| Tim,
It seems to me that the scales at which SchoolForge has historically been most successful is the individual school, and the small district: helping one school or a small district move towards FLOSS systems for their technological infrastructure (student attendance and grading systems, desktop and portable systems for students and staff use). Scaling up to a national level may not be the most likely successful approach for this project.
In fact, most textbook decisions are made at the school or district level (though some states maintain oversight authority, essentially creating a list of approved texts). If we're successful at creating one or more open-source texts, it will be interesting to see whether or not state boards of education would even consider approving such a text (since it presumably won't be physical copies, and states don't normally get involved in decisions about curricular resources other than textbooks).
It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that makes the idea of open-source texts appealing to SchoolForgers: it leverages the philosophical underpinnings of the FLOSS movement, to wrest control from large power-aggregators (textbook companies, state boards of education) and place that power in the hands of users (teachers and students).
James Klock Juarez HS, Chicago On Jan 27, 2012, at 9:43 AM, j. Tim Denny wrote: Jeremy and Yishay
YES
In the pat year or so many great projects have popped up to focus on OER and particularly on textbooks for high school and college. I think it is a wonderful idea for Schoolforge to support this effort but the question I have to ask is what aspect of the movement can we best support? might it be hardware, software or the actual texts?
There are various national efforts to digitize national curriculum, Nepal is working on it through http://www.olenepal.org, Korean has openly talked about their goal to have an entire education system online by 2015. Thailand has invested $2million to digitize its courses, etc etc...
so what can we offer? Should we be working directly with some national programs? other organizations? what?
Here I might offer that we first need to do needs assessment to garner a clearer idea of the current gaps and assess where nations can best use our support. How about a developing an online survey which could be used to communicate with key targets to assert where their needs are most persistent.
Anyhow, you are on to something immensely important as access to textbooks and in general access to learning materials is one of the greatest barriers to developing human resources the world over.
count me in..
Cheers Tim
__________________________________ j. Tim Denny, Ph.D. Consultant - International Development, Education and ICT
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On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 22:28, Yishay Mor <yishaym@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Jeremy,
Very interesting idea. Are you aware of -
Given Apple's recent announcement of iBook author ( http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/) and the controversy around it, I think its worth looking into the idea of open-source eBooks, and an open platform for collaboratively authoring eBooks.
A low-cost tablet and an open library of eBooks is much more cost effective than a repository of printable textbooks.
best
Yishay |