Affected Clapping

The latest Education Week issue has a profile of teachers embracing “open resources”, those that are free to the public and easy to tweak for whatever your personal needs may be. I’m not claiming to have “invented” this idea; and it’s great to see it in more populated circles than my little blog.

Read the full article here.

Some highlights from the article:

Author Andrew Trotter lists some valuable resources for educators:

Open Educational Resources

•The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium makes available open educational resources that teachers can use to help high school and college students study biology by posing and solving problems and communicating with their peers, just as real scientists do.

•The Creative Commons is the nonprofit author of Creative Commons licenses, which allow content creators to tell others which rights to their specific works they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.

•FreeReading is an open instructional program to help teach early literacy through a 40-week scope and sequence of concepts and activities.

•The Math Open Reference is a free interactive math textbook, which covers high school geometry and plans to expand to other areas of math.

•The Open Educational Resources Commons is a comprehensive open-learning network where teachers from pre-K to higher education can share course materials and collaborate on educational issues.

I disagree with one of the commentators of the article. She states:

Why is scholarship not a concern when discussing open source resources for education? Good intentions are not adequate when we are in global competition for ideas, competency and a variety of literacies (sic).  We must value intellect, knowledge and learning. We must as a nation wean ourselves from drilling down into stupidity and embrace learning as if our very survival as a democratic nation is at stake.  Open source materials should have a review panel as does online journals before stuff is released to the public.

My retort:

The fact that textbooks are still a piece of school’s budget is a travesty. I can’t think of a more outdated educational learning tool.

C, you wrote, “Open source materials should have a review panel as does online journals before stuff is released to the public.”

I think you’re missing the point. Open source materials are valuable not b/c they’re “always right”, but because accessing the information is an educational experience in and of itself. Students are no longer looking up the “right answers” in a textbook; they’re doing real research, weeding through the admittedly massive amounts of data out there to find the answers to their specific questions. It’s a matter of student-centric learning, as opposed to students learning what textbook publishers deem “valuable.”

P.S. Since we’re on the topic of “Open” resources, you may be thinking, “is that picture of the Prophet Elias copywrited? Isn’t it illegal for Lee to use it in his blog post?”

Here’s the answer:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!