openedcourse2007week09-10
What can the open education movement learn from the book you chose to read? Elaborate on at least three points. Which of the ideas presented in the book did you find hardest to believe or agree with? Why?
So, it’s late in the evening and I’m late with my week assignements.
Given that I unterstood the new syllabus schedule as an encouragment to read deeper and compare more other posts - and then post some of my own.
Thus I will give this post as Week 9 and 10 at the same time, you may like it or not.
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I decided to read the Coase’s Penguin…. because it’s short compared to other readings for week 9.
But it wasn’t a bad choice to me. I won’t go through the process of making a summary of the reading, ’cause I think that other participants made it already (Yu Chun: - Catia: , jonthomas: )
The only one I read that isn’t a summary is Antonio’s post) in my opinion.
As I said, Coase’s Penguin was an interesting reading to me.
I will try to give the “at least three points” through questions:
1. How do I motivate my collegues to gather in a (virtual) room, to discuss, to produce learning materials, to share them?
2. How much important are costs for question (and anwser) #1?
3. How do I trust “educational resources” produced by peers (=collegues)?
The reading seems to be optimistic. In recent times some collegues of mine and I tried to introduce some innovations in my school in the realm of Information Technologies. In Italy we do have a public funded system called Indire (www.indire.it).
Only actually employed teachers can take part to the courses given by this “structure”, courses that are costless for participants - but not for government.
Thus my collegues and I organised a course where other collegues learnt in a blended (do you know? ah ah ah) manner.
The results were - at the end: no effect on the didactical pratice - the main goal totally missed.
(Personally the people enjoyed more or less the course, but they didn’t WANT to grasp that they weren’t there in order to learn how to use powerpoint or excel but they were there to learn how to make students learn to use IT instruments in a different way).
A further experience I am actually living is with some collegues from any corner of Italy. We met in a course organised - at no cost for participants - through a forum, a videoplatform and discuss and try to apply the risults of our discussion - about communicative competences - in our practical job.
Participation is high - even though we haven’t met each other, and the level of the outputs is at a good grade.
In the first case all premises let us think that the outputs for our job would have been great - and they weren’t. In the second we could expect the reverse, and instead the outputs are good.
In the second case I find somehow an echo of Coase’s Penguin thesis that modularity and granularity are important for peer production of educational resources.
Peer production didn’t happen in the first case - I believe - because all participants or almost all hadn’t switched from the role of mere-learner to the role of learner-for-letting-other-learn.
So far, I could say that peer production is really a good chance - but: if something doesn’t switch in the users’ mind, it won’t work.
As concerns question #2, I mean costs by no way only in terms of money or structures (computers, servers, books….). Coase’s Penguin let us see more or less clearly that emotional costs may be relevant to the true development of a peer project. Hedonistic instincts, for instance, are not at all on a secondary level.
Let’s wonder why all of us “non paying students” jumped into this experience of the Open course on the open educational resources: did we do it for the sake of glory?
More or less anyone of us wanted to get something back - “I was in touch with a worldwide guru of the topic” or “I afforded it to cope with a full-english course” or “I can put a certificate in my curriculum” or “Thus I can develop my criticism about the subject”…. and so on.
Costs are not secondary, they may be material or non material, but they play a role.
If my stretch toword a goal (call it “have an OER at the end of the path” now) isnt’ giving me a little pleasure. In this regard I may agree with the Coase’s Penguin.
Question #3 is last but not least.
When I surf the web and land to an educational site, I have always to ask: who did it? When was it done? Whom is it addressed? How did he/she/they want to use it within a syllabus?
this specific questions are relevant for a K-12 teacher, because many resources available online are not suited for children in this age, just because they’r not planned to be for them.
Sometimes if they suite, they’r not updated. Sometimes the frame in which they were planned to be used is not flexible, thus making them non useful.
And at the source of the problem, the authorship.
Who is the teacher behind this specific resource I am now going to use?
Is he/she competent?
In these regards I may partially agree with the Coase’s penguin, that’s why:
Merely collaborative OER are not always so good as they may seem. Look at connexions: I went into the site, couldn’t find anything useful for K-12 education in my subject (German). A similar situation - much less flexible - is mirrored in an italian student’s site named www.studenti.it: students can sign up, log in and find resumes, papers, lessons…. made by other students!
Does it work? I had to persuade my own students that those “OER” aren’t so that good, telling them that I had found in some of them grammar errors, for instance!
You may say: but you are a teacher, dont rely on such sites!
Ok, ok, but: if you say peer, you cannot mean pear! peer must be understood at his highest degree, or it’s not peer…. it’s - renewed through a different mean of information - the vertical relationship between one and many….
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Another topic I could find in some posts of the two last weeks is the production of school books/texts.
I can only quote - as I almost 100% agree with - the following from http://www.k12opened.com/blog/archives/33
“The legislative environment surrounding the adoption and procurement of school textbooks is complex and in some places nearly impenetrable. In the United States, for example, it is very unlikely for OER to be successful in the K-12 environment due to legislative issues. This suggests that parts of the world with fewer legislative constraints will be more fruitful breeding grounds.”
The situation is not so that dramatic in Italy (we would even have the opportunity to not adopt a “textbook” in the school, but… almost nobody does it, me too!).
The issue is nevertheless interesting. Imagine a situation in which teachers begin to develop OER at a K-12 level, cooperating and collaborating among themselves and with the pupils’ relevant contribution.
These OERs could be later used for pupils of the coming school years, and naturally adapted and changed through the time.
This would mean less costs for families (#2) and more “compulsory” collaboration among teachers (#1). Being the OERs produced among and from collegues who know directly - more or less - each other, question #3 would be answered. Wouldn’t it?
This could be an answer also to:
http://megsplanet.blogspot.com/2007/10/week-9-easterlys-white-mans-burden.html
Flooding the world with generic blueprint OERs will not necessarily bring prosperity or learning to all. However, targeting the needs of certain groups of learners (the needs of learners, not of the educators) might result in several really great OERs. One size does not fit all.
Yet from the same blog another issue (as you can understand, I like thinking stretching the cases until their opposite…. it helps to prevent sad suprises when making them real…)
“This same idea can apply to Open Education. Although I strongly think that Open Ed should be set to help targeted groups/problems (and who ever else benefits is an added bonus), it is important to take into consideration that in order to truly revolutionize people’s access to knowledge through OER, we need to make sure they have access to computers. Again, there are computers in rural Tanzania, but when the power keeps going out… (I love the $100 laptops for this reason)”
The key word is here COMPUTER but you can change it with BOOK or BLACKBOAR or PENCIL or ….
I think that, at the very end of the story, nobody likes being sitting hours and hours in front of a computer, thus there’s the need to print OERs and this requires facilities (understant anything you can under this word) to do it.
ps: many of my ideas about these weeks are gathered together at diigo
I am living a similar experience with the INDIRE courses (ForTIC), with the same negative results in terms of pedagodical-methodological achievements in the use of ICT from the teachers attending the courses. The problem is also in the fact that in spite of the blended approach they adopt, these courses are traditionally up-bottom centered, with pre-wrapped up learning materials imposed from the above and a poor motivation in the e-learners. They often do not even share the same needs in attending these courses because they teach different subjects in different kinds of schools, from infant to high secondary.
I have to desagree with Elisa.
In the new format of Fortic Courses, the success is strictly connetted with the skills of the e-tutor and its teaching plan during the f2f sessions.
Il is a blended solution and even the first edition with its bottom-down structure was a challenge for me.
I did it my way…do you want to have a look at what teacher from different schools produced in that Fortic INDIRE first edition?
http://www.funteaching.it/portal/main_tic.asp
Click on LAVORI DI LABORATORIO to surf the HYpermedia
Silvana
[…] Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (Benkler) Commented on by: Yu Chun, Anton, Catia, Alessandro, […]
Ciao Silvana,
la mia esperienza, spero si sia compreso dal post, con Indire, è ambivalente.
Ciò che focalizzo nel post è l’atteggiamento del gruppo di lavoro con cui ho svolto il ruolo di co-tutor, laddove i presupposti erano a) avere conoscenze di base solide nell’uso del pc b) avere chiaro che il percorso ForTic 2005-2008 prevedeva di applicare alla didattica, con ricadute dirette per l’istituto di servizio, quanto sperimentato nel percorso.
Fatte queste premesse teoriche del corso, che io ho più volte ripetuto durante gli incontri f2f, debbo addurre le giustificazioni per i miei ex-corsisti: a. il gruppo era eterogeneo, elementari e medie b. le dirigenti dei due istituti hanno presentato il corso come uno di alfabetizzazione e non di approfondimento d’uso c. sicuramente noi come tutor non siamo stati all’altezza di qualcosa…. tuttavia, in quella specifica esperienza chi si sentiva già un po’ solido non ha volutamente approfittato dell’occasione, mentre chi aveva scarse conoscenze ha acquisito molto e ha fatto…
E’ un’esperienza che ho citato a mo’ di esempio, ovvio che non vuol essere la regola generale.
I lavori che ci mostri: li hanno fatto gli alunni? I colleghi hanno riutilizzato le modalità apprese in classe? … è questo che mi interessa, altrimenti, accade come l’anno scorso con lo spottone del MPI sulle buone pratiche (ricordate!??!) dove, sul sito ministeriale, cosa è stato pubblicato? quello che ho visto io erano prevalentemente relazioni di docenti, o elaborati che evidentemente NON erano stati elaborati da alunni… ma questo mi porta verso un’altro filone polemico che voglio evitare…
Your point about reading on a computer screen vs. reading on paper is interesting. I have thought a lot about the need for print versions of open resources for the developing world, where computers are not readily available, but it also an issue for those who preference not to read on a computer screen. For myself, I find it hard to read lengthy writings (such as some of those from this course) from a desktop or laptop computer. It is not so much because of the computer screen but because of the ergomonics of it. Sitting at a desk or even on a couch (as I am now) with a computer on my lap is not a comfortable way for me to read. However, I often lengthy books on my handheld computer and find that very much to my liking. It feels like holding a small book and the screen is very readable. There has been some research that even reading of a mobile phone screen is effective for some.
All of this goes to the point that an important part of open materials is having an accessible format. If something is formatted in XML, it can be reformatted easily for a variety of uses, including for laptops, handhelds, phones, or print. However, with PDFs this is much more difficult.
[…] I appreciated the Alessandro’s effort to contextualize the discussion on the Italian situation, which I too well know. I think […]
[…] Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (Benkler) Commented on by: Yu Chun, Anton, Catia, Alessandro, […]