All posts in educon

A General Schedule for an Open Content Barn Raising

Posted January 23rd, 2013 by Bill

Tomorrow, on January 24th, at Science Leadership Academy, from 10 to 4:30, we are having the first of several participant-led work days focused on authoring and sharing open content.

As we have discussed before, our goal is to create a framework that can be used by anyone, anywhere to hold similar community-led events for the purpose of authoring open content. Toward that end, here is a general schedule that we will use to structure the workday. We will likely adjust this as needed, but this general structure will get us started:

10 to 10:30 - Introductions - if people have specific goals for the day, we'll use the intros to help set priorities and, where appropriate, set people up in teams;
10:30 to 12:30 - Work;
12:30 to 12:45 - Pre-lunch check in - before we grab lunch, we will check in and see how people are progressing. If there are any issues that will benefit from the attention/work of the group, we'll look at them together;
12:45 to 1:45 - Lunch;
1:45 to 2:15 - Post-lunch check in - after people return from lunch, we'll revisit the goals we set in the morning. If any newcomers are joining us post-lunch, we'll get them set up and working;
2:15 to 4 - Work;
4 to 4:30 - Closing - in the closing conversation, we'll identify how people want to follow up on the day, including next steps, and what can be improved in future events.

Additionally, as part of our work with open content, we are building an open source content authoring platform. During the workday (and also during all of EduCon) we would love for some folks to work with us on some usability testing. We have a solid prototype in place, and a roadmap for future development, but we also want input from other people. If you are interested in learning more about user testing and aren't going to be at the Barnraising on Thursday, please get in touch with Andrea Burton - within FunnyMonkey, Andrea is the UX expert.

After the barnraising on Thursday, we'll post up a summary of the day. For those of you coming to the event, we'll see you tomorrow!

Amost-Educon Open Content Creation and Remix Fest - Thursday, January 24, 2013 at Science Leadership Academy

Posted November 14th, 2012 by Bill

You (yes, you!) are invited to a full day of open content creation, curation, remixing, and distribution with a group of content, technology, and open learning geeks.

Eventbrite - Amost-Educon Open Content Creation and Remix Fest

The event will be held Thursday, January 24th, from 10 to 4, in the library of Science Leadership Academy, the day before Educon begins. The event is free; please sign up to give us a sense of who will be coming. While the event is free, we are also asking participants to make a donation to Science Leadership Academy's Home and School Association. SLA's generosity in allowing us to use this space is pretty awesome.

As is probably obvious from the title of this post, we've been struggling with what to call this day, largely because the process of creating open content is part hackfest, part content authoring, part content curation, part old-fashioned work day. We'll be combining these elements, covering how to use Creative Commons licenses, and how to prepare and distribute resources in reusable formats. At the end of the day, we should all have sets of resources we can use and share whenever we want, and connections with people who want to continue to do this work.

If you are a teacher who is developing curriculum or class resources, come and work with us.

If you work at a school that wants to reduce the costs and inflexibility of traditional textbooks, come and work with us.

If you have been interested in learning more about open content, but didn't know where to start, come and work with us.

If you want to make sure that your students can have access to course materials over the web, on an iPad, on a Kindle, or on any mobile device, come work with us.

If you have been creating open content for the last 20 years, and want to keep on doing what you know works, come work with us.

The day will be spent creating and remixing open content; as we have been planning the event, there are four general goals:

At the end of the day, participants will walk out with resources they can use the next time they are teaching;
Create and extend connections between teachers who want to do more work with open content in the future;
Begin to create and curate a library of high quality, easily reusable openly licensed content;
Plan additional open content remixathons throughout the year; these can be virtual events, face to face events, or any combination thereof.

In the last year, we have seen some great community initiatives around open content. In particular, the work from Finland where a group of math instructors crowdsourced a textbook over a weekend provides a good example to emulate. A key takeaway - and an element that often goes overlooked in coverage of successful crowdsourcing events - is the planning and organization required before the event. This planning helps ensure that when the crowdsourcing begins, people already have a sense of what needs to be done, and who they will be working with. We are glad to help organize and coordinate introductions between people working on similar projects, and if people want to get working before the event, we'd be glad to help coordinate that as well.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up, and get to Science Leadership Academy on January 24th!

If you have any questions about the event, or how to get involved, please leave them in the comments or email me at bill (at) funnymonkey (dot) com.

Image Credit: "Three Leaves and a Berry" taken by Donnie Nunley, published under an Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license.

Notes From Educon Session: Crowdsourcing The Death Of The Textbook

Posted January 29th, 2011 by Bill

These are the notes from my Educon session earlier today.

A. What Problem Are We Trying To Solve?

Using textbooks built from open content mitigates common issues with traditional texbooks.

Cost

Accurate and reliable numbers for K12 education are hard to come by, but according to the College Board the average yearly cost for textbooks for an undergraduate student in a 4 year college is $1,137.

Restoring Teacher Autonomy and Learner Control

Sometimes, educational organizations make bad choices. If and when this occurs, the traditional textbook model can leave schools, teachers, and learners with some flawed choices. Traditional textbooks offer little recourse aside from buying a completely new text. A textbook model that allowed schools, teachers, and learners more control over the content they used in their learning would allow people the autonomy they needed to shape their learning to meet their needs.

Greater Quality and Accuracy

Textbooks contain mistakes. Sometimes we change our definitions, or learn new things.

Paper texts - and textbooks controlled and distributed by traditional publishers - are cumbersome to update, and often require repurchasing the updated book as a "revised" copy.

More Equitable Distribution of Resources

If the costs of acquiring high quality learning materials decreases, more people will be able to access them.

B. This Is A Political Issue

Publishing companies spend millions on lobbyists for our federal government.

For extra fun, search this Federal Lobbying Database for the Common Core Endorsing Partners.

The data on lobbying spent at the state level is more difficult to come by. If anyone has a source for getting this information at the state level, especially for Texas and California, please let me know.

C. What Isn't The Problem?

Availability.

Curriki, MIT's Open Courseware, OER Commons, Flexbooks, and Flat World Knowledge are providing content that is (in most cases) licensed under a Creative Commons license.

D. However

This open content languishes within content silos. Some courses provide the source materials as html downloads, but in many cases the material requires a level of technical expertise to copy in bulk that is beyond the reach of most educators.

From a technical place, these barriers are completely unnecessary. The only reason they exist is to defend a business model and/or a distribution model predicated on controlling access to content.

How's that working out for the music industry? Newspapers? Print in general?

E. But What About The Learning?

The problems laid out above would be less critical if the traditional textbook wasn't so intertwined with issues related to curriculum and assessment.

In VERY general terms:

Curriculum - which is aligned to standards - determines the scope and sequence of what gets taught.
Textbooks get written to address the needs defined by the curriculum.
Depending on the curriculum, and/or what gets purchased, the textbook package can include just introductory texts, or a full complement of lesson plans, test and quiz banks, and other ancillary materials.
Learning is reduced to student progress through the curriculum. It's important to note that this is not a necessity, but that this result is frequently an organizational decision, because:
Assessment focuses on measuring mastery of content to the exclusion of higher level skills.

In an educational landscape where people are attempting to measure school and teacher effectiveness based on student test scores, strange things can happen. Administrators can cook the numbers. Teachers alter tests of students. Administrators reinstate segregation based on race and gender.

F. The Problem Isn't The Textbook

Really.

The problem is how learning is assessed, and the role that the textbook plays within that context.

G. Moving Along

Breaking down the process of informal learning, we usually start with:

Base knowledge, or pre-existing knowledge. To do advanced chemistry, one must know how to balance equations. To discuss how Napoleon influenced 19th Century Europe, one must understand the French Revolution. Base knowledge can come from many sources, and textbooks are one of them.
Questions that frame the subject. In informal learning, these questions come from specific needs we have. The phrase "passion-based learning" has garnered attention of late, and as much as I despise perpetuating jargon, it's a decent image. But in any case, in a school setting, these framing questions can come from teachers, students, or other sources. Ideally, the people creating these framing questions are as close to the learners as possible, if they aren't the learners themselves.
Process. In this step, students create. The framing questions, on top of base knowledge, provide a scaffolding to support student inquiry. In an ideal world, this inquiry results in two distinct artifacts: first, student-created texts that show what they learned; and second, an analysis describing how they learned. Over time, these texts form a roadmap that demonstrate mastery of content and the processes through which mastery is obtained. These artifacts also provide concrete points for teacher or peer feedback.
Student created work can then be used as an additional means of assessing student growth over time.

H. And This Is Our New Open Textbook

Much of the existing work "reinventing" the textbook focuses on the device (iPad, anyone?). Efforts that are device centric will fail. They will probably get a lot of VC and grant money in the process, because they are shiny and can be used to create exciting marketing copy, but they will fail nonetheless, because they are trying to stuff a flawed model (both business and learning) into a new device.

There will always be a market for books that do a good job providing this base knowledge. Possibly, some of these "reinvented" textbooks will do a good job delivering this solid base material.

However, many texts that deliver base knowledge should be assembled from content that is freely available, easily remixable, and published under a Creative Commons license. Here, I'm specifically thinking of any introductory text to a core discipline, general history texts, grammar manuals, etc. This content already exists, and is already licensed under a Creative Commons license. Transforming it into a reusable form requires time and work, but once that work is done, we can all reap the benefits - and when I say "we" I'm thinking primarily about students, schools, and communities that would be able to access accurate, current information and adapt it to their local environment.

The second piece of the equation involves the framing questions and lessons we design around content. Teachers create these supporting materials regularly, yet few get shared even within schools, let alone with the greater world. All that is required to make this sharing happen is to publish them under a Creative Commons license on a blog that has an RSS feed.

I. People and Time

As noted earlier, the content exists. Good, accurate base content needs to be collected and edited by domain area experts. And yes, teachers are domain area experts.

People need to publish lessons on their blogs. Ideally, these lessons will be tagged with a subject and/or keywords.

More importantly, though, schools and administrators need to see this as an important worthwhile activity. Administrators need to advocate for the increased use of open texts within their schools. Parents need to ask their school boards why money is still being sent to textbooks companies unnecessarily. Teachers need to advocate for greater autonomy within the classroom. Unions need to negotiate for the creation and remixing of open content counting as ongoing teacher professional development. Schools of education need to educate students about the positive shifts that can occur in classrooms built around open content.

This is a lot of work. But the good news is that all of the content exists. The technological tools required to publish, collect, remix, and republish already exist. All we need now are people and time.

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.

Deadweight

Posted March 5th, 2010 by Bill

In an Op-Ed written by Ok Go member Damian Kulash Jr, he describes how his record company, with the help of YouTube, has made it impossible to embed their new videos in external sites. Since the change, there has been a marked drop in viewings of the Here It Goes Again video:

When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.

(Seriously, take some time and click on the above link to the video. $27.77 for 6 months? Wow)

Leaving aside the incredible shortsightedness of a policy that eliminates free marketing, I was struck by the deadweight that musicians carry with them as part of a record deal. Industry lawyers needed to vet this change in policy, industry PR and Marketing people needed to articulate this new strategy, and these people's salaries are paid by the talent of the musicians "represented" by the label.

(Photo credit: betseyweber, original available here)

Except that, as this situation clearly demonstrates, the business needs of the recording industry often run counter to the creative needs and processes of musicians. The recording industry is bloated with administrative deadweight that contributes little to nothing to the people creating music.

And the more I think about it, the more I see parallels between what is happening with music and what is happening with education.

In education, as in music, there is an Education Industry that has differing goals and interests of the people upon whom they depend for their continued existence. While the goals of the education industry do not need to diverge from the actual needs of students and teachers, in practice the needs of the education industry require that organizations spend money that has little or nothing to do with student performance.

A broad range of companies and organizations lobby Congress about Education (at the national level, as well as at the state and local levels); several of the larger textbook companies spend money for lobbyists. It's almost like they lobby on issues that dovetail with the products they sell, to the point where it's difficult to tell if the product line follows the legal requirements, or the legal requirements follow the product line. But in any case, it's probably easier to tease out the relationship between lobbyist influence and business needs than the relationship that any of this has to making schools a better place.

It's also worth noting the money spent on lobbyists spent by the College Board -- you know, the people that brings us the SAT and Friends, and who create a need for a test-preparation industry that rakes in millions from anxious teens and their parents. These players occupy space in the educational market, and generate an incredible amount of revenue, yet I doubt you will find many people making the argument that learning how to take the SAT brings greater intellectual growth than creating a portfolio. What could happen if the resources poured into test preparation were instead directed towards Arts education, or -- to help counter increased rates of obesity -- Outdoor Education?

The money spent on testing becomes even more questionable when one considers the apparent correlation between family income and student performance on tests.

The existing conference model of professional development provides another example where industry needs have diverged from the needs of teachers and learners. Virtually all of these conferences have a vendor driven model (about the only exception I know of is Educon). For vendors, these conferences are an opportunity to connect with (aka market to) the people they view as their customers. For attendees, however, this means that a portion of their professional development experience is cluttered with sessions devoted to salespeople extolling the virtues of their product in the educational process. There doesn't need to be a disconnect between the needs of companies and their customers, but the vendor-driven model tends to put the product as the focus, as opposed to the needs of the learner. A more authentic approach -- and the approach taken by many classroom teachers -- is to assess what students need, and assemble resources based on that need. However, using technology in response to a need -- rather than buying up technology because vendors offer district-wide rollouts -- doesn't help people make sales quotas, and doesn't convince vendors that their sponsorship dollars are well spent.

The next time you are at a conference, wander onto the vendor floor. Do a quick count of the number of booths, and the number of people at each booth, and what the vendors are giving away. The cost of this marketing is reflected in the cost of products sold to teachers, schools, and districts. Given that schools are increasingly being held accountable for the cost of supplies (how many teachers have had to supply paper for your classroom?), it would be nice to see something that resembles restraint from organizations that profit directly from schools.

The process of reworking how we teach and learn requires more than just changing how the interpersonal exchanges between teacher and student take place; it will also require a critical rethinking of how we assess learning, and a critical rethinking of how we equip ourselves to teach and learn. Many companies make a tidy profit within the current supply chain, and they will not passively go away simply because there are better ways of doing things that renders them obsolete. And in case you're wondering, a teacher's lobby doesn't feel like the answer; the American Federation of Teachers has been pretty active, and they haven't done much. I don't know whether we need to get on or off the treadmill, but we certainly need to get moving. The educator's voice -- the principals and teachers working in schools -- has been largely absent from the conversation. How can the people doing the actual work become more involved in shaping the policy?

Schools, the Internet, and Privacy

Posted February 11th, 2010 by Bill

In a recent listserv conversation, a participant asked about the steps schools are taking to monitor student computer use. One question dealt with the frequency with which browser histories on student machines were parsed, not as part of any examination into any suspected incidents, but as part of routine supervision and oversight of students.

I've seen more threads like this than I can count. Much of the impetus behind the more intrusive forms of supervision comes from a good motive: the desire to keep kids safe. High profile cases power calls for more supervision, as do "consultants" who conduct seminars tailored for the fears of parents and administrators (as an aside, if I remember the research correctly, scare tactics have been shown to have limited effectiveness for a short time period with students at or around middle school age. Scare tactics don't do much for older students. If any of my three readers knows better info on this, please share it in the comments).

But -- as people who work in and with schools, as people who help kids develop the skills to make rational, meaningful decisions about the world in which they live -- when do we have a responsibility to push back against well-intentioned but misguided efforts that conflate security with supervision?

Within the last two weeks, there have been news stories about the FBI wanting access to geolocation data obtained from cell phones, and the FBI wanting to require ISP's to retain web browsing records for two years. As we have seen before, even access to anonymized search records show an incredible amount of information about an individual. In the recent past, there was some outcry against the government requesting borrowing records from public libraries, and the entire question of warrantless wiretapping raised some hackles.

But the outcry against intrusions on privacy takes place against a backdrop where it's normal to share a steady stream of details about your life. My concern is that, if we make our schools into places where "normal" means having your browsing history tracked daily, people will take that level of supervision for granted. For a child born in 2002, a government that uses warrantless wiretapping is part of the fabric of their lives.

As teachers, as parents, as people who run schools, as people who care about kids: how are we empowering kids to develop their distinct interests, to take informed risks, to explore freely, and to know that it's okay to have hopes, fears, and dreams that are private, and intrinsically theirs until they choose to share?

I was at Educon 2.2 a little while back, and at that meetup we spent a lot of time talking about what school can and should be. I have been working on a follow-up post about the session, but I sense that as I try to make some sense about what learning can be within a context where there is a growing tension between constructive guidance and overbearing observation, part of what we all need to learn is how to deconstruct the myth that being observed and tracked makes us safer.

Portfolios, Open Content, and Educon

Posted January 30th, 2010 by Bill

Later today (January 30, 2010), I'll be running my session on portfolios.

From the session description:

The promise of the portfolio is that the demonstration of learning remains as close as possible to the process of learning, while allowing individual elements of the learning process to be highlighted and discussed as part of evaluation. This type of assessment creates a nuanced picture of how a person is developing as a learner.

Portfolios have been around for a while, yet they are still largely viewed as an "alternative" means of assessment. What are some of the barriers for adoption that exist? What are the arguments against using portfolios?

Also, as part of our work with portfolios, we have built out a system that can be used to support collaboratively authoring curriculum within and between organizations. This also has some uses for schools interested in creating curriculum maps.

With the exception of the theme, the code that runs this system is already available on Drupal.org; in the upcoming weeks, we'll be writing up how we built this site so others can replicate it. The theme will also be released as part of our work for the Knight-Drupal Initiative.