One school in Pennsylvania is using open-source tools wherever possible to keep students close to the code behind the machines they use. This stance is opposite to the very restrictive policies of many schools, but could allow students more freedom to explore what makes devices work.
thinkstock By Ana Tintocalis California is one step closer to bringing free online textbooks for state college students, a huge step for the open education movement. A historic bill on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown would give college professors, and thereby students, an option to use free online, customizable curriculum rather than print textbooks, … Continue reading Will Free Online Textbooks Become a Reality for California College Students? →
By Ben Stern, EdSurge The enemy of innovation and growth is routine. These auspicious weeks before the school year commences are the perfect time to create a new routine that will ensure innovation in your instruction and growth as an instructor. Here are some idea for those who want to take advantage of these next … Continue reading Five Smart Habits to Develop for Back to School →
By Frank Catalano Schools are moving from creamy to chunky — but not in relation to cafeteria peanut butter. The change in texture is happening with content. Instruction that was structured linearly, captured in books that were all-inclusive monoliths with a predetermined progression for a uniform, somewhat “creamy” consistency, is shifting to newer forms of … Continue reading How Open Education is Changing the Texture of Content →
Flickr:FontFont Open education sites exemplify how technology is democratizing education. These sites allow both learners and teachers to create their own curriculum, whether it’s used in or out of the classroom. Here’s a comprehensive list of open education sites MindShift has covered. As always, we love to hear about sites that aren’t included in the … Continue reading Open Education Sites Offer Free Content for All →
When we talk about the upheaval in educational publishing, we often focus on what students read, via digital textbooks, apps, and e-readers and tablets. But there’s another side to all this, and that’s the production of the scholarly works. For most academics, publishing their work in scholarly journals is a part of their jobs. It’s … Continue reading Open Source Comes to Academic Publishing →
Dale Dougherty, founder of Maker Media (which organizes the annual Maker Faire), O’Reilly Media (publisher of all those great “Missing Manuals”) heralds the virtues of the open web and the history of open-source information in this talk at Open Educational Resources 2011 talk last month. “The most important educational resource is the student,” he says.
Flickr:CriCristina This month marks the tenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the university’s initiative to provide free and open access to its core academic content — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from over 2000 MIT course. The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow … Continue reading 10 Ways OpenCourseWare Has Freed Education →
There’s no argument that Silicon Valley startups have influenced how businesses operate. The fact that most companies now count social media strategy as a crucial part of their operation is a testament to the Internet culture infiltrating far beyond the Internet-only based businesses. The same phenomenon is happening in education. Here are five ways tech-based … Continue reading Five Ways Silicon Valley is Changing Education →
“Humans tend to use new technology in the same way they used the old technology,” says Cleve Miller, founder and managing director of English360, an online learning and open source model for English language teachers. “The first television broadcasts were of a man in an armchair with a microphone — exactly like the radio! It … Continue reading Open Source: A New Paradigm for Language Learning →
We hear a lot about the importance of “social learning” — the recognition that students’ collaboration on projects is something to praise, not a form of cheating to punish. But we tend to hear little about “social teaching,” and the idea that that collaborative process of knowledge sharing and building involves both learning and teaching. … Continue reading Unlocking the Teacher in All of Us →
Ten years ago, the concept of a university openly sharing its prized (and expensive) curriculum for free with anyone who was interested, especially one has highly regarded as M.I.T., was unheard of. But in the past decade MIT OpenCourseWare has paved the way for the open-source content movement. On their tenth anniversary, ReadWriteWeb enumerates what … Continue reading What’s Next for Open-Source Education? →