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…
Monthly Archive for July, 2010
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.
