My blog contains over 600 posts, but my longer writing typically goes to more academic outlets like journals. Thanks to the help of the amazing folks at BYU’s Scholar’s Archive (our institutional repository), much of my peer-reviewed work now has a stable home online, too. I’ve gathered up links to these peer-reviewed articles as well as whitepapers and other long pieces on a new page called Articles. While, it’s not a “complete” collection of my writing (e.g., few of my book chapters are there yet), it should be enough to cure any amount of insomnia. Feel free to poke around when you have absolutely nothing else to do…
I’m at the AECT Board of Director’s meeting / Research Symposium this week. Rick
Schwier (@schwier) is presenting about learning in formal, non-formal, and informal environments. Listening to him talk helped me crystalize something I already sort of knew but had never but into words to my satisfaction.
- IF people construct meaning based on their own prior knowledge and past experience, and
- IF a wide variety of tools and content like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, OpenCourseWare, blogs, etc., are significant, important parts of some people’s every day lives, and
- IF significant, important parts of daily life contribute substantially to one’s prior knowledge and past experience,
- THEN these people will draw heavily on tools and content like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, OpenCourseWare as they construct meaning.
There are multiple layers of implication that accordion out both upward and downward, but I believe this core idea is very important. Thanks, Rick!
I’m very happy to announce that BYU has just received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The pilot project will examine the deeper learning and cost savings that can be achieved when open textbooks replace traditional, expensive textbooks in public high school science classrooms.
15-20 public high school science teachers in Utah will replace their expensive, traditional textbooks with open textbooks from CK12.org for the 2010-2011 school year. Approximately 2,000 students will be impacted by the changes. Most will use printed versions of the books, while a few hundred students in one-to-one schools will use the online versions of the books on netbooks or iPads. Teachers will continue to supplement the CK12 books with additional resources and activities just as they have historically supplemented expensive, traditional textbooks.
Because expensive, traditional textbooks have to be passed from student to student over 4-7 years, students are typically prohibited from marking in the books in any way. By contrast, because the open textbooks are so inexpensive as to be considered consumables (from a budget perspective), students will be able to engage these books through active study processes like highlighting and annotating. These active study strategies may promote deeper learning for participating students. This difference provides a theoretically grounded reason for us to anticipate OER being more educationally effective than their expensive, traditional counterparts.
At the end of the school year, test scores of participating students on the state of Utah’s Criterion-Referenced Test (CRT) will be compared to the CRT scores of nonparticipants in comparable classrooms. We hypothesize modest gains in student performance for those participating in the study due to their ability to utilize active study strategies with the open textbooks.
Throughout the project we will carefully monitor costs associated with the use of the open textbooks for comparison purposes. At the end of the school year we will report on the comparative costs of using open textbooks in traditional public school science classrooms. We anticipate curriculum cost savings of approximately 50%.
OER have not yet had the impact they are capable of making. By empirically demonstrating that OER can simultaneously promote deeper student learning and save districts and schools significant financial resources, we hope to catalyze significant a uptake of OER in public schools.
Earlier today the Open High School of Utah (disclaimer: I’m the school’s founder and currently serve on its board) issued the following press release. Congratulations to Sarah and the whole school.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 28, 2010Contact:
DeLaina Tonks, (801) 725-3396
Director~Open High School of Utah
dtonks@openhighschool.orgOnline Teacher Named Utah Charter School Educator of the Year
Open High School of Utah, a virtual charter high school serving students statewide, announces that online math teacher, Sarah Weston, is awarded Utah Association of Public Charter School Educator of the Year.
Salt Lake City, UT (PRWEB) – Sarah Weston, math teacher at the Open High School of Utah, is awarded Utah Charter Educator of the Year at the annual Utah Association of Public Charter Schools Conference in Provo. Every year, Utah’s Charter Association recognizes excellence and innovation by individual charter schools and the tremendous people working within them, at their annual conference held in June. This year’s nominees for Educator of the Year included applicants from among many of the 72 charter schools statewide. Sarah Weston from the Open High School of Utah was one of two teachers selected to receive this prestigious award for the 2009-2010 school year.
Sarah Weston is the first online teacher in Utah to receive an Educator of the Year award. She teaches math courses at the Open High School of Utah, a full-service online high school, where she also develops and creates dynamic, engaging courses online. Because the curriculum is housed and delivered on the computer, the majority of Sarah’s time is spent providing one-on-one tutoring for each student, giving them the individualized instruction they need, when they need it.
What makes Sarah Weston stand out as an educator? Sarah has perfected the art of individualized instruction and connecting with her students. This is especially important for math students, some of whom have begun to like math for the first time ever! The use of 21st century technology is an essential component of Sarah’s success as a teacher, and she is highly skilled at incorporating a wide variety of tools into her teaching repertoire. Sarah is masterful at pinpointing student needs and giving them meaningful individualized instruction. Whether her students are struggling or excelling, Sarah is always the first to contact them.
Sarah’s students overwhelmingly agree she has inspired them to love math. One student shared, “I just felt the need to express my current love for math–and it’s all thanks to you! If you recall, at the beginning of the semester, I stated that I was terrified of math… But after watching the videos you create, everything seems so crystal clear and simple, in a way that’s like, Wow! How did I not see that before?”
Parents have observed a difference in their students’ level of achievement. Parent, Dave Harless said, “I have watched some of the videos where you teach the students different lessons, and you do a marvelous job. You are very clear and concise and make it easy to understand. My son is doing much better in math this year and much of the credit belongs to you.”
DeLaina Tonks, Director of the Open High School of Utah adds her thoughts on the key to Sarah Weston’s success. “Sarah is never content to maintain the status quo. She continually searches for ways to improve her skill set, student performance, and increase efficiency as a teacher. Sarah is an example of leadership to the other teachers and continually seeks for best practices and tools to implement in order to keep OHSU on the cutting-edge. Teachers like Sarah are a rare treasure.”
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The Open High School of Utah is putting the focus where it should be – on the student. Our mission is to facilitate lifelong success by meeting the needs of the 21st century learner through individualized, student-centered instruction, innovative technology, service learning, and personal responsibility.
At the Open High School of Utah students learn from home on a laptop provided by the school, logging in to classes on a daily basis to complete their schoolwork, assisted by certified, highly qualified teachers. The Open High School of Utah currently serves 250 9th and 10th graders across the state of Utah. That number will increase to 1500 students in grades 9-12 by the 2013-2014 school year. Go to www.openhighschool.org for more information.
The world is increasingly divided. The world is increasingly bitterly divided. Of all the things I worry about late at night, lying in bed unable to sleep, the almost absolute absence of civility in our nation’s political discourse has loomed largest lately. Everyone on the left seems to think everyone on the right is a moron. Everyone on the right seems to think everyone on the left is a moron. The louder you scream and the meaner the things you say, the greater standing you seem to have in your political group. The recent round of vilifications of “Republicans in Name Only” and “Democrats in Name Only” provides a preview of what may soon come – an America where radicalism (i.e., actions and words showing your allegiance to either the radical right or the radical left) becomes the primary political currency. There is precious little room left for those in the center who put pragmatics before ideology and would rather discuss and understand than accuse and belittle.
(It sort of reminds me of Lady Gaga, and the way that the music industry has become a contest to see who can pair the most outrageously pornographic music videos with the most yawningly mediocre music. There’s precious little room left in that industry for talented people who just want to make great music but aren’t willing to take their clothes off while doing it. But I digress.)
In my humble opinion, the “open” space should be the world’s foremost exemplary showcase of tolerance. We should be models of “open”-mindedness. And we should be the most open-minded in our thinking about openness itself!
The idea advocated by groups like the Open Knowledge Definition or the Free Cultural Works crowd that there should be a litmus test for openness really bothers me. Deeply bothers me. What is the point of crying from the rooftops that some content is “Open in Name Only?” Why must we, the “open” folks, be in the business of ideological purging like the politicians? If someone has gone out of their way to waive some of the rights guaranteed them under the law so that they can share their creative works – even if that action is to apply a relatively restrictive CC BY-NC-ND to their content – why aren’t we praising that? Why aren’t we encouraging and cultivating and nurturing that? Why are we instead decreeing from a pretended throne on high, “Your licensing decision has been weighed in the balance, and has been found wanting. You are not deemed worthy.” Why the condescension? Why the closed-mindedness? Why the race to create machinery like definitions that give us the self-assumed authority to tell someone their sharing isn’t good enough?
Why isn’t the open crowd more open-minded?
And I have to ask… Has their really not been any useful intellectual advancement in this field since Richard Stallman enumerated the four freedoms (1986) and Bruce Perens laid out the Debian Free Software Guidelines (1997)? I think the last decade has shown that content is different from software in meaningful ways. (For example, there are no objective tests to tell whether or not modifications of a still image, video, piece of music, or essay have improved that creative work.) Clinging to statements of principle laid down for software (apples) to help us think about all other creative works (oranges, bananas, kiwis, etc.) ten or twenty years later just doesn’t make sense to me. By slightly reworking the four freedoms or the DFSG, statements like “Freedom Defined” and the “Open Knowledge Definition” seem both (1) unwilling to acknowledge the important differences between software and other creative works and (2) all too anxious to find ways to exclude people from the club and tell them they’re not good enough.
The original OpenContent License (1998) was a simple modification of the GPL. But within the year I felt that was a poor fit for content. The Open Publication License (1999) rethought some of these problems and took a new approach (laying the structural foundation for the Creative Commons licenses). And we’ve seen additional problems since the OPL was first released in 1999 and Creative Commons followed in 2001. My relatively recent statement on the definition of the open in open content takes another new approach to operationalizing the construct “open” – one that is informed by lessons I’ve learned in the last decade. It’s not a new license, but new thinking a decade later about a broad framework in which everyone who shares can locate their activity. It’s goal is not to exclude, but to include. It’s goal is not to arbitrarily declare what is good enough, but to describe the options available. It’s goal is to be open and inviting, not judgmental and standoffish.
I wish we could get over our innate need to feel superior to others by establishing frameworks that allow us to judge them as inferior (and yet, at some level, that’s what this post seems to be doing, isn’t it?). I wish those of us who associate ourselves with the open community would be more open in our thinking about many things… especially openness itself.
