Category Archives: Education

the open source curriculum: wikimania

A little over a week ago, at the first international Wikimedia conference (Wikimania) in Frankfurt, Wikipedia founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales presented a free culture manifesto comprising ten problems, or, “ten things that will be free” over the course of the next generation. Invoking the famous “23 problems” presented by mathematician David Hilbert to the world mathematics community in Paris in 1900, Wales laid out the ten forms of information that he believes have a solid chance of actually becoming free, provided that his burgeoning Wikimedia empire, and other similar ventures, continue to gain influence.

The list:
1. free the encyclopedia
2. free the dictionary
3. free the curriculum
4. free the music
5. free the art
6. free the file formats
7. free the maps
8. free the product identifiers (e.g. ISBN etc.)
9. free the TV listings
10. free the communities (e.g. web forums, wiki hosting sites etc.)

Recently a guest writer on the Lessig blog, Wales had the opportunity to expand on some of the ten items. I found the “free the curriculum” entry particularly suggestive, especially considering recent feeble efforts from textbook publishers to adopt an electronic model (see “tired of feeling so used, textbook publishers go digital”). Wales predicts that “a complete curriculum in English and a number of major languages will exist by 2040, and translation to minor languages will likely follow soon after.”

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

Wales dreams that Wiki Books – a clearinghouse of free, open content textbook modules – will lay the groundwork for this new era of openness. There’s not a whole lot there yet, certainly nothing to match the 22 million articles that in half a decade have filled the pages of Wikipedia. But let’s wait and see.
I would guess that it won’t be Americans or Europeans who will make the first big move into open source curricula. The West may be a great source of ideas, but it is also a stronghold for the entrenched interests of publishers and software companies. In so-called developing nations, there is much less to lose and probably much more to gain from experimenting with something like Wiki Books. Take a look: someone has even “wiki-fied” the entire National Curriculum of South Africa as a skeleton for the kind of public domain curriculum Wales has forecast. Right now, free software is spreading rapidly through the developing world, especially in educational initiatives. Freeing the curriculum would be a logical next step. If or when these changes take root, we’ll find ourselves living in a very different world.

Over the next few days, I’ll be discussing some other open curriculum initiatives. Stay tuned.
new post now up: MIT’s OpenCourseWare

electronic reference works contribute to innovation

Electronic reference works are exploiting the unique capabilities of the digital medium and educators are incorporating these innovations into curriculum material. The atlas, for example, has its internet counterpart in: MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and others. These electronic data sets are being used as material for student projects like Jimmy Palmer’s gCensus, which is constructed from Google Maps and data extracted from the 2000 United States Census. Of the project, Palmer says:

I recently completed my Masters of Science in Computer Science at The University of Mississippi. One of the classes I took during my last semester was a course concerned with processing large quantities of data. Specifically, the course focused on scientific data collected in such fields as fluid dynamics, physics, and weather. The class was small, about a dozen people, and this allowed the class to be somewhat informal in nature. We read two or three published research papers per week and discussed the papers in round table discussions during class meetings.
One of the assignments we were given was open-ended. The assignment was to “do something interesting with a large data set”. I looked around at possible datasets and came across the census data. At approximately ten gigabytes, I thought it qualified as a large data. At the same time, spring 2005, Google had just released its map technology. I thought the two were a perfect match and gCensus is the result.

As we consider the ways in which textbooks are evolving in the digital medium, we must also look at how electronic reference material is created, archived, and accessed. Changes in the use and nature of reference works may engender changes in teaching methods and tools.

tired of feeling so used, textbook publishers go digital

CNET News reports that ten schools, including Princeton, the University of Oregon, and the University of Utah, are to participate this fall in a trial program in which college bookstores will offer digital editions of high-demand titles at a 33% mark-down from print prices. In exchange for these enormous savings, students get to download one, intensely straight-jacketed .pdf file – a book that is readable on only one machine, cannot be printed out in full, and will expire after 150 days.
Some of America’s biggest textbook publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, and Thomson Learning are offering digital titles in the program through wholesaler MBS Textbook Exchange. Their aim? To tempt cash-strapped students away from used textbooks, the bane of the textbook industry. All in all, it’s a cynical move that implicitly acknowledges the absurdly inflated price of print textbooks, yet offers only token relief, trying to pass off self-destructing, digital facsimiles as a reasonable substitute for a perfectly durable, slightly dinged used book.
What the textbook publishers ought to be doing is cultivating a more creative vision of the digital textbook, and getting over their terror of online distribution, which they can only see as an intellectual property disaster. Textbook publishers should take a look around and see that there are ways to make good business online. Charge for the service, not the copy – explore syndicated content that students can subscribe to at reasonable rates. Develop new kinds of multimedia titles that can truly take advantage of the online environment. Stop spending millions on digital rights management, stop worrying about your precious copies getting stolen.
On the web, everything is a copy, and it’s pointless trying to police this reality. What’s meaningful is access, what’s meaningful is staying up to date. Develop a good service, with consistently updated, valuable content, and students and professors will buy in. If the textbook industry does not wake up and adapt, they could find themselves in the ash heap. More on that to come.

n.y. times examines “the digital student”

With August comes the ritual back-to-school mania, and fittingly, there’s a large special section in today’s Times on the “digital student.” At a glance, it seems to focus heavily on gadgets – a sort of fashion spread for the accessorized student – but there are also articles looking at social software in the classroom and new pedagogical methods. Could be interesting.

e-slates in kenya

A pilot program in Kenya gives 54 fifth grade students pocket PCs in lieu of textbooks (BBC story). Known in the school as “e-slates,” the handheld computers run on open source software and contain digitized print textbooks, but could eventually support multiple media materials. The whole classroom is connected through a wireless network, which allows texts to be updated seamelessly, and may ultimately enable homework assignments to be passed between teacher and pupil without a single sheet of paper. But that will depend on a reliable network connection and a steady supply of electricity, neither of which are a given.

the paperless high school

According to a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star, Empire High School in Vail, Arizona will soon become the state’s first all-wireless, all-laptop public school. The laptops will entirely replace paper textbooks. Traditional lesson plans will be built around online articles and electronic reference material. Adminstrators are betting that this flexible teacher-driven curriculum will inspire both students and teachers.

Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.

Educators also believe the initiative will improve learning, engage tech-saavy students, and better prepare them for future careers.

Networked Pedagogies: Opensourcing the Writing Classroom

Penn State has initiated a pilot program of 10 wiki-based composition classes. Richard Doyle, Jeff Pruchnic, and Trey Conner, instructors in the pilot-program discussed their experiences this morning at the Computers & Writing Conference in Stanford. They found that students produce better work in a peer-reviewed environment. Grammar and mechanics are contextualized and there is greater motivation to create error-free work. Students read each other’s work, which forces them to consider their arguments carefully in order to avoid repeating someone else’s point.
They also found that the self-governing ecology of the networked wiki format creates a fruitful environment for discussion and debate. The wiki places control over the direction and duration of the discussion into the student’s hands. Richard Doyle also pointed out that there has not been a single editing war in the years that he has been teaching the course. He attributes the lack of unproductive “flame wars” to the amount of work his students have. Each student produces about 100 pages of material and must read, comment on, and GRADE their fellow students’ work. This is a learner-centered environment where, as Richard Doyle puts it, “the teacher acts as coach or zen master, making periodic interventions.” Doyle also points out that in these wiki-based courses, “students are learning how to interact in an information dense environment responsibly. They are being trained to deal with the fluid environments they are going to find themselves in.”

“an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating”

Good piece today in Wired on the transformation of scientific journals. There’s a general feeling that commercial publishers like Reed Elsevier enjoy unreasonable control over an evolving body of research that should be freely available to the public. With exorbitant subscription fees, affordable only for large institutions, most journals are effectively inaccessible, and the authors retain few or no reproduction rights. Recently, however, free article databases have sprung up on the web – The Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and NIH’s PubMed – some of which, like PLoS, have begun publishing their own journals. It’s a welcome change, considering how much labor and treasure is poured into scientific publications (from funders, private and public, and from the scientists themselves), and yet how little is gotten in return. Shifting to a non-profit model, as PLoS has done, preserves much of the financial architecture that supports the production of journals, but totally revolutionizes the distribution.

PLoS journals are free and allow authors to retain their copyrights, as long as they allow their work to be freely shared and distributed (with full credit given, naturally). They also require that authors pay $1,500 from their grants, or directly from their sponsors or institutions, to have their work published. These groups pay the bulk of the $10 billion that goes to scientific and medical publishers each year, and what do they get in return? Limited access to the research they funded, and no right to reuse the information.
“It’s ridiculous to give publishers complete control of an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating,” Eisen said (Eisen teaches genetics and is a founder of PLoS).

But what is in many ways the tougher question is how to shift the architecture of prestige – peer review – to these new kinds of journals.

building frontier networks

The $100 laptop project – the MIT-led initiative to distribute cheap, network-enabled computers to schools throughout the developing world – is moving ahead, but it’s far from clear whether it will succeed. Today Wired discusses some of the daunting physical challenges of deploying technology in places where there isn’t even electricity, let alone a wireless broadband network. As far as energy is concerned, the MIT team is trying to make the computers as self-sustaining as possible, experimenting with hand cranks (like a wind-up watch) and “parasitic power,” where the user’s typing constantly charges the battery. Then there is the problem of networks. The vision driving the project is one of delivering the resources of the web to communities that are cut off from libraries and the general flow of information. But extending the gossamer strands of the web requires robust architecture. Dumping cheap laptops in village schools won’t achieve much if you can’t connect the dots.

Wired mentions geekcorps, a group that coordinates skilled technology volunteers around the world “to teach communities how use innovative and affordable information and communication technologies to solve development problems.” One of their trademark innovations is the “BottleNet” – a method for setting up improvised Wi-Fi relay networks with “do-it-yourself antennas,” first employed in geekcorp’s Mali project:

The do-it-yourself (DIY) antenna designs were based on information gathered from numerous sources, including standard ham radio operator reference manuals, books on building wireless community networks, numerous DIY wireless sites on the Internet, and from the past experiences of GCM volunteers with wireless antennas. Changes to the designs were made to incorporate materials that are easily available in Mali (plastic water bottles, used valve stems from motorbikes, window screen mesh, television and low cost coaxial cables, etc.) to minimize the technical skills needed to build an antenna and to reduce costs.

Something about these ad hoc creations, patched together with junk – the scraps of western industry – speaks eloquently of the fragility of our grand networked enterprise.
images: (left) kids with Panasonic Toughbooks at the Nicholas and Elaine Negroponte School in Cambodia (from Wired); (right) BottleNet antenna in Mali

student papers with a purpose

One of the most exciting presentations at the recent Share, Share Widely conference was Natalie Jeremijenko‘s student-authored wiki “How Stuff is Made”. According to the website FAQ page, HSIM is a visual encyclopedia documenting the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental accounts of contemporary products. It is collaboratively produced, independent, academic, wiki-based publication. Encyclopedia entries are summative photo essays created by engineering, design and art students guided by faculty who ensure high standards of evidence.
In her conference abstract, “Changing Structures of Participation In New Media Education,” Dr. Jeremijenko claims that the HSIM project provides …evidence that the way we structure participation changes what information is produced, who produces it, and how it circulates. Additionally, the work provides material to question what these changes may mean for learning.

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