OER

In reading through the draft of the National Educational Technology Plan, I like the goals.

As one example, this page contains a graphic titled, "Learning no longer has to be one size fits all."

(Just FYI, the un-clickable link to the Creative Commons license in the above graphic is the work of the technology people behind the technology plan. That's not my doing. The image appears to be licensed under a CC-NC-SA license)

Further down the same page, it reads:

Technology also gives students opportunities for taking ownership of their learning. Student-managed electronic learning portfolios can be part of a persistent learning record and help students develop the self-awareness required to set their own learning goals, express their own views of their strengths, weaknesses, and achievements, and take responsibility for them.

This sounds great, but it just doesn't seem to align with the way that the Common Core standards are being forcibly injected into the educational landscape.

The plan also talks about Open Educational Resources. Secretary Duncan mentions OER's in a speech he gave on March 3, 2010 at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting:

Our commitment to Open Educational Resources includes a commitment to you: that they will be fully open, including open to commercial producers of learning materials who want to add value to these resources and sell enhanced, proprietary versions.

We see this step as both an investment in our students and an opportunity for your industry.

In practical terms, this means that textbook companies will be able to take resources that have been created using public funds, modify them slightly, and voila, the derivative works are no longer freely available. That's a very generous way to subsidize a dying industry. One way of reading this: textbook companies can spend less on developing texts, as they will be able build textbooks using the curriculum and assessments we will pay to get developed as part of Race to the Top/ESEA. Interestingly, as noted earlier in this post, the Department of Education uses the less restrictive Non-Commercial license for its graphics.

So, while the technologist/open source developer/open content advocate in me wants to be excited, the educator in me feels skeptical. The approach to the current Ed policy feels like a series of political calculations, wrapped in the almost obligatory "But think about the children" rhetoric. The actions -- and, more importantly, the funding strategies -- feel misaligned with the stated goals.

In the Executive Summary, it states:

The programs and projects that work must be brought to scale so every school has the opportunity to take advantage of that success.

It's difficult to see how unfunding the National Writing Project -- a program that works, that scales, and supports teachers as they develop resources in their local communities, and has been on the leading edge of technology use -- aligns with this goal.

The rhetoric around education policy has yet to line up with the effects of this policy.

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.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki

This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality.