Open Educational Resource

Earlier today, Lisa Nielsen asked a question about a book on mobile phones. Her question got me to thinking about a book I'd like to see that addressed the use of handhelds and phones in education.

Section 1: Getting Started

• Chapter 1: A Brief History of Handheld and Mobile Devices. This chapter would be look at how this space has developed. Possibly, it could attempt to draw an existential distinction between the tablet, the laptop, the handheld, the PDA, and the smartphone.
• Chapter 2: What's What? A breakdown of the differences between different phones and handhelds that are currently available. How are these devices different from one another? How do these differences support different types of learning activities?
• Chapter 3: Operating Systems. This doesn't need to be too technical; rather, it just needs to provide an overview of the relative strengths and weaknesses between the iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry, Linux, and Windows based operating systems.
• Chapter 4: Handheld Devices and Connecting To The Internet. Part of this chapter should be devoted to data plans, and how the wrong data plan can trigger surprising costs.

Section 2: Approaches To Learning

• Chapter 5: Project-Based Learning. This chapter would explore how handhelds can be used to support project-based learning. This chapter would introduce high-level concepts.
• Chapter 6: Handhelds and Storytelling. This chapter would outline strategies for digital storytelling and community media that can be supported/enhanced via mobile devices.
• Chapter 7: Portfolios. This chapter would examine methods of using handhelds to support portfolio-based assessment/portfolio-based discussions of learning. This chapter would address strategies for teacher and student collected artifacts.

Section 3: Strategies and Lessons You Can Use

This section would provide strategies that could be implemented in classrooms. It would build off the theoretical base presented in the initial two sections to give people tools they can use, immediately. Ideally, many of these lessons/units would work across traditional curricular boundaries.

• Chapter 8: Early grades (K-2).
• Chapter 9: Elementary (3-5).
• Chapter 10: Middle School (6-8).
• Chapter 11: High School (9-12).
• Chapter 12: Adult Learning and Ongoing Professional Development.

And, at the risk of stating the obvious, this book would need to have an accompanying web site. Without this, much of the information in it would become obsolete quickly; while this would benefit publishers, it wouldn't benefit actual readers. Having this information freely available as open content on a web site would also allow this content to be accessed via the same handhelds described in the actual book; this would be both symmetrical and useful.

As I clean up this post, I actually wonder how much of this information already exists on the internet. If someone actually wants to write this book, that would be awesome! But I suspect that much of this content is already created and dispersed on the web; if that is the case, and you know where it is, feel free to throw links in the comments. I'll gladly rework this post to include links to any relevant information, and will give credit to both the people who passed on the link, and the original source of the content.

As an aside, I read Lisa's original post on my phone as I returned home from the office. As I prepared dinner (grilled shrimp marinated in lemon juice/olive oil/white wine/garlic/dill; over pasta, with a salad), I broke away periodically to read sections of this post into voice recognition software on my phone. Before lighting the grill (an old-school Weber, since you asked) I emailed it to myself. As the coals heated, I cleaned up the formatting, and did a final spell-check. In other words, before I had a phone, I probably wouldn't have written this, but a handheld device lowered the convenience threshold just enough to make it possible for me to write this out.

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.

This post is adapted from my post over at Sylvia Martinez's Generation YES blog. Her post is titled Why open curriculum wikis won’t work. As my title suggests, I have a different viewpoint.

From my comment:

There is an enormous gap that is not addressed between wiki curriculum and delivery in the classroom — you allude to it in your closing when you say: “But hoping random lesson plans can knit themselves into a coherent curriculum is just magical thinking. At best, teachers may find a few nuggets they can adapt for their own classrooms.”

So, the problem here isn’t in wiki-style curriculum repositories. The problem is twofold: first, most existing repositories are content silos; second, the workflow of teachers isn’t considered in how open content is published. Neither of these issues are inherent in open content or wiki-style curriculum tools.

I don't usually pass these things on.

Particularly in the case of videos -- but this, created by Tony Hirst, was too good not to share.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for posting about this.