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.