Open = Available
Content = Stuff
That's right. Available stuff. Who doesn't love that?? Especially teachers. We are always looking for stuff. Stuff for lessons. Stuff for lesson planning. Stuff to make lessons awesome. Stuff to help with assessments. Stuff for subs. Stuff for OTES. I could go on and on and on...
Stuff is pretty important. For teachers, it's especially important if it's free. So what is this (often) free "stuff" anyway? Open Content is only limited to the imagination of the creator. According to Wikipedia, Open Content is a creative work that others can copy or modify. After reading this, I realized I've been using Open Content for a few years. For example, I go to Teachers Pay Teachers and peruse the FREE downloads. I find a math game I like, but I need to tweak it. I change it up and voila! I have something I need and I didn't have to, as the saying goes, reinvent the wheel.
Open Content is a teacher's answered prayer. Information is shared, as well as instructional practices, techniques and experiences. Educational content can be customized. Even better? Open Content can be a cost-effective alternative to textbooks. According to the 2011 Horizon Report (Johnson, Adams, & Haywood, 2011, p. 22), information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it. Content is available for many subjects and at various levels, kindergarten-college. As a teacher in a large urban district, this could be a solution to never-ending textbook problems. What problems, you ask? Where to begin. Okay. Sometimes, there aren't enough books. Students can't take them home when there aren't enough. As a math teacher, this stinks. I want the kids to practice at home. When I send worksheets, there aren't references for parents. Also, worksheets tend to disappear. Aside from this, there's the whole inventory thing. I check books out; students don't bring them back; the office holds the grade card; parents get mad; there's no money to replace the lost books. Ugh. Annoying. If textbooks are online and can be accessed freely from any computer, tablet, or smart phone, the whole book debacle ends. I like it.
I decided to check out the site www.flatworldknowledge.com. Flat World Knowledge (FWK) is a publisher of college-level textbooks and educational supplements. Textbooks are either extremely cheap for students or free. College professors have control in what they need; students choose the format they prefer; authors earn rapid market shares. So how does FWK do this? They use Creative Commons licensing.
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that enables the sharing/use of creativity/knowledge through free legal tools. According to their website, www.creativecommons.org, they provide free, easy-to-use copyright licenses. These are not an alternative to copyright--they work alongside copyright. There are six different licenses that give the creator the choice to have their work be commercial or non-commercial, changeable or not, and may require a "tweaker" to license their changed version of the original. In the video Creative Commons: Saving the World from Failed Sharing, the big picture was that Creative Commons is method to marry access and control.
My wish in all of this is for e-books to become more accessible to my students. That being said, there is also a need for more academic titles. I can go to Google Books and search for anything--it's just like Kindle or Nook. The problem is that a lot of the free stuff, is, well, junk. I said it. Sorry to the authors of those titles. As an educator, I'm looking for features that support scholarly work. In the 2011 Horizon Report, it is stated that the problems I mentioned are fading. As an avid user of e-books, I say Prove It! A big PLUS, however, is that e-books are being joined with cloud computing. I love that I can access my ENTIRE Kindle library on my iPhone or my Surface. Better yet, my page is ALWAYS marked, no matter what device I used last. This would be awesome for students. I imagine them having a cloud library with all of their books, accessible from any device, anywhere, any time. This is what intrigues me the most as I reflect upon the week's readings. I know our future lies in this technology because it will be most cost-effective--yet contains many benefits for students beyond what a dollar amount could possibly convey.
Ethics-wise, I understand people are worried about copyright, copyleft, copyfree, and good, old-fashioned plagiarism. To me, these concerns speak to the value of the services provided by Creative Commons and Flat World Knowledge. Another concern that piqued my interest was the topic of an e-book Google Monopoly. According to the Open Content Alliance, despite repeated requests, Google has declined to give any details about what privacy controls it would put in place on its Book Search product. Will Google track the books that we are reading and make this information available to sell advertising against it? Will Google refuse to share information with the government about what books people are reading, as libraries routinely do? Will Google even publish a robust privacy policy on its Book Search product before the settlement issue is resolved? These are questions I look forward to learning the answers to as this quiet controversy continues.
Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., & Haywood, K. (2011). The 2011
Horizon Report. Austin Texas: The New Media Consortium.
Open Content. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January, 25, 2014, from
http://en.widipedia.or/wiki/Open_content#Major_open_content_repositories_and_directories
Creative Commons. (n.d.). Creative Commons. Retrieved January 28, 2014, from http://creativecommons.org/
A Shared Culture | Creative Commons Episodes | Learning Videos | Blip. (n.d.). RSS. Retrieved January 31, 2014, from http://blip.tv/creative-commons/a-shared-culture-1198493
Introducing Google eBooks. (2010, November 29). YouTube. Retrieved January 31, 2014, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKEaypYJbb4
Developed by experts. Personalized by you. Affordable for students.. (n.d.). Flat World Knowledge. Retrieved January 28, 2014, from http://www.flatworldknowledge.com
"Open Content Alliance (OCA)." Open Content Alliance OCA RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
Melissa,
ReplyDeleteYour reflection was very detailed and eye opening! I agree that open content is very beneficial for teachers. As a preschool teacher now, I am able to download free worksheets and ideas for calendars, holidays, and seasons. It is saving me a lot of time and money by simply pushing a button on a computer to download information and print it out. I do agree that in the long run, more students, teachers, and schools will benefit from the idea of open content. There will be no lugging around or losing textbooks, no awkward period of time where resources are out of date, and no struggle of having enough funding from the school to provide new and detailed materials to keep our students' engaged. In addition, being able to communicate with teachers around the globe virtually opens new doors to new ideas that will instill creativity in the classroom.
However, I do have one concern, which I wrote about in my post. If teachers give their students papers to write or research to investigate, how can we be sure they are not plagiarizing? And if they are using open content online that is available and not copyrighted, is it considered plagiarizing if they copy ideas and phrases? I think plagiarism needs to be defined precisely to students, including a fine line between what is completely acceptable and unacceptable. I am curious to see what the future holds for the field of education!
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ReplyDeleteHi Melissa - As I was reading through your response to Open Content and Ethics, I was agreeing almost the whole way through! I am so with you on the textbook issue. I don't have the problem you have of not having enough books, I have the financial issue in that our school district cannot afford them! Mine are so old, that about two years ago I just decided to not give them out anymore. It really was pointless. They were so outdated that there was a math problem involving the Twin Towers!
ReplyDeleteI think eventually there will no longer be textbooks that kids have to carry around. Everything will be online, which will be extremely beneficial to keep information up to date. Also, I believe that technology is going to be even more accessible to students, even those that cannot afford it. I can see in the near future all students carrying around ipads or other netbooks instead of a heavy backpack. Instead of "the dog ate my homework" it will be "I couldn't connect to the Internet"!!
I do everything by worksheets, but the difference is all of my lessons are recorded on YouTube. If a parent wants to brush up on a skill to help their child, they too can watch the video. Also, all of my worksheets are not only available in my classroom, but are also online. So the only excuse I can hear is "my printer was out of ink"!! Which, believe me, I've heard several times!
I, too, have used Teacher Pay Teachers. It is an awesome sight to find things that you can adjust for your needs so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's sort of like Pinterest for me, where I find myself searching for awhile and do not realize where the time has gone! What I love about Teachers Pay Teachers is that there is a lot of stuff available for secondary math classes. Sometimes the fun things are only for early elementary and this is a great resource to energize me to put some FUN back into math!