Open Access Curricula
Open access to each other’s lessons, units, projects, and curricula is the necessary next step for educators. Over the past several months, I’ve been reading books about online businesses and how the new web technologies have affected business models. In Wikinomics, the argument is that businesses who resist opening up their knowledge reserves to consumers will crumble in the new market. In Disrupting Class, they extend these ideas to say that the old way of schooling children is costing more money than it needs to: improve online courses and children will learn better. In What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis writes that there are myriad platforms that provide “elegant organization” on which businesses and communities can create content and change.
One way for teachers to use such platforms is to elegantly organize their teaching resources for others to take for free. While there are sites that do offer this service, their interface and search functions are atrocious. While Ning provides a fantastic platform that many educators are taking advantage of, it doesn’t easily facilitate the searching and sharing of files. Teachers need a simple open platform on which they can easily post resources (imagine a really effective lesson plan), tag those resources (say “The Iliad”, “mixed method”, “simile”), and a wiki-like function for modifying/improving each other’s resources so what we end up with is a mega-archive of best practices.
The technology is there for it. The need is there for it. What is holding it up?
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Whether or not this is the wave of the future for business it ought to be the wave of the future for teachers. I agree that something along these lines is overdue. T. S. Eliot said something once about how bad poets plagiarizer and great poets steal. I do not know if this is true of poets (it was certainly true of Eliot) but I think it is very true for teachers. We all know teachers who xerox stuff other people have done and recycle it, but really good teachers take what others do and adapt it to their own personalities, temperaments, and teaching styles. I think online tools like wikis and the like make this a much easier thing to do. The more that teachers digitize what they do the easier it is for other teachers to adapt these materials to their own practice. The issue I suppose is copyrights and where the profits go, but I imagine that is more of a concern for businessmen than teachers.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
I’m struck by these business books being written about Web 2.0 economics–rather than make your business closed and cost-effective, they say open up your ideas and even infrastructure and don’t charge for it! I’m setting up a Google Apps platform for my school right now so we have some way to archive our best practices rather than re-inventing the wheel each year. My hope is that between teachers sharing more and students sharing more with other students, we might actually be on the brink of new times in education. -TLL
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