Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article titled “Global firm to pay Montgomery, Md., schools millions for elementary curriculum.” Essentially, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) have signed a deal with Pearson, the global publishing behemoth, under which MCPS will develop educational curriculum and transfer the copyright to Pearson. In exchange, Pearson will pay $2.25 million, [...]
I joined CC two years ago this January, and since then my views about CC’s role in culture and education have evolved. Back then, I was pretty much a novice to this space, though sharing in education sounded like a no brainer to me. But I’ve had time to grow with my program (CC Learn), [...]
Recently George Siemens posted some thoughts on the topic of openness as an ideology, and a dialogue began to take shape around whether the open education movement is best served by pragmatists or ideologues. In true blogger fashion, I want to ignore a lot of the context and put my own spin on the topic [...]
Friday, November 20, 2009
Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA
A Peer 2 Peer University co-founder recently posed this question to our tight knit community of volunteers: “Where are we in terms of P2PU’s evolution (one guy with his shirt off, or three people falling over themselves?)” Of course, this question was in reference to this infamous YouTube video of [...]
Something I hear frequently is this wish that all “educational uses” be considered “fair uses,” thereby presumably freeing the resources from the usual constraints of copyright. How shall we count the ways that this seemingly simple idea is confused at best, and horribly wrong at worst? Let’s see…
1. Define “educational use” for me. Does it [...]
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Current textbook initiatives give the impression that educational quality will suffer without textbooks. In response to economic crises, these initiatives focus on saving the textbook, by either reducing its cost or digitizing many of its components. However, this public perception, that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, begs the question.
Also filed in Education, Open Textbooks
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Tagged california, free digital textbook initiative, K-12 education, Open Textbooks, quality, social content review, state standards, textbook adoption, textbooks, thomas b. fordham institute
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Digital textbooks and open learning are in the news again, just in time for back to school. The New York Times has published an article called “In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History” by Tamar Lewin, who profiles the increasing adoption of digital textbooks by school districts as a way of cutting costs and as [...]
