What can K-12 districts gain in knowing about Open Source? At the recent 2007 National School Board Association Teaching and Learning Conference, held in October in Nashville, Tennessee, a group of school board leaders, technology administrators, and teachers gathered in a Mini-Academy session to delve into the subject of Open Source for their own schools. The conference was featuring Open Source as one of six major themes facing education. The intention of the in-depth session was to broaden participants’ definition of open source by understanding current trends worldwide and to provide a case study of how one district is taking the strides to embrace open source systems and software.

People generally understand Open Source to refer to software collaboratively created and offered back freely to the public and the development community for use and modification. The Gnu Free Documentation License instantiates this legal freedom, moving away from the copyright, “all rights reserved” tradition, to allow adaptation while giving credit to creators. On Wikipedia, Open Source is defined as a “set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge”. Building on the shoulders of the Open Source movement and as well open cultural trends in music, photo, and video sharing, the open education movement is developing both tools and content to make learning freely available, and by extension, customizable to the needs of the learner. Like the open source software phenomenon, open education has the potential to birth new economic models and empower new contributors.

I presented about these trends and showed examples of the use of open educational resources (OER) worldwide and our work with OER Commons,  http://www.oercommons.org in particular. Next, a school district in Wisconsin, the D.C. Everest Area, http://www.dce.k12.wi.us/ described their approach to bring the entire district onto Open Source platforms. Marie Wardall, in charge of libraries and coordinating the effort with Cory Jaeger, head of technology for the district, sited the example of giving away free CDs with Open Source software programs to students. The students can now work in the same software environment at home and at school, removing the challenges around versions and compatibility between in-school and at-home work. The district has shown considerable financial savings in this effort and has been able to use that savings to put new technologies into every classroom to augment sharing and connectivity services that are saving teachers and staff time and enhancing learning.

On Oct. 30-31, members of the global open educational resources (OER) community will present their research into the challenges of sustaining and facilitating the movement at the OpenLearn 2007 conference in Milton Keynes, UK. Hosted by the Open University, the conference has four main themes: research agenda, sustainability, user experience, and software and tools. The overreaching aim of the conference is to “help establish the importance of research for this growing area and bring together the community of researchers,” specifically shedding light on the research agenda, tools, research results and models that are emerging from the OER movement.

Cynthia Jimes will present the case study of Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), a South African-based open content initiative that facilitates the online collaborative creation of high-school level science and math textbooks online. The presentation will also discuss the iCommons iCurriculum project more generally, and address the issue of assessing project successes and challenges and creating a framework and knowledge-base among open content projects toward continuous learning and OER sustainability.

Other presenters at the conference include, for example, Peter Batemen of Open University UK, who will discuss how a participatory architecture can make OER more accessible for African universities, and Susan D’Antoni of UNESCO, who will discuss a community-developed research agenda for OER. In drawing together OER community members from across the globe, the conference has the potential to provide a good venue for sharing and insights that can impact the iCommons iCurriculum Case Study Project.

 
For more information about the FHSST presentation, contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org. For more about the OpenLearn conference, visit the conference website.

By Amee Evans Godwin

Last week I presented a conference session together with Leslie Rule, project supervisor of KQED’s Digital Storytelling and a maven of geo-tagging. Our interactive session entitled, Placeholding: Location-Specific Metadata and Context for Open Content, was a brief take on “localization” of learning content, the theme of the 2007 C()SL conference in Logan, Utah, through the lens of “place”. Considering the importance of being local, of being required to go outdoors, into one’s community, and observe the here-and-now, guided our thinking about the reuse of learning content.

Whether called metadata or tags, descriptive terms make materials searchable across the web. Tags let anyone connect and collaborate through relating together or enabling the mash up of content. At OER Commons (www.oercommons.org), we focus on making resources richly described. Why? Reasons are to give people easy entries to learning materials and to facilitate people contributing to learning materials themselves. When you tag something, it does someone else a favor by adding a new possibility of reuse.

Through the OER Commons project, I learned about Quest, a program from Bay Area’s PBS station, KQED. I was excited to learn about their involvement with content and tagging where original nature footage is geo-tagged with GPS coordinates. The digital video camera has the capability to add the exact place where the footage is shot to the video file. The intention is to make footage open and available for students and teachers to make their own videos. This is part of the promise of OER, or open educational resources, and of technology that makes learning anywhere in and outside of the classroom possible. Resource reuse can be connected to place, and facilitated by new mobile devices, like GPS-enabled handhelds and smart phones that anyone could use.

In our session, for example, Leslie revealed the numerous metadata fields available now in iPhoto, fields waiting to be filled with placed-based data. In general, photos, video, audio, data, and documentation of any kind can easily be linked to place. Datasets can be correlated by time and place to support scientific investigation. Near the end of the session, attendees were asked to join in an exercise. We input participants’ comments from observing the landscape into a file embedded in Google Earth, at the spot where the session was taking place. We captured the learning moment and made a new geo-tagged reusable resource.

It was nearly impossible to say which was hotter: the passion in the room for open access, compatible licensing, and peer production, or, the wilting temperatures recorded at the recent iCommons Summit 2007 held Dubrovnik, Croatia in June.

ISKME showcased OER Commons in the Open Education Track's participatory sessions, where traditional panel presentations and passive viewing were banished. Researchers, administrators, legal experts, and educators from many countries held heated discussions on the issues involved in creating, localizing, and sharing content across borders and legal challenges that accompany the internet freedom movement and information sharing generally.

In a pre-conference one-day workshop, Lisa Petrides and Amee Godwin of ISKME, and Joanne Boulle of Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) facilitated an interactive discussion around the importance of open educational projects assessing their current practices and sharing what they’ve learned within and across project boundaries. Specifically, we heard from Joanne Boulle about challenges and successes in the collaborative process of creating free, open-licensed math and science textbooks especially for high schools in South Africa.

During the other exciting three days of the iCommons Summit Education Track, break-out groups brainstormed about training teachers with OER, bringing students into authoring, and using learners to improve learning content. The activities culminated in next-step visioning for facilitating "next-generation" learning, to remove barriers from learning what you want, when you want it.

Contact amee@iskme.org about OER Commons and the iCommons Summit 2007 Open Education Track.

By Cynthia Jimes

On August 21-23, several open textbook project leaders, researchers, collaborators and open textbook publishers met at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) to discuss how the development and use of open textbooks is best supported and sustained. At the meeting, which was hosted by the Hewlett Foundation and UC Irvine’s Distance Learning Center, there were presentations on open textbook projects, and on quality and technology issues within such projects. These included, for example, a demonstration of the textbook project Open Reference Mathematics, a presentation on balancing the needs of diverse open textbook communities, and a presentation of the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) case study project.

The FHSST case study, presented by Lisa Petrides, discussed several topics of relevance to open textbook sustainability, including the role of teachers and learners as co-creators of open textbook content, and the potential importance of hybrid models of peer production that simultaneously draw on face-to-face group work and online content authoring platforms. The FHSST presentation served as a concrete example that meeting participants drew upon during the remaining days’ dialogue—which focused on, among other things, defining an “open textbook” in light of teacher and learner needs, and the necessity of developing online spaces where teachers, learners and other users can interact and collaborate around textbook use and reuse possibilities.

The FHSST presentation slides, titled “The Case of Free High School Science Texts: Leveraging Community and Technology to Meet Local Teaching and Learning Needs”, can be downloaded in the resources section of iCommons from here.

If you have questions about the FHSST presentation, please contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org.

By Cynthia Jimes, ISKME

The OER Case Study project is progressing, both in terms of data collection and framework development, as well as in terms of engaging the OER community members around the project.

The pre-conference day to the 2007 iSummit in Dubrovnik provided an opportunity to share early learnings about the Case Study Project, and to push thinking around sustainability within and across OER initiatives. The pre-day participants brought to light the importance of recognizing variations in definitions and of incorporating that variation into our understanding of OER sustainability—as, e.g., what we mean by localization, peer production, and user engagement will likely differ across initiatives. The pre-day also underscored the importance of paying heed to sometimes less prevalent OER sustainability factors, including getting students involved in the creation of open content, and ensuring that open content is not created in isolated pockets within any given initiative.

As a result of the iSummit pre-day discussions, revisions and additions to the initial case study framework and its tools have been suggested and posted on the Case Study Wiki. These include an OER primer/lexicon, an OER storytelling template, and activities around internal assessment and facilitation of, e.g., content localization and community engagement. Next steps include refining, augmenting, and developing these and other tools with FHSST and additional OER projects to make them applicable for the wider OER community.

In terms of the FHSST case study, analysis of the project’s online volunteer forums, newsletters and other documents as well as over 6 hours of in-depth interviews have been conducted with the project leaders to understand work practices, success factors and current and future challenges. In late July, Sarah Blyth of the FHSST admin team administered a volunteer survey to ten core volunteers. The survey was written collaboratively by FHSST and the ISKME researchers and sought to understand volunteer perceptions around the recruitment process, the content authoring process, and the communication channels within FHSST. Six volunteers returned the survey, and two of them are expected to participate in a follow up phone interview to delve deeper into themes that arose through analysis of the survey responses. ISKME and FHSST will work collaboratively to analyze the final data sets, and to write the FHSST case study report, which will be distributed to stakeholders August 31, 2007. An important by-product of engaging FHSST’s leadership team as researchers of their own practices is the development of the case study framework and tools. For example, the volunteer survey and the means through which it was distributed, collected and analyzed by FHSST are all tools and insights that other OER projects can potentially use in the analysis of their own practices.

In continuing to inform and facilitate wider participant engagement in the case study project, we will continue to update the Case Study Wiki, and invite you to monitor and edit the project description, the case study framework/tools, and the suggested OER programs initially identified by each of you in phone interviews and discussions with the ISKME project director, Lisa Petrides. We also invite you to comment on this node and the blogs that will be created around it each month.

The contact person for the OER case study research is Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org.