Ten Reasons Why

Some new thinking up over on the work blog.

Education

The OpenTextBook link popped up on a few weblogs today, but none of them seemed to be the usual ed blog suspects, so here’s the link. Or, rather, the link’s a few words back.
Basically, they’re co-authoring a textbook online, using CVS (not the pharmacy) to check in the changes to the PDF manuscript. Appears to be a math textbook, but works like “algebra” frighten and confuse the English major in me, so I couldn’t read much.
I doubt the publishing giants are quaking in their boots, but it’s a valiant effort. They should’ve used a wiki though. Although common among developers, CVS is still fairly rarified for a mainstream educator or student. It pretty effectively limits the people who can contribute. On the other hand, Wikipedia, has turned into an amazing resource, primarily because of the low threshold to contribution.

Education

The New York Times documents one of those “Duh!” statements that never seems to make it into public policy in any meaningful fashion.
The article’s a few weeks old, but it’s not like it’s an idea that goes stale. That’s the point.

Education

Will Richardson, who writes non-stupidly on this stuff, has summarized a conversation about blogging in schools that has been taking place across several weblogs over the last couple days.
I’m far from a Luddite, having made been involved with educational technology for more than a decade, made my living off it most of that time, and have worked with 1500+ faculty in 4 or 5 countries. Likewise, though I’ve been out of the teaching game for several years, I’ll put up five years of teaching several sections a semester of freshman comp or intro lit as reasonable cred to discuss writing pedagogy somewhat intelligently.
All of which is to say that this is stuff I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about, so I don’t take it lightly when I paraphrase a former President:
It’s the writing, stupid.

Read more…

Education

Google will begin searching on academic university repositories. Begs the question: what comes first, the search or the content?

Education

As I explored the ADL site while thinking about the previous post, I stumbled across this nice list of learning object repositories.
Here’s another directory of learning object repositories from UT-San Antonio.

Education

Yesterday, the ADL announced a new reference model for Content Object Repository Discovery and Resolution Architecture (CORDRA).
What I wonder is when (if?) all of the repository and discovery work in the learning object crowd is going to come together with the repository and federated search in the library space. And who’s going to do it?
Hmm. Maybe I should. :-)

Education

The Chronicle has an opinion piece titled “The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google.”
At the recent ALA Midwinter Conference, Roy Tenant of the California Digital Library referred to The Google Lesson: the number of results aren’t as important as how the results are presented. He said that librarians and library systems vendors have historically put more emphasis on delivering the most results instead the most relevant results. Roy dropped another jewel that partially explained this phenomenon:
“Only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find.”

Education

From yesterday’s Washington Post: Students Fill Grade Book On Teachers at Web Site. The article is about Ratemyteachers.com, another site that allows students to review teachers from their school:

Critics, including many teachers and principals, said the site’s ratings are unscientific, not to mention hurtful. Many school districts across the country, including Montgomery County and Loudoun County, have blocked access to ratemyteachers.com from school computers.

I think that there’s a great potential for this kind of service to provide students, parents, and administrators with valuable (if unscientific) feedback. However, it’s accompanied by a great potential for immature abuse.
It strikes me that what’s lacking from this kind of service is a social software-like reputation system like Slashdot uses. E.g., the community needs to be able to mod up or down the comments. Of course, the hole in that approach is likely that the small sample size may not be large enough to effectively moderate itself.

Education

Will Richardson writes:

Forget all that stuff I said about moving too fast. I’ve decided I’m going to create one Web log a day as a surprise “gift” to various clubs and teams and teachers.

Great idea for a school! Eighty percent of them will never get used, but the twenty percent that do will probably use them really well.

Education, Weblogs