Open content

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.

Here is my dream:

A dozen schools join forces to share curriculum created by teachers over the span of an academic year. The curriculum could range from individual lessons to more structured units. They would publish these lessons under an open license (ideally, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike). Teachers from these dozen schools would publish these lessons on a blogging platform that allowed people to subscribe via RSS, and they would tag them according to subject and grade level.

Over the course of a year, these lessons could be aggregated into a central location. Then, over the summer, they could be organized into more structured collections that could begin to resemble textbooks. These textbooks would have soft spots and missing sections. These missing sections could then be targeted via specific outreach, and during the second year, lessons could be collected that filled these gaps. These lessons could then be aggregated into the main lesson repository, and mixed into the existing texts as needed.

Every year, for every class, teachers create original curriculum. Teachers are already doing this work. The missing piece, of course, is the sharing, which happens less frequently.

I think about this when I read about school districts selling publicly-funded curriculum to Pearson. I understand that school districts feel pinched, underfunded, and under pressure to find new revenue sources. However, the shortsightedness of selling this content to Pearson does nothing to provide a sustainable future for the district. If those texts had been released as an open resource, it would have saved countless districts an enormous amount of money.

Over the summer, we will be releasing our code for our Publishing Platform and Aggregation Hub. These tools will be freely available to all to download and use. This work has many applications; one of the ways it can be used is to aggregate, organize, and republish open content. I look forward to the day when teachers are again viewed as content experts, and purchasing a textbook from a company is viewed as an unnecessary, inefficient use of resources.

I ran across another eulogy for the not-dead-yet publishing industry; this one is written by Garrison Keillor and appeared in the New York Times.

Keillor's op-ed opens with a description of a Tribeca "rooftop party" replete with bestselling authors. The description of the party is almost Gatsbyesque, albeit smaller in scope, down to the detail of Keillor as a modern-day version of Nick, the star-struck midwesterner in the city. In any case, without going too far down the rabbit hole of authorial intent, the point is made: traditional publishing has elegance, style, and glory.

But all is not good. Keillor goes on to note:

These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think

Keillor is correct, of course, but it should be noted that traditional publishers are happy to give voice to this sentiment when it moves books. Sarah Palin has trumpeted this message from Alaska into the lower 48 as a part of, among other things, her book and the accompanying book tour. And book tours are increasingly rare these days, as publishing houses are less willing to take the risk on an expense that won't get repaid in book sales. From a business place, you can't blame traditional publishers from cutting back, but if you are making a case/waxing nostalgic about the good old days of publishing you can't ignore the role that publishing houses have played in crafting their decreased relevance. Unless, of course, you are writing fiction.

Keillor then proceeds to trot out one of the traditional digs leveled at a world without major publishing houses controlling the flow and distribution of texts (or, a world in which people of varying levels of expertise are allowed to have opinions on a subject):

And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

This argument is rooted in the basic notion of supply versus demand, and assumes that as supply goes up, demand - and therefore profitability - goes down. The notions of quality, choice, and taste are completely (intentionally?) left out of this conversation; I can only assume this oversight is allowed to stand because if we actually assume that people are rational actors with the ability to discern good from bad, we would also have to admit that "better" writers will be more widely read, no matter who controls how their work is distributed. The existing publishing houses and media companies have lost stature for many reasons, but in part because they provided too big a megaphone for too few people. On a side note, this is one of the reasons Net Neutrality is so important, as without net neutrality, Internet Service Providers could place comparable limits on how we are able to freely communicate over the internet.

The people who made money in the world of traditional publishing are predictably nostalgic for it - I understand this, as it's difficult to watch the thing that helped you become prominent wither and fade. But, as we begin to face the inevitable, we need to remember that the publishing houses supported a small number of authors and then distributed their creative output; they didn't actually enable the act of creation. Talent is talent, and the ability to articulate a nuanced point should not be conflated with the mechanism that distributes the resulting content. The demise of traditional publishing is not the same as the end of an author's right to profit from their creativity and perspective. However, the demise of traditional publishing should lead to the end of content distributors placing unrealistic and unhealthy restrictions on how people use and interact with our cultural inheritance in the name of protecting the author.

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.

Earlier this spring, the Knight Foundation let us know that our proposal to the Knight Drupal Initiative was accepted.

We are equal parts honored and excited, and work is underway.

Our project targets community media, and seeks to lower the barrier to entry for communities looking to collaborate with other like-minded groups via the web. One of the uses for our work will be within journalism, but other uses include collaborative creation of open courseware.

To be clear: this project will simplify the process of creating, distributing, and using open courseware. We want schools to spend less money on textbooks, and our work -- which will be freely available to all -- will support that goal.

As the project progresses, we will update this space with tutorials, status updates, etc. This page collects our Knight Drupal posts, or you can also subscribe via the feed.