Re: [school-discuss] project idea: open source text books

[Micah Roth <micah.roth@xxxxxxxx>]

I'm a US Peace Corps Education Volunteer (PCV) currently serving in the Philippines. In Education, PCVs often have to source their own materials and lesson plans. Here in the Philippines, it's not strictly because the materials don't exist but that the materials are so poorly designed and written. So there's an army of Peace Corps Volunteers out there duplicating work every single day, generating 50 versions of the same lessons. If we had some centralized place to put our effort, I'm quite confident we could really make progress on generating open materials. It would make our jobs easier and more fulfilling, too. I feel like there's a lot of unfocused effort being expended in educational materials development in the Peace Corps that really needs to be harnessed in an open-format materials development project.

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Jim Jütte <jimjutte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tim,

My view is both abroad (I currently teach in China) and at home.  With respect to China, I can only comment about my school about where I'm working, but suffice to say that texts are challenges. Ironically when compared to local schools, I am teaching in a very wealthy environment, so your comments about books is understood. At "home", I find that there is an increasing disparity between school districts, but this is especially true in aboriginal communities which aren't necessarily that different from non-aboriginal communities in rural and northern areas of Canada.

Jim