[IAEP] OERs and collaboration

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 9:33 pm, forster at ozonline.com.au wrote:
> Valerie
>
> Thanks for the helpful comments.
>
> A problem of educational resources developed by an open source community
> is that people have 'scratched their own itch' and there are lots of
> disconnected education resources but little overall structure. This is not
> a criticism of the community, without the community, the resources would
> not exist.

The new Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks project means to address that
problem, allowing a hundred flowers to bloom, or a hundred itches to be
scratched, and also recruiting professional subject matter experts to
create OERs that conform to various curriculum standards, with peer
review. You can see our beginnings on the test server that dogi set up for
us.

http://booki.treehouse.su/

We will also need a repository that can handle a multidimensional
collection of documents

* on every school subject and teacher training subject, plus many more
* at every level of child development
* for every country
* in every language needed

with local materials in topics such as history, geography, civics, health,
agriculture and more. Even in PE we have to allow for countries where the
number one game is soccer, baseball, or cricket. I have proposed teaching
statistics using sports records, so even math materials have to have local
content.

> I started blogging rather than adding to the wiki for what I suppose are
> the usual reasons: not wanting to mess with another's document, being
> unsure about my work's quality and relevance and wanting to own my own
> work. Later I changed my mind but kept blogging to be consistent.

We can and intend to provide space on the booki server for single-author
materials and group efforts. I have many notions about how to use Turtle
Blocks as the introductory math language, with the aim of making it as
natural as learning talk. This was Seymour Papert's goal for Logo, as
described in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. So I
would like to work with you.

> Anything which makes the invitation to edit a wiki more explicit is good.
> Any tools that make it easier are good. But many will still want to manage
> their own resources. I think the idea of Delicious style tagging is good,
> but I am not sure how you would implement it.
>
> The following examples of sites have good resources in the 'turtle
> graphics' space occupied by TurtleArt, Scratch and Etoys. A search
> facility that could find all of them (and more) would help teachers. Its
> unrealistic to expect that all the resources would be on the wiki,
> regardless of how easy the editing was.

Reference librarians have plenty of good ideas on managing bibliographies.
What is harder is to make a collection that does not look academic, that
invites children in.

> http://sites.google.com/site/solymar1fisica/fisica-con-xo-investigacion-
> http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Aplicacion_Problema_de_Pizzas
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/0e/Gravity.odt
> neoparaiso.com
> http://ictmindtools.net/scratch/
> http://www.waveplace.org/resources/tutorials/
>
>
> The issues (also addressed in Valerie's
> http://wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/Learning_objects,_personal_learning_environments,_study_guides)
> which make bringing all the resources in some way under one umbrella
> difficult include:
>
> Difficulty and inconsistency in finding and navigating to resources
> Different formats of the resources, wiki, blog, image, pdf, doc
> Different depth in the resources, ranging from as little as a single image
> to a book
> Patchy coverage of the subjects
> Different languages, primarily Spanish and English
> Difficulty in assigning a resource to a subject or year level
> What are the limits of what is relevant?
> Authors may be unaware of complimentary resources and not incorporate or
> cross reference
> Authors' reluctance to add their own work to a wiki (or tagging) in case
> its not good enough or relevant enough
> Abandoned partly completed projects
>
> That's a list of problems, unfortunately I don't have solutions.

Good start. Yes, none of us has the answer. We'll invite the children and
the teachers to help us find some.

> Thanks for the comments on
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt
>
> Yes its a big document. Walter has started the steps to breaking this up
> into smaller documents, its already 9 sub documents stitched together
> (click view source to see the structure) Will breaking it up make it
> easier to comprehend and more inviting to edit? Any comments on the
> structure welcome or just edit it yourself.
>
> Glad you like the 'Challenges' section. Would you rather see it closer to
> the top? Does it need a run through of what TurtleArt can do first? In how
> much detail?

That's what I particularly want to work on.

> "Provide a way to showcase and contribute learning objects - basically
> challenge descriptions with categories / tags - subject, degree of
> difficulty, ... and optional information like learning objectives and
> additional information for teachers or students - setup, curriculum
> integration, links to more advanced related challenges. There should
> be a mechanism for adding reviews to challenge entries, too."
>
> Can you flesh this idea out a bit? Or even better do it? I am a bit vague
> on degree of difficulty & curriculum integration for the existing samples,
> this needs feedback from teachers in the field. Getting feedback is
> important.
>
> Would you let the tags just grow organically or should we work out some
> hierarchy of tagging? Is it worth making a start with something like
> Delicious? I suspect that reprogramming the wiki is too much to ask for at
> this stage.

There are several useful structuring principles. Mine is the growth of
children's mental capacities. At what stage of development can we
effectively introduce an essential idea? How do stages of development
correlate with age? How can we recognize a stage of development? How can
we maximize the children's own discovery? Which ideas are the most
essential?

There is a substantial literature on these questions, building on Piaget,
Montessori, Papert and others, but taking many new directions.

> You said you had made a TurtleArt sample. Please add it to the wiki. Feel
> free to restructure the existing pages so that its addition makes sense in
> the larger structure.
>
> Thanks again for the feedback
>
> Tony
>
>
>> YOU are systematic. It is the rest of us who need help.
>>
>> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Valerie Taylor <vtaylor at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >> I think there is merit in having a public repository like the Sugar
>> >> Labs wiki to encourage educators and others to see what is being
>> done,
>> >> and build on that in a systematic way.
>> >
>> > We are not exactly systematic about it, but Tony links to his most
>> > relevant blog posts in the wiki. Please see
>> > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Tutorials and
>> > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors
>> >
>> > As far as how to make these posts have more impact, we are open to
>> suggestions.
>> >
>> Good example - the first encounter with the Turtle Art page is a
>> little overwhelming - Obviously tons of wonderful information with
>> pictures and code...
>>
>> Some us need to know "what can it do?" and "why do I need to know all
>> this stuff?" (rather than "how does it work?"). The Challenges are
>> great! This is where it starts to make some sense for me.
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Challenges
>>
>> Provide a way to showcase and contribute learning objects - basically
>> challenge descriptions with categories / tags - subject, degree of
>> difficulty, ... and optional information like learning objectives and
>> additional information for teachers or students - setup, curriculum
>> integration, links to more advanced related challenges. There should
>> be a mechanism for adding reviews to challenge entries, too.
>>
>> The Turtle Art page is sooo organized that it doesn't invite
>> contributions or collaboration. If there was a "button" that said "add
>> your own challenge" or "add a review of this challenge" it would
>> create a safe way to contribute. A form pops up with boxes to fill in,
>> including some options, save and it is added to the page in the proper
>> place without the risk of messing up what is already there.
>>
>> This would also help educators (and students) find challenges to try
>> themselves. Once they locate a couple of challenges that seem
>> appropriate and interesting, then they will be motivated to work
>> through all the terrific material provided.
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-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/