based professional development provided by EDC address the goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.

This looks awesome! A four year math curriculum, complete with professional development for teachers, and all developed with National Science Foundation and Recovery money from the US Government! I can't wait to see this curriculum! More importantly, I'm really excited to see how it can be remixed and reused and improved alongside other project-based learning exercises.

So I follow the link to Tables of Contents, and check out Algebra 2.

And there's just a text-based breakdown of the contents. No links. No actual problems. Just descriptions. Nothing that is actually useful.

And then I return to the home page, and read the second line:

The series was developed by the Center for Mathematics Education at Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) in Newton, Massachusetts, and is published by Pearson Education, Inc.

Is it really possible that in 2010, curriculum that is developed using public money can only be accessed by buying it from a private entity? Can someone tell me what I'm missing here?

Does anyone know more details about this project? Will this curriculum and the accompanying professional development materials ever be released under an open license that permits reuse?

Image Credit: Photo "CreativeTools.se - PackshotCreator - Head scratcher" taken by Creative Tools, published under an Attribution license.

Et Tu, Bruté? Crowdsourcing The Death Of The Textbook

Posted October 20th, 2010 by Bill

There's nothing quite as nice as a trip to Philadelphia in January.

Personally, I go for the weather. But, as luck would have it, Educon also takes place then.

All kidding aside, if you can make the time to go to any conference this year, make it Educon. More than other conferences I have attended, the organizers at Science Leadership Academy do a phenomenal job at keeping the conference focused for practitioners. Students participate in sessions, and real live teachers (as opposed to vendor sales reps) run a significant proportion of the sessions.

Here is my proposal; I hope it gets selected, and I look forward to seeing you at Educon.

Short Description

Do you want to design a course reader/curriculum for your class that you can control, edit, update, and share? Do you want to connect with colleagues inside and outside your school? Do you want your work accessible on handheld devices for your students? Then open content, and this session, is for you.

Extended Description

The traditional textbook model revolves around a fixed, unchanging printed text. This model has significant weaknesses; many teachers spend a fair amount of time preparing lessons and activities that extend, augment, or replace textbooks. These teacher-generated materials, along with a growing body of freely available open content, have some significant advantages over traditional textbooks - including price, more timely updates, and the complete flexibility to modify or customize a text, to name a few.

Teachers already prepare educational materials as part of class preparation. If these materials were shared, in a reusable format, under an open license we would have a growing body of teacher written, classroom tested material that can be then be remixed, reused, improved, and redistributed.

In this session, we will examine ways to connect with educators to author, share, and reuse content, using tools many of us are already using, to increase the reach of work many of us are already doing.

Conversational Practice

This method of developing and using content is predicated on continuous, ongoing conversations between teachers. In this context, the definition of "open content" expands to encompass not just learning objects (those stale, encrusted metaphors of centralized control), but the concepts taught, the activities used, and observations around what worked and what didn't within a specific lesson or unit. The process of converting a traditional textbook into a learning tool that captures an ongoing conversation about a subject at a specific point in time does more than simply replace some dead trees with a more vibrant (and cost effective) alternative. It helps reshape our learning habits in school to resemble our learning habits in life.

On the practical side, this session will also cover how to set up your very own remixing engine, using open source components that can be assembled and installed by a moderately technical person in 30 minutes or less.