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'Telepresence' adds realism to video conferencing
Initial cost is likely too steep for schools--but it could have future implications
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
October 26, 2006
Imagine a virtual conferencing solution so advanced that unsuspecting visitors entering the room have been unaware that not all participants were physically present.
That's what Cisco Systems has designed with its new "Cisco TelePresence" system, technology that aims to remedy the detached feel of talking to a television set that long has plagued traditional video conferences. The technology is likely to have a limited impact in education in the near term, given its initial price point. But as the cost comes down, it could have implications for schools down the road, industry watchers say.
Cisco TelePresence is a tool for orchestrating meetings between far-flung parties that will deliver a vastly more intimate experience, Cisco claims. Announced on Oct. 23, the solution is the San Jose, Calif.-based networking gear maker's first foray into the fledgling "telepresence" market.
The term is industry jargon for attempting to simulate real-time interactions between people in different locations using high-definition monitors, highly sensitive audio equipment, and integrated networking gear.
The technology aims to be so realistic as to make conference-call participants believe the person talking on the monitor is actually in the same room.
For example, picture a conference room with six chairs, three on each side of a conference table. Envision a clear glass panel running down the center of the table.
Walk into this room while a high-level parlay is under way, and you'd see six executives deep in conversation. But here's the catch: Only three of them are physically present. The three participants closest to you actually are in the room. The others are in another location, but their life-size, high-definition images are on the glass partition in the conference room.
The illusion reportedly is heightened because both locations use matching furnishings. Other elements that enhance the effect are that participants appear to make direct eye contact with one another, the streaming video is smooth and flawless, and the audio is perfectly matched to lip movement.
Several companies, including Hewlett-Packard Co., already offer telepresence products. The market is projected to grow to $300 million by 2008, according to technology research firm Gartner Inc.
Cisco, which makes the routers and switches used to link networks, is banking that large corporate clients will flock to the technology and propel it into a billion-dollar business.
One of Cisco's newest products is a high-end room that can accommodate up to 12 people around the virtual table and comes with three 65-inch plasma displays, three high-definition cameras, and the table and lighting. Price: $299,000.
The other is a single-screen version that costs $79,000 and can accommodate up to four people.
Both products are designed to run across a company's existing network, said Marthin De Beer, vice president of Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology Group.
But to take advantage of the technology, customers must have robust bandwidth; the high-end room uses about 10 megabits of bandwidth per second.
De Beer said the technology marks a dramatic improvement in reliability, ease of use, and overall realism over traditional video conferencing products and solves a lingering business dilemma.
"This has been an elusive dream for many years," he said. "With all the technologies of the past, people were never comfortable to use it for real business, to close that deal or sign that contract."
Whether the illusion of greater intimacy is important enough for schools to justify the higher price tag remains to be seen.
"Telepresence will have a very limited role in education in the near future, given the [initial] price point," said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for Florida's Broward County Public Schools.
Sonty said Broward County is now piloting a video conferencing system that lowers the cost to about $200 per end point and reportedly works with all other major systems. He said the high-definition capabilities of the district's current system are "more than sufficient for education," including teaching, learning, and research.
David Willis, chief of research for Gartner, said the steep price and network requirements make Cisco's products irrelevant for all but the largest of customers. But he was impressed with the technology.
"It's an amazing illusion," he said. "It really pulls off the experience of a real meeting. And I hate video conferencing ... But this is like David Copperfield. This is like magic."
Cisco said the systems are already available and should begin shipping to customers in about four weeks.
Link:
Cisco TelePresence
http://www.cisco.com/telepresence
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
ALL Things DIGITAL and SOME Unintended Consequences
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Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?
Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.
The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.
Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture, the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated movies.
What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”
Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.
Richard M. Karp, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk whose title seemed esoteric: “The Algorithmic Nature of Scientific Theories.”
Yet he presented a fundamental explanation for why computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both mathematics and computer science.
“Algorithms are small but beautiful,” Dr. Karp observed. And algorithms are good at describing dynamic processes, while scientific formulas or equations are more suited to static phenomena. Increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes, and computer science, he said, is the systematic study of algorithms.
Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes, like protein production, as algorithms. “In other words, nature is computing,” he said.
Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation.”
But with the rise of the Internet, social networks and technology networks are becoming inextricably linked, so that behavior in social networks can be tracked on a scale never before possible.
“We’re really witnessing a revolution in measurement,” Dr. Kleinberg said.
The new social-and-technology networks that can be studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success? Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?
Social networking research promises a rich trove for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists and educators.
“This is the introduction of computing and algorithmic processes into the social sciences in a big way,” Dr. Kleinberg said, “and we’re just at the beginning.”
But having a powerful new tool of tracking the online behavior of groups and individuals also raises serious privacy issues. That became apparent this summer when AOL inadvertently released Web search logs of 650,000 users.
Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life. The potential for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking. Rick Rashid, a computer scientist and head of Microsoft’s research labs, noted that he would like to see a recording of the first steps of his grown son, or listen to a conversation he had with his father many years ago. “I’d like some of that back,” he said. “In the future, that will be possible.”
But clearly, the technology could also enable a surveillance society. “We’ll have the capability, and it will be up to society to determine how we use it,” Dr. Rashid said. “Society will determine that, not scientists.”
Monday, October 30, 2006
STEM Project Granting Vehicle
DaimlerChrysler, science center offer tech education awards: the DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund and the Detroit Science Center announced that the "Closing the Technology Gap" educational awards will return for a second year and applications can be submitted immediately.
The program, which honors teachers who have challenged and stimulated students in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math, will award a total of $87,000 to Michigan public schools.
The program aims to increase student interest and participation in the sciences and ultimately provide companies such as Chrysler Group with a viable, technology oriented work force in the future.
Michigan public school teachers who teach STEM courses are invited to submit an application via mail to the Detroit Science Center or the Web site www.chryslerteacherawards.com by Dec. 31.
Winners will be announced in May.
The program, which honors teachers who have challenged and stimulated students in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math, will award a total of $87,000 to Michigan public schools.
The program aims to increase student interest and participation in the sciences and ultimately provide companies such as Chrysler Group with a viable, technology oriented work force in the future.
Michigan public school teachers who teach STEM courses are invited to submit an application via mail to the Detroit Science Center or the Web site www.chryslerteacherawards.com by Dec. 31.
Winners will be announced in May.
Friday, October 27, 2006
DIGITAL Video 1.0
eSchool News presents
Creative Video Solutions
The digital age has completely transformed how video is used in schools. No longer is it necessary for teachers to order films three weeks in advance. Almost gone are the days when media-resource teachers got into their car and drove filmstrips, VHS tapes, and DVDs from school to school. Today, an increasing number of schools are reaping the benefits of video delivered over computer networks.
Whether it's called video streaming, video over IP (Internet Protocol), or video on demand, the concept is relatively the same. Video is digitized, housed on a server, and accessed via computer. Users can play the video clips directly from the internet on their computer screens, or they can download a clip and show it to the entire class via a television monitor or a digital projector beaming the images onto a large screen.
The advent of video streaming offers many advantages. With just a few seconds at the computer, teachers are able to show short snippets of video to capture students' attention at the beginning of a lesson or to reinforce what they are teaching. And beyond delivering supplemental instructional videos to classrooms, schools are sending video across their networks for other functions, too.
For example, many schools and districts are creating their own professional development videos and giving teachers access to them online at their convenience. Others are using video to reach out to parents and other stakeholders, such as streaming school board meetings, football games, or video news programs over the internet.
With the generous support of New Dimension Media (NDM), the editors of eSchool News have assembled the following collection of news stories, best practices, and other resources from the eSN archives to help you explore the many ways video streaming can be used to boost communication and enhance instruction in your own schools.--The Editors
Creative Video Solutions
The digital age has completely transformed how video is used in schools. No longer is it necessary for teachers to order films three weeks in advance. Almost gone are the days when media-resource teachers got into their car and drove filmstrips, VHS tapes, and DVDs from school to school. Today, an increasing number of schools are reaping the benefits of video delivered over computer networks.
Whether it's called video streaming, video over IP (Internet Protocol), or video on demand, the concept is relatively the same. Video is digitized, housed on a server, and accessed via computer. Users can play the video clips directly from the internet on their computer screens, or they can download a clip and show it to the entire class via a television monitor or a digital projector beaming the images onto a large screen.
The advent of video streaming offers many advantages. With just a few seconds at the computer, teachers are able to show short snippets of video to capture students' attention at the beginning of a lesson or to reinforce what they are teaching. And beyond delivering supplemental instructional videos to classrooms, schools are sending video across their networks for other functions, too.
For example, many schools and districts are creating their own professional development videos and giving teachers access to them online at their convenience. Others are using video to reach out to parents and other stakeholders, such as streaming school board meetings, football games, or video news programs over the internet.
With the generous support of New Dimension Media (NDM), the editors of eSchool News have assembled the following collection of news stories, best practices, and other resources from the eSN archives to help you explore the many ways video streaming can be used to boost communication and enhance instruction in your own schools.--The Editors
Thursday, October 26, 2006
DIGITAL Gaming for Education!
Scientists call for government to help fund video game research
10/17/2006 1:47:21 PM, by Jacqui Cheng
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) released a report (PDF) today recommending that the federal government provide funding to create more educational video games. They argue that video games teach higher-level, complex thinking skills that are used in today's workplaces, and that these skills would give American students an edge in the job market over foreign competition.
The conclusions were drawn from a summit held last year in Washington, DC and sponsored by the FAS, the Entertainment Software Association, and the National Science Foundation. The summit, composed of nearly a hundred experts ranging from the video game industry to teachers, focused on four key issues: video game features that support learning, research needed to support video games in education, market barriers, and barriers in the school system.
The panel determined that there are, in fact, skills learned by video games that are of value to today's employers, including "strategic and analytical thinking, problem solving, planning and execution, decision-making, and adaptation to rapid change." Additionally, they found that video games foster goal-setting, practice in patience, and even team building. Carefully noting that there is a difference between video games developed for entertainment versus education, the FAS's report says that an emphasis in learning in video games could greatly benefit future generations of workers.
In order to continue to foster these skills in children and young adults, more educational games need to be developed, according to the report. There are a number of barriers holding back the video game industry from doing so, however. First, there is little-to-no actual research done on how effective educational video games can be on children, making the industry unwilling to take the financial risk in developing such programs without the promise that they will take off. Secondly, without any sort of testing that measures the skills learned in video games, schools are scared to sacrifice textbook time for video game time, especially in the eyes of parents and teachers who hold a dim view of the value of gaming.
So what are the recommendations? FAS recommends that the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor should work in conjunction with educators and researchers to develop a research & development schedule to evaluate learning in games.
Additionally, part of the R&D schedule should include a method by which those skills would be assessed. Also included in the recommendations are school systems working educational video games into their teaching, a feat that could take some time given the strict budgets and lesson plans that many schools already face.
*21st Century Digital Learning Environments have had seminal discussions with the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU) regarding the co-development of such a collaborative initiative between their organization and K-12 Education.
DIGITAL WEB 2.0 (Coming to a Classroom Near You Soon?)
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Wiki..Quick and Easy Collaboration
Gettin' Wiki Wit It
A new online tool allows workers to collaborate quickly and easily.
By Andy Opsahl
October 2006
In Hawaiian, the word wiki wiki means quick or fast.
But when computer programmer Ward Cunningham used the term to describe the set of formatting tools he created in 1994 that allow collaborative discussion to take place online, he shortened it to just wiki.
Even a few years ago, the word wiki meant little to most people. But the explosive -- and some say controversial -- growth of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone with Internet access can edit, has popularized the term, as well as the software that makes wikis possible.
With this popularity, it's no surprise that several vendors are developing types of wikis, and that government is also looking into the technology.
The Federal Approach
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) implemented a wiki in 2004 as part of a collaborative work environment suite of online decision support devices. The GSA used that wiki for a U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chartered workshop to improve data maintenance and referencing.
The wiki allowed remote attendees interactive participation in discussions and enabled them to submit comments. When the on-site participants broke into small discussion groups, remote participants posted their comments, and also had quick access to the comments made in those on-site group discussions.
"It's very easy for our community members to participate without having to travel," said Susan Turnball, senior program adviser for the GSA. "Prior to the wiki, they would probably be sitting in their offices, just listening to presentations with nothing in front of them."
The wiki's user-friendly aspect of the process kept remote participants from being passive, she said, and prevented decisions from being made only by on-site attendees.
"Originally we estimated this project would take 18 months," Turnball added. "It was completed in 180 days and was successfully issued by OMB. It's actually being adopted by states right now."
Community Application
Wiki technology is primarily used to allow groups of nonprogrammers to collaboratively create applications, said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, a technology consulting firm. The collaborative concept of a wiki has been around for several years, she said, but interest from nonprogrammers hadn't been considerable until recently.
"Now you have lots of people offering wikis in the context of user environments," Wohl said. "In some cases, they're offering them for fairly specific purposes, and in other cases, you can do whatever you want with them."
Groups that create wiki applications can customize the rules for how people participate.
"You could decide whether you want membership in the wiki to be by invitation only, or whether anybody who comes across can join," Wohl said. "You could decide whether to have different role levels among the people who can participate in the wiki, so some people can only read things, and some people can read and write. Some people have sort of administrative capabilities where they can delete things other people write or set up in a group."
Wiki groups typically divide users into subgroups to work on different parts of the application rather than a big "jam session," she said, which sometimes happens. "You want to split it up by topics, by groups of people, by projects, by dates or however you're splitting it up. Wikipedia is just an example of a wiki that's been split up by topics.
"Typically the point of a wiki is to let multiple people collaborate," Wohl continued. "You probably wouldn't use a wiki if one person were doing the whole thing, because there are other tools that are just as useful and less trouble."
Customizing Applications
IBM is developing a technology called Enterprise Mashup, which would let users place individual application functions -- such as phone number searches, GIS devices and other functions -- in the combination and on the location on the screen they found most useful.
1 | 2 | 3 Next
Andy Opsahl
Staff Writer
A new online tool allows workers to collaborate quickly and easily.
By Andy Opsahl
October 2006
In Hawaiian, the word wiki wiki means quick or fast.
But when computer programmer Ward Cunningham used the term to describe the set of formatting tools he created in 1994 that allow collaborative discussion to take place online, he shortened it to just wiki.
Even a few years ago, the word wiki meant little to most people. But the explosive -- and some say controversial -- growth of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone with Internet access can edit, has popularized the term, as well as the software that makes wikis possible.
With this popularity, it's no surprise that several vendors are developing types of wikis, and that government is also looking into the technology.
The Federal Approach
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) implemented a wiki in 2004 as part of a collaborative work environment suite of online decision support devices. The GSA used that wiki for a U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chartered workshop to improve data maintenance and referencing.
The wiki allowed remote attendees interactive participation in discussions and enabled them to submit comments. When the on-site participants broke into small discussion groups, remote participants posted their comments, and also had quick access to the comments made in those on-site group discussions.
"It's very easy for our community members to participate without having to travel," said Susan Turnball, senior program adviser for the GSA. "Prior to the wiki, they would probably be sitting in their offices, just listening to presentations with nothing in front of them."
The wiki's user-friendly aspect of the process kept remote participants from being passive, she said, and prevented decisions from being made only by on-site attendees.
"Originally we estimated this project would take 18 months," Turnball added. "It was completed in 180 days and was successfully issued by OMB. It's actually being adopted by states right now."
Community Application
Wiki technology is primarily used to allow groups of nonprogrammers to collaboratively create applications, said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, a technology consulting firm. The collaborative concept of a wiki has been around for several years, she said, but interest from nonprogrammers hadn't been considerable until recently.
"Now you have lots of people offering wikis in the context of user environments," Wohl said. "In some cases, they're offering them for fairly specific purposes, and in other cases, you can do whatever you want with them."
Groups that create wiki applications can customize the rules for how people participate.
"You could decide whether you want membership in the wiki to be by invitation only, or whether anybody who comes across can join," Wohl said. "You could decide whether to have different role levels among the people who can participate in the wiki, so some people can only read things, and some people can read and write. Some people have sort of administrative capabilities where they can delete things other people write or set up in a group."
Wiki groups typically divide users into subgroups to work on different parts of the application rather than a big "jam session," she said, which sometimes happens. "You want to split it up by topics, by groups of people, by projects, by dates or however you're splitting it up. Wikipedia is just an example of a wiki that's been split up by topics.
"Typically the point of a wiki is to let multiple people collaborate," Wohl continued. "You probably wouldn't use a wiki if one person were doing the whole thing, because there are other tools that are just as useful and less trouble."
Customizing Applications
IBM is developing a technology called Enterprise Mashup, which would let users place individual application functions -- such as phone number searches, GIS devices and other functions -- in the combination and on the location on the screen they found most useful.
1 | 2 | 3 Next
Andy Opsahl
Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Resonating Theme: Funding for Research & Development of Digital Learning Metrics & Rubrics
October 24, 2006
News Update :: Tuesday, October 24, 2006
News
MacArthur Foundation Quests for Secrets to Digital Learning
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said it would donate $50 million for projects that will help understand “the impact of the widespread use of digital media on our youth and how they learn.”
The Foundation announced that the research will test the theory that digital youth are different because they use digital tools to “assimilate knowledge, play, communicate, and create social networks” in new and different ways.
“This is the first generation to grow up digital – coming of age in a world where computers, the Internet, video games, and cell phones are common, and where expressing themselves through these tools is the norm,” said MacArthur president Jonathan Fanton. “Given how present these technologies are in their lives, do young people act, think, and learn differently today? And what are the implications for education and for society?”
The funding will support an array of projects in 2007, including:
-- A donation of $2 million annually for research and creation of a Web-based hub for information on digital media and learning.
-- MacArthur will publish six books 2007, online and in print, on topics will include credibility, civic engagement, and the ecology of games, as well as identity and digital media.
Human and Community Development
Digital Media, Learning & Education
Grantmaking in education seeks primarily to gain a better understanding of how digital technologies are changing how young people learn, play, socialize, exercise judgment, and engage in civic life.
Grantmaking also is exploring how learning environments – peers, family and social institutions (such as schools) – may be changing as well. Through answers to these questions, and the policy responses to them, the Foundation seeks to help build the interdisciplinary, cross-sector field of digital media and learning.
To learn more about this initaitive, visit the Digital Media and Learning website, or engage with grantees on the Spotlight blog.
An effort also continues to improve schools in Chicago neighborhoods where other Foundation-funded community revitalization activities are underway.
|  | From the Field
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Monday, October 23, 2006
The URGENCY of the DIGITAL EMERGENCY!
The Fischbowl
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html
Check out the PowerPointe Slideshow.........geared to "stretch" your mind and imagination.
LINK: COMPLIMENTS FO PAUL BRIERCHECK
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html
Check out the PowerPointe Slideshow.........geared to "stretch" your mind and imagination.
LINK: COMPLIMENTS FO PAUL BRIERCHECK
Saturday, October 21, 2006
FRAMING the Contextual 21st Century Digital Broadband Revolution K-12 Education On-Line Experience Conversation
LINK: COMPLIMENTS OF PAUL BRIERCHECK
Michigan Merit Curriculum On-Line Experience
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/Online10.06_final_175750_7.pdf
Resonating Intention: But while they are trying to decide WHAT Conversation to have, let's just go ahead and SHOW THEM WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE!
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Spreading the Broadband Revolution
WASHINGTON
LAST week, Google announced that it would pay $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, a video-sharing Web site started only 20 months ago. At the same time, CBS announced a content-sharing arrangement with YouTube. This is the new world of interactive television, all made possible by fast broadband connections streaming video over the Internet.
Television is becoming a two-way, interactive experience that offers viewers the digital agility of the computer, the display quality of a movie theater and content that can be summoned on demand. It will take us from what an F.C.C. chairman, Newton Minow, referred to 45 years ago as a “vast wasteland” to a vast interactive world of limitless content — a long way from our couch-potato past.
Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide.
The nation should have a full-scale policy debate about the direction of the broadband Internet, especially about how to make sure that all Americans get access to broadband connections.
Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.
As chairman of the F.C.C., I put into place many policies to bridge the narrowband digital divide. The broadband revolution poses similar challenges for policymakers. America should be a world leader in broadband technology and deployment, and we must ensure that no group or region in America is denied access to high-speed connections.
We are falling short in both areas. Since 2000, the United States has slipped from second to 19th in the world in broadband penetration, with Slovenia threatening to push us into 20th. Studies by the federal government conclude that our rural and low-income areas trail urban and high-income areas in the rate of broadband use. Indeed, this year the Government Accountability Office found that 42 percent of households have either no computer or a computer with no Internet connection.
Two promising policies in particular would significantly expand broadband access.
First, to ensure that broadband reaches into rural, low income and other underserved communities, Congress should reform the Universal Service Fund, the federal subsidy paid to companies that provide telephone service to rural areas. For decades, the fund has been financed by a federal fee or surcharge that consumers pay on interstate phone calls. But the fund in its current form is not an effective way to support expanded broadband access. It is not fair to expect telephone consumers to bear the sole burden of the subsidy, and the decline in revenue from traditional long-distance calling is shrinking the base for contributions to the fund.
We must find a new source of revenue for the fund that does not exclusively tax users of the phone network. And we should adopt a much more efficient way to distribute precious fund dollars. All communications companies — telephone, cable TV or wireless network operators — that want government financing to provide broadband services to specific underserved communities should submit competitive bids to the fund. The F.C.C.’s chairman, Kevin Martin, has opened the debate on this proposal, called a reverse auction, which would ensure that only the most efficient companies would be granted subsidies to provide service to rural areas. This is a step in the right direction.
Second, Congress should put all broadband providers on a level playing field. Both the cable and telephone industries are racing to provide a bundle of services to consumers. Each wants to be the consumer’s one-stop shop for video, voice and data services. Unfortunately, the legacy of historic regulation puts the telephone companies at a serious regulatory disadvantage in quickly deploying video services.
Both industries could benefit from national franchising legislation that would streamline the franchising process and promote innovation and competition. (Disclosure: Some companies in which I invest at The Carlyle Group could also benefit from the wave of investment that would result from such legislation.)
Congress punted on both of these issues this year in large part because of the polarizing net neutrality debate. Now the combatants are set to throw millions more dollars into the fray when Congress revisits new telecommunications legislation. Policymakers should rise above the net neutrality debate and focus on what America truly requires from the Internet: getting affordable broadband access to those who need it.
Friday, October 20, 2006
More on ALL THING'S DIGITAL.....and by design, beginning with the END in MIND!
E-learning: Not Just Child's Play
By Lindsay Oishi
URL: http://www.schoolcio.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187201337
Q. What e-learning initiatives has Chicago Public Schools undertaken in the past two years?
A. One example is using PDAs (personal digital assistants) for kindergarten to 3rd grade early literacy screening, data-informed and differentiated instruction, and ongoing progress monitoring of students. The scope of it has been 66,820 students in 457 elementary schools. This PDA is from Wireless Generation, and it's called DIBELS—Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. It gives you an indication of which students are on their way to successful early reading, and which are struggling. It allows the teacher to make data-informed decisions, and it identifies strategies for teachers to use. There's also a parents' report to give parents specific strategies in order to identify and address gaps in early literacy.
We have also implemented a student information system along with a curriculum instructional management system. Now we have all the data in the system—scheduling, grades, benchmark assessments, screening tools, state assessments—along with curriculum and learning standards. So instead of creating a lesson and then implementing an assessment, a teacher can flip it and say, "Looking at a student's assessment results, how do I plan instruction based on where they're at?" That's called backwards design.
Q. Why should K–12 CIOs build out their infrastructures to support e-learning?
A. Training is a short-term activity. That means that you're not going to have a return on that investment. It's a waste of time. Why is classroom training for teachers and administrators declining while e-learning gains? I'll tell you why. Because there's a reduction in cost per person, increased reach, reduced time to train, increased consistency and compliance, and increased tracking and reporting. So think about the benefits—it's immediate interaction and feedback, collaboration and social learning, reduced travel costs, and reduced time away from work and home. Those are huge benefits. Classroom training is like eating out at a restaurant: you need to make reservations. Asynchronous e-learning is like doing your own microwave dinner at home. But synchronous e-learning is like room service. Who doesn't like room service?
Q. What challenges do CIOs face when it comes to supporting e-learning?
A. CIOs need to be more collaborative and more innovative, and they have to build an entire system that's going to work over the long term. You've got to have learning and development. [Learning and development are] the first things people want to minimize. But learning and development are going to give you the greatest return on investment.
Q. How do you measure return on investment?
A. The return on investment for us is increased student achievement. We need to increase the ability of people to do their jobs, which ultimately increases student achievement. You can have all sorts of electronic systems, but if people don't know how to use them effectively, it's all for naught. The single best indicator of whether a school is going to be effective is if you have an effective leader. If they don't have the capacity to lead the school in effective uses of technology, then it's not going to happen in that school.
Q. Are there trends in this area that are just starting to emerge?
A. Oh yeah. If you think about why we are increasing learning and development for teachers and administrators, it's because there's return on investment. We increase teacher effectiveness and administrators' capacity to lead. Students are more engaged and motivated to learn; it's more student-centered, focused on where students are. With these electronic systems, we can zoom in on individual student analysis and understand what we must do to increase their capacity to learn.
Lindsay Oishi is a graduate student in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at Stanford University.
© School CIODIGITAL: Is it "LIVE" or "MEMOREX?"
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October 20, 2006
C. J. Gunther for The New York Times
Katherine Lantz, a high school junior in Peterborough, N.H., dissecting a pig on the Web. Her school does not offer zoology, so she takes it online.
No Test Tubes? Debate on Virtual Science Classes
When the Internet was just beginning to shake up American education, a chemistry professor photographed thousands of test tubes holding molecular solutions and, working with video game designers, created a simulated laboratory that allowed students to mix chemicals in virtual beakers and watch the reactions.
In the years since, that virtual chemistry laboratory — as well as other simulations allowing students to dissect virtual animals or to peer into tidal pools in search of virtual anemone — has become a widely used science teaching tool. The virtual chemistry laboratory alone has some 150,000 students seated at computer terminals around the country to try experiments that would be too costly or dangerous to do at their local high schools. “Some kids figure out how to blow things up in half an hour,” said the professor, Brian F. Woodfield of Brigham Young University.
Now, however, a dispute with potentially far-reaching consequences has flared over how far the Internet can go in displacing the brick-and-mortar laboratory.Prompted by skeptical university professors, the College Board, one of the most powerful organizations in American education, is questioning whether Internet-based laboratories are an acceptable substitute for the hands-on culturing of gels and peering through microscopes that have long been essential ingredients of American laboratory science.
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the board has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.
“Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they’d be concerned about giving credit to students who have never had any experience in a hands-on lab,” said Trevor Packer, the board’s executive director for Advanced Placement. “You could have students going straight into second-year college science courses without ever having used a Bunsen burner.”
Internet-based educators are seeking to convince the board, and the public, that their virtual laboratories are educationally sound, pointing out that their students earn high scores on the A.P. exams. They also say online laboratories are often the only way advanced science can be taught in isolated rural schools or impoverished urban ones. Online schooling, which was all but nonexistent at the elementary and secondary level a decade ago, is today one of the fastest-growing educational sectors, with some half-million course enrollments nationwide.
Twenty-five states operate public, Internet-based schools like the Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest, which has some 40,000 students. Virtual High School, a nonprofit school based in Maynard, Mass., has 7,600 students from 30 states and many countries. Susan Patrick, a former Department of Education official who is president of the North American Council for Online Learning, estimated that 60,000 public school students were enrolled in some online science course.
John Watson, an education consultant who wrote a report last year documenting virtual education’s growth, said online schools had faced lawsuits over financing and resistance by local school boards but nothing as daunting as the College Board.
“This challenge threatens the advance of online education at the national level in a way that I don’t think there are precedents for,” Mr. Watson said.
The board signaled a tough position this year.
“Members of the College Board insist that college-level laboratory science courses not be labeled ‘A.P.’ without a physical lab,” the board said in a letter sent to online schools in April. “Online science courses can only be labeled ‘A.P.’ if the online provider” can ensure “that students have a guided, hands-on (not virtual) laboratory experience.”
But after an outcry by online schools, the board issued an apology in June, acknowledging that “there may be new developments” in online learning that could merit its endorsement.
Mr. Packer of the College Board said in an interview that the board had set up three five-member panels composed of biology, chemistry and physics professors and online educators, which are to meet in New York next month to review the online laboratories offered by Internet-based schools for A.P. courses.
The board’s rulings will determine whether high schools can apply the A.P. designation to online science courses starting next fall on the transcripts of students applying to colleges, Mr. Packer said.
In recent conversations with college science professors, the board has encountered considerable skepticism that virtual laboratories can replace hands-on experience, he said.
But educators at several prominent online schools pointed to their students’ high scores on A.P. exams.
On the 2005 administration of the A.P. biology exam, for instance, 61 percent of students nationwide earned a qualifying score of three or above on the A.P.’s five-point system. Yet 71 percent of students who took A.P. biology online through the Florida Virtual School, and 80 percent of students who took it from the Virtual High School, earned a three or higher on that test.
“The proof is in the pudding,” said Pam Birtolo, chief learning officer at the Florida Virtual School.
Still, there is tremendous variety. A 2005 guidebook, “Finding an Online High School,” compiled by Vincent Kiernan, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, lists 113 Internet-based secondary schools, 32 of which offered at least one A.P. science course. Online curricula are anything but standardized, and new approaches to online laboratories are emerging at a dizzying pace, said Kemi Jona, a computer science professor at Northwestern University.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all landscape,” Dr. Jona said.
The science courses offered by some online high schools draw on multiple Internet sites that provide data, then lead students through an analysis. At one site, for instance, operated by the University of Arizona, students collect data from the cells of an onion root and use it to calculate the duration of each phase in the cells’ division.
Chemistry and other science courses at many Internet-based high schools include laboratories often characterized as “kitchen science,” in which students use household materials — ice, cooking oil, glass jars — to carry out experiments.
“ ‘Make sure we have potatoes in the house,’ my daughter told me before her last lab,” in which students studied osmosis, said Mayuri Shah, whose daughter Sonia is taking A.P. biology from the Florida Virtual School. Sonia, 16, enrolled in the online course because her high school in Lecanto, Fla., north of Tampa, does not offer it.
That is one of the most common reasons students sign up for online classes, said Ms. Patrick, the North American Council for Online Learning president.
“Thousands of schools in rural areas don’t have science labs, but they have kids who want to go to college and need that science inquiry experience,” she said. “Virtual science labs are their only option.”
ConVal High School in Peterborough, N.H., offers more than a dozen science courses, but zoology is not among them. So Katherine Lantz, a junior, is studying it online.
One recent evening she was at home, moving through a virtual pig dissection screen by screen. One image showed a pig kidney, outlined by pulsing yellow dots.
“Whoa, that’s kind of gross!” Katherine said. She clicked her mouse, causing a virtual scalpel to lay the pig’s kidney open, its internal regions highlighted by blinking labels.
“Its nice to have it enlarged because if we were dissecting this in my school lab this would be hard to see,” Katherine said. “I learn a lot online — as much as I would attending a physical class.”
But Earl W. Fleck, the biology professor who created the virtual pig dissection, believes otherwise. Dr. Fleck began working on the virtual dissection in 1997 to help his students at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., review for tests and to offer a substitute for those who, for ethical reasons, objected to working with once-living specimens.
Dr. Fleck, who is now provost at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, said students worldwide found the virtual dissection useful. But he called it “markedly inferior” to performing a real dissection.
“You don’t get the look and the feel and the smell,” he said.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Simple Digital Practicum
Integrating Visual Literacy
By Susan McLester
Oct 15, 2006
URL: http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193200370
Today's digital natives are driving the move toward visual information.
From its enviable perch atop a hill in San Francisco's Pacific Heights, Convent of the Sacred Heart High School for girls overlooks the city's Marina district and the encircling bay that bustles with ferries, freighters, and the occasional cruise ship. Inside the old mansion's walls, just over 200 students are interacting with technology in a way that Computer Science Chair Tracy Sena describes as "increasingly seamless and student-driven."
Internet-enabled Palm handhelds are the centerpiece of the school's four-year academic program that integrates a broad range of technologies into all curriculum areas. Incoming freshmen are each issued the latest Palm, and via a WideRay beaming station they begin their high school careers with an efficient, 21st century organization tool. Each day they download school-posted content, including homework assignments, testing schedules, sports updates, and various announcements.
Sena, who has been an educator for 24 years, remarks on the extent to which technology now comes naturally to students. "We handed out the Palms to the freshmen this year, and within 30 minutes, with no instruction from me, they'd configured their e-mail and were sending messages to each other." Students love the time-saving and flexible learning Palms allow, often using the graffiti option to complete written assignments from the bus on the way to a game, for example, and e-mailing them directly to their teachers.
A major influence this generation of high school digital natives has had on the curriculum is their natural focus on visuals to convey information. "The girls are very creative when it comes to film and photo," says Sena. The school makes both digital still and video cameras from Canon and Olympus available for students to checkout, but as digital age denizens, it also comes naturally for the girls to use their Palms or even individual cell phones to incorporate visuals into class projects.
In Spanish class, for instance, students enjoy writing and filming their own telenovelas, imaginative subtitled spoofs on Spanish television soap operas. They work in teams shooting on location around town, staging action scenes in a local bowling alley or cafe, for instance, or choosing a behind-the-wheel close-up of an actor confessing secrets to a camera set in the car passenger seat while driving across town.
Other video projects include original commercials for a media literacy unit, creating a game show to review vocabulary for a language class, and documenting field trips, such as one the seniors took to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland last year.
Journaling is required in almost every subject at Sacred Heart, and students quickly become adept at finding accompanying images on the Internet or while out around the city. When reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club in an English class, for instance, they visited Chinatown to take photos of the different shops, restaurants, and parks Tan wrote about, and then added these images to entries written in Word, AppleWorks, or other word processing programs. Many of the students use Adobe's InDesign to keep all their journals because the application makes it easier to turn them into booklets.
Sacred Heart has found that mixing the digital and traditional — sometimes in unexpected ways — can motivate and enhance quality. Sacred Heart's award-winning school newspaper, the broadview, has jazzed up its historical format via imaginative design, layout, and illustration. With a combination of InDesign, scanned pen-and-ink drawings from the art department, manipulation of color spots, and high-quality writing, of course — as Sena hastens to point out — students have created an appealing, cutting-edge product their peers are excited to read. Also central to the publishing process is e-mail, which the educator describes as a lifeline when both she and student staff are proofing last-minute drafts of the paper from home, often late at night.
Teleconferencing is also integrated into the classroom and relations among school, home, and the community. Sena is currently exploring how to use Apple's iChat conferencing application to work collaboratively with another high school's newspaper class located down the peninsula in Palo Alto. Apple's newest operating system allows for as many as four videoconferencing windows to be open simultaneously, so that if students are having problems with implementing InDesign, they can alert Sena and through the iMac's built-in cameras, she'll be able to see their screens and walk them through their problem.
The school also began using iChat's videoconferencing capability at a recent open house, where parents gathered in the school's theater for a big-screen live chat with a Sacred Heart alumna at her new college. The school simply shipped an iChat-configured laptop to the college instead of using a videoconferencing service, which comes with a hefty fee, as they had in the past.
Susan McLester is editor in chief of T&L.
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Creating a Visual Classroom
Fourteen tips about how to inject visual information into any curriculum area as excerpted from the Tech Forum handout, "Visual Literacy and 21st Century Skills." For additional information, visit www.techlearning.com/events.
1. Use single images as writing prompts for creative writing, or for image analysis. Some great sources of appropriate imagery are Flickr and the National Archives.
2. Use Google Earth or geotagged Flickr imagery as data sources for geography lessons.
3. Build VisualQuests with myprojectpages.com, with visual information contained in the online lesson representing a data source that is used to answer an essential question.
4. Have students build presentations using only visual images-no text is allowed except on the title slide.
5. Build digital stories with the latest versions of iMovie, Photo Story, Movie Maker, Pinnacle Studio, or Digital Storyteller.
6. Teach students about intellectual property rights by designing lessons that utilize Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) licensed imagery.
7. Evaluate the authenticity of visual information.
8. Use Inspiration or an online tool such as Gliffy (www.gliffy.com) to diagram concepts or storyboard.
9. Use tools from Intel.com to promote critical thinking, such as the Seeing Reason Tool (for cause and effect) and the Visual Ranking Tool (analysis and prioritization of information).
10. Build teacher presentations in PowerPoint or at www.thumbstacks.com.
11. Use Flickr as a repository for student or school imagery and project work.
12. Analyze imagery or illustrate writing using Flickr.
13. Create virtual field trips and visual arguments in science class with Flickr.
14. Use online video editors such as eyespo and VideoEgg.
— David Jakes and Joe Brennan
Validation and a Variation on OUR Theme!
One-to-One in Michigan
By Tom McHale
Oct 15, 2006
URL: http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193200304
The first in a series of articles examining one-to-one programs across the nation.
The Freedom to Learn program is a statewide initiative coordinated by the Michigan Department of Education and Ferris State University in Big Rapids. Now beginning its third year, the program targets underperforming middle schools in 100 of the state's 500 districts. More than 23,000 students and 1,500 teachers have been issued HP nx9010 notebook computers with wireless capabilities, and new instructional models center on inquiry and project-based learning.
Funding
Demonstrating a strong commitment to a one-to-one environment, Michigan dedicated $7.5 million to the start-up program, with both state and federal funds financing the implementation phase to deliver the $1,040 HP package to individual teachers and students.
Funding, however, remains an ongoing challenge because the program does not provide for the infrastructure, upgrades, and additional costs needed to maintain it beyond the four-year HP training and support commitment. According to a Metiri Group study, "One-to-One in Michigan: A State Profile," the funding model was based on the Henrico County, Virginia initiative, which sought to sustain a laptop program for every teacher and student without seeking new money after initial implementation. In Henrico, reallocation is key, with the county redirecting 4 percent of its operations and maintenance budget to keep the program afloat.
In Michigan, sustained funding is left up to individual school districts. According to Leslie Wilson, director of professional and curriculum development for FTL, districts must rethink current models, trust the vision, and make changes to meet it. FTL has used the CoSN-Gartner TCO Tool to help schools and districts determine the total cost of ownership needed to deploy and maintain the program. According to "Measuring the Value of One-to-One Computing," a case study by FTL consultants Wilson and Eric L. Peterson, three districts using the CoSN-Gartner Tool reclaimed significant monies by sharing facility laboratories, eliminating the use of classroom inkjet printers, enlisting financial support from parents, and purchasing refurbished computers, servers, and printers at reduced costs. Currently, FTL is in the process of creating its own TCO tool for school leaders and is offering professional development workshops about grant writing and alternative funding sources to administrators.
Professional Development
Michigan recognized that an extensive ongoing professional development model for administrators, teachers, and technology staff was central to a successful one-to-one implementation. FTL developed its own professional development model in collaboration with the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) and others. At the heart of Michigan's training program is a mentoring model that involves training teams of lead teachers who then coach others in their building plus monitor the needs and effectiveness of the program. The program goals are to allow all participants to become knowledgeable, skilled, and comfortable with their new roles within the changing school environment.
For administrators that means facilitating reform, communicating their vision to all school constituents and using resources, funding, and grants. Wilson sees this as crucial to a program's success. "That administrator needs to model and believe in the vision and be able to create that shared vision with staff," she says. FTL's professional development program offers leadership workshops such as its hybrid of McREL's Balanced Leadership and the Gates Foundation's LEADing the Future.
Page 2
When every student is hooked up with a personal Internet-enabled computing device, the focus for teachers becomes integration and facilitation. After receiving their laptops, all participants attend a mandatory full-day orientation through HP that familiarizes them with the machine, software, and additional resources. Michigan chose a package that makes ongoing assessment and communication possible. It uses Microsoft's Class Server as the framework and includes Scantron's Assessment Connection, which allows teachers to build customized tests and quizzes from a regularly updated scientific bank of items aligned to Michigan's standards for grade level content. Also included is ETS's Discourse, a remote desktop management tool.
To aid in incorporating all of these new tools, the ATA Technology Academy (an SBC-funded homegrown training initiative) and FTL created a hybrid set of workshops that focuses on curriculum integration beyond traditional word processing, Internet research, and presentation development. Included is NTeQ: iNtegrating Technology for Inquiry, an inquiry and project-based learning program developed by Professor Gary Morrison of Old Dominion University and Deborah Lowther of the Appalachian Technology in Education Consortium.
Additional professional development resources include online courses and tutorials via Connected University, ongoing workshops on integrating program components (see the sidebar, "Michigan Toolbox"), and a 40-hour workshop for teachers on technology integration through Intel's Teach to the Future program. Administrators are also offered a 24-hour help desk, MACUL resources, and are encouraged to join learning communities to share best practices and problem-solving approaches.
How It's Working
Early results from a third-party evaluation conducted by the Center for Research in Educational Policy at the University of Memphis are encouraging. Through a combination of direct observation and surveys, the evaluation found a significant increase in cooperative and experiential learning and computer activities involving critical thinking, plus more student discussion than national norms. In addition, 61 percent of students reported being more interested in learning, 54 percent felt they learned more, and 51 percent believed their increased efforts would lead to getting better jobs in the future. Although achievement results from individual districts are promising, a statewide analysis of results in core subject areas is not yet complete.
Beyond the data, Wilson sees FTL's one-to-one program as transforming the classroom into a highly charged, student-centered learning atmosphere where teachers create a media-rich environment. Due to the emphasis on inquiry and project-based learning, students are also working more collaboratively, moving around, and depending more on one another than the teacher. "They are given permission to interact with the technology and each other in whatever way they need to learn," Wilson says. "It's a much more constructivist environment just by virtue of the fact that these kids are working in their native world."
Going Forward
Armed with lessons learned so far, executives from FTL, with support from HP and others, are in the process of launching the One-to-One Institute, a nonprofit, national organization whose mission is to facilitate school reform and student-centered learning through one-to-one programs. The institute identifies key components of successful laptop programs, serves as a clearinghouse for research and best practices, and links to other programs throughout the country to form a virtual community. Wilson, who knows firsthand the challenges schools, districts, and states face in implementing these programs, serves as interim secretary and vice president of programs and services. "You're burning down the house you knew and building over," she says.
Tom McHale is an educator in New Jersey.
Michigan Toolbox
ATA Technology Academy
www.ataacademy.org
Connected University
http://cu.classroom.com
CoSN's Taking TCO to the Classroom
www.classroomtco.org
Discourse
www.discourse.com
Freedom to Learn
http://www.ftlwireless.org/index.cfm
LEADing the Future
www.leadmichigan.org
Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning
www.macul.org
Microsoft's Education Portal
www.microsoft.com/education
NTeQ
www.nteq.com
One-to-One Institute
www.one-to-oneinstitute.org
unitedstreaming
www.unitedstreaming.com
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Resonating Intention: THINK Freedom and Communities of Practice, NOT Software
Open Source/Open Course Learning:
Lessons for Educators from Free and Open Source Software
Lessons for Educators from Free and Open Source Software
ARTICLE
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) has transformed the software industry. As noted by other authors in this issue, academic information technology (IT) is already realizing many benefits by adopting open software; such benefits include reduced cost, absence of user restrictions and vendor lock-in, and consistency with traditional academic values of openness and sharing. The greatest benefit of the FOSS movement for educators, however, is not cheaper or better software but the model it provides of a social, cultural, and legal framework capable of harnessing IT to improve learning.
At this point, some may object: "Universities have been using IT for a half-century and hardly need a new model." But formal education has used IT principally to support administration and research and has been slow to adapt it to improve its core business of teaching and learning. Traditional learning is still too passive, too parochial, too hierarchical, and too artificial. By harnessing IT effectively, educators can make instruction more graphic, dynamic, and active than it is now. They can introduce students to real-world experts and real-world problems and create communities of practice that promote learning. Others may object that a huge amount of online content is already available at no charge, so open source learning is old news. But price is the least important issue in open source learning, as a review of the factors critical to the success of FOSS will make clear.
In the model I outline below, the characteristics of FOSS that have contributed to its rapid rise and success serve as the inspiration for grassroots, open-source learning communities—or more succinctly, open course communities—that would be capable of transforming education just as FOSS communities have transformed the software industry. To be sure, the participants and domains of FOSS communities are not the same as those within the open course communities I envision, and consequently the former provide a pattern for education to emulate rather than a precise blueprint. Nevertheless, in light of the similarities that do exist between these two worlds, I believe that the FOSS-inspired approach can revitalize educational practice.
How and Why Open Source Succeeds
Richard Stallman (1996), founder of the Free Software Movement, defined FOSS as follows:
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer."
Free software . . . refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose . . .
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs . . .
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor . . .
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits . . . (¶ 2)
The license definition does not preclude a modest charge for the software, but the freedom to redistribute prevents monopoly rent and thereby limits the price that may be charged. With the near-zero cost of Internet distribution, the market price for downloaded material is often less than the overhead of a financial transaction and therefore effectively becomes zero.
The success of FOSS, however, is not directly due to any of the above freedoms but rather to the community that comes along with FOSS's egalitarian philosophy. FOSS projects succeed—when they do—because they are embedded in a supportive community of practice, not just because they make their source code available (Weber 2004). FOSS communities organize and govern themselves, continually evaluate and improve their products, and grow in size and influence—generally in a bottom-up fashion with little or no external funding or institutional support.
Mozilla's Firefox browser, for example, owes its stunning success to its community: the teams of (largely) volunteer programmers and testers, the volunteers who write documentation or staff the help forums, and especially those who tell friends about it and help answer their questions. This support community plays a key role in driving adoption because by reducing the difficulty of mastering how to download and use the browser, it reduces adoption cost. Commercial software companies offer support, too, but it is usually less helpful (and often more expensive) because they cannot match the sheer manpower and enthusiasm behind many open source projects. Too often commercial support consists of a low-level employee reading from a script: "First, try rebooting the computer. Next, uninstall and reinstall the software . . ." The crucial difference is that successful FOSS communities grow spontaneously and become self-sustaining and self-supporting, recruiting new users who become members of the community themselves.
The Concept of Open Course Communities
Like their FOSS counterparts, open course communities are defined by their freedoms:
- The freedom to use material for teaching and self-study.
- The freedom to adapt material to meet students' needs.
- The freedom to redistribute material to help others.
- The freedom to release improvements so that the entire community benefits.
The freedom to adapt and improve is even more important for learning materials than for software. Adapting is more than just a matter of internationalization and localization. Learning occurs more readily in a culturally familiar context, so a Homer Simpson example that connects with community college students in Atlanta may be ineffective or inappropriate for medical students in Kuala Lumpur. Using learning assets in a new setting often requires that they be adapted. As Robby Robson puts it, "Context is the friend of learning and the enemy of reuse" (2003, "Context," ¶ 2).
Affording these freedoms is not sufficient, however, for open content to be embraced by most teachers. Fifteen years of institutional and philanthropic support has produced many digital libraries and large stores of free and open content, yet their impact on mainstream education remains slight. Why?
The answer is that zero price does not mean zero adoption cost. Adopting a new learning asset takes time and is in itself a learning process. Most teachers have more work than time and are wary of adopting new technology without knowing how long it will take to master. Their cost (expressed in terms of hours) is: Adoption Cost = Mastery Time (difficulty, experience) + Price per Instructor/Hourly Wage.
Mastery time is an increasing function of the difficulty of the materials and a decreasing function of the instructor's experience with them. The price of the materials can be nil, but mastery time is always greater than zero so it is usually the dominant factor in the cost of adoption. This observation is as true for software as for courseware, and FOSS's most important lesson is that a strong community can reduce this cost.
Open Course Communities: Key Ingredients of Success
Support and Collaboration
A strong support community is crucial in helping mainstream faculty members adopt online learning materials. The community can help teachers find materials that are right for their courses and students, and it can help show them how the materials might be used. It can evaluate the materials, creating a feedback loop for improvement. Community members can contribute back improvements, new learning assets, lesson plans, and assessment questions so that all benefit.
Experience to date has shown that content alone—however excellent it may be—is not enough to impact formal learning significantly. Like the vacuum cleaner salesman's boast that "this machine will do most of your work by itself," it is false advertising. If educational content is to be effective for the mainstream, it needs to be supported by a strong community of teachers, teacher trainers, developers, technologists, and students. Learning is always the result of a conversation, however indirect that conversation may be. What is needed is not just open content but open course, defined as follows: Open Course = Open Content + Community.
Students benefit from this community not only indirectly but also from direct participation. Involving students in the evaluation and improvement of their class materials fosters more active and critical learning. Focusing on content alone perpetuates the idea that teaching is no more than feeding students safe, predigested bits of knowledge for their enlightenment. Although such an approach may be useful for building foundation knowledge, stopping learning at that stage creates a crippling dependency. More advanced learning is messy and open-ended, and in such contexts an open course approach is more effective pedagogically when it welcomes student participation.
An open course community is a knowledge ecosystem where teacher, courseware developer, librarian, and student roles are linked together by collaboration, sharing, and feedback. Like any ecosystem, it is characterized by circular flows of information, resources, feedback, and credit; the knowledge ecosystem develops its own, alternative economy based on exchange and reputation. Since the academy is already structured according to disciplinary boundaries, most open course communities are likely to be discipline-specific, but they will entail a much higher degree of collaboration—both horizontally across institutions and vertically between students and faculty—than is traditional in educational practice.
Assessment and Evaluation
Any successful complex system is the product of some sort of evolutionary improvement process. Engineering has well-developed standards of quality that software developers can use to choose between two competing programs. This is not the case in education where learning assessment is seldom standardized or tied to agreed-upon competencies and where different institutions and teachers are often fiercely loyal to their own ways of doing things. For open source learning to succeed, however, it still needs to address the issue of objective assessment. Just as many FOSS developers are moving to test-based development (Beck 2003), so should open course developers. This would require that
- each learning object have explicit learning objective(s);
- each objective have an associated battery of mastery questions, exercises, and problems;
- teachers administer these assessment materials to their students; and
- aggregated results be made available to the community.
This approach will enable the community to weed out ineffective assessment items and compare assets that share learning objectives based on the assessment results. This is, of course, no absolutely best way to teach a given subject because students are not all the same in any particular context; yet it is important to determine whether, for a particular group of students, this or that learning object is more or less effective in teaching a given subject. As Thomas Angelo points out, "assessment techniques are of little use unless and until local academic cultures value self-examination, reflection, and continuous improvement" (Angelo 1999, "Changing Our Mental Models: Assessment as Culture Transformation," ¶ 2).
A side benefit of this approach is the development of a large bank of vetted assessment materials classified by learning objective, a valuable open educational asset in its own right. For example, the question bank would not only allow for informed decisions about what learning object to use in a given situation but would also make it possible to compare the outcomes of teaching a topic with and without using learning objects. The evaluation I advocate is open, voluntary, decentralized, and bottom-up, and thus it avoids the controversy that has plagued standardized testing.
IT Infrastructure for Collaboration
These beneficial network effects I have described presuppose that many participants in an open source learning community contribute substantially to the community by developing learning assets, creating mastery questions, administering tests and submitting results, answering questions, helping faculty colleagues, submitting bugs and suggestions, and in a dozen other ways. Such contributions will occur only if they are easy and become a social norm.
Facilitating the human interactions that are important for learning and the growth of the community may require new technical tools. Open course communities need a technical infrastructure that makes collaborating with distant colleagues, finding the content needed for tomorrow's class, incorporating content into a lecture or online module, creating and administering student assessment, and returning anonymous data to the community easy. For students, the infrastructure needs to make using the online materials, taking assessments, interacting with the content developers, and generally contributing to the community easy. The role played by IT here is to enable collaboration, reduce friction, and facilitate data collection. It should also, like good plumbing, stay in the background and not become an issue.
Promoting Participation
Active collaboration is vital to the health and growth of the open course community, but there are obstacles to member participation. Most teachers are too busy with their workload, too uncomfortable with technology, and too unaccustomed to collaborating. To overcome these obstacles, the following elements are necessary:
- Barriers to participation and contribution need to be made as low as possible (through technology, careful planning, and thorough user testing).
- Active members of the community need to reach out to colleagues and encourage them to join the community.
- Educators need clear incentives to participate. These could be institutional rewards like release time or a stipend or increased status in the eyes of their peers. The most effective incentive, however, is a convincing demonstration that by actively participating, they will teach more effectively and save time in the long run.
- Educators need to understand clearly that their contribution is needed and in what ways they may give it. There should be enough ways to contribute to accommodate every talent and taste.
In addition, the license may include a giveback clause that makes helping an obligation (Exhibit 1). Specifically, for every hour that an educator's class spends using open course content, the teacher and students collectively owe an hour's contribution to the community. The open source learning communities are not in the business of policing compliance, however, and giveback is imposed only by persuasion and reputation.
Some will choose not to contribute while others will prefer to continue teaching in a more traditional way and eschew open course learning resources altogether. Those who do participate in the community, however, will contribute to the improvement of the open content and help recruit new colleagues. In the process, they will strengthen the community and all will benefit.
The Status and Future of Open Course Communities
Briefly, the main arguments made in this commentary are as follows:
- FOSS demonstrates that network effects occur at the edge of the network: in most cases bottom-up is more powerful than top-down.
- FOSS's lesson is that an active community of practice is the key to success. An open course collaboration is a knowledge ecosystem with an economy based primarily on exchange and reputation. When such a community involves all stakeholders, it not only provides the most value to its members but also grows the fastest.
- Including students in this community of practice strengthens their education.
- An open course community needs the ability to modify its resources since this is the only way they can be improved or adapted for new contexts.
- Community resources will evolve only if they include assessment as an integral component and the results of this assessment are used to drive improvement.
- Stakeholders need lots of simple, easy ways to make helpful contributions to the community so that it becomes a social norm. Ways to promote this include incentives, a reputation system, and a license that requires contribution. Technology is needed to make these contributions as frictionless as possible.
No such community exists yet, although a few, such as the grassroots Harvey Project (Stephenson 2000), come close. Some top-down projects, such as the Global Education and Learning Community and the Social Authoring Project of the National Registry of Online Courses have similar goals.
Ad hoc solutions for most of the technical issues exist today. For example, MERLOT makes it possible to find and review large amounts of online content, and the eLearning XHTML Editor helps teachers create their own online courses using open content. OpenCourse.Org and Utah State University's EduCommons support collaboration around building, adapting, and evaluating open content. Commercial tools like Questionmark and Respondus and the Sakai Project's open source tool SAMigo build and administer standards-based tests. What are still lacking are tools that are more integrated and more transparent for mainstream educators to use. These improved tools can be built by FOSS developers within the academic community. This is exactly the sort of "scratch your own itch" solution that FOSS has mastered in its approach to software development.
As these issues are solved, open course communities will begin to grow in size and improve in effectiveness. Eventually they will transform education, no matter how modest their beginnings.
[Editor's note: This article was adapted from a presentation at the Open Education Conference at Utah State University in Logan, UT, September 2005.]
References
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Beck, K. 2003. Test-driven development by example. Boston: Addison-Wesley.
Robson, R. 2003. Reusable learning | design. http://www.reusablelearning.org/index.asp?id=30 (accessed September 30, 2006).
Stephenson, R. 2000. The Harvey Project: Open course development and rich content. In Case studies on information technology in higher education, ed. L. Petrides, 185-194. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing Co.
Stallman, R. 1996. The free software definition. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html (accessed September 30, 2006).
Weber, S. 2004. The success of open source. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Copyright and Citation Information for this Article
This article may be reproduced and distributed for educational purposes if the following attribution is included in the document: Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Stephenson, R. 2006. Open source/Open course learning: Lessons for educators from free and open source software. Innovate 3 (1). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=345 (accessed October 18, 2006). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.
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