The Open Education ‘movement’ has several facets. A primary facet is access from the learner perspective — it seeks to ensure broad access to content by making it freely available and easy to procure. Another is sharing from the educator perspective — the ability for educators not just to create content but to then disemminate quality online resources, or “open educational resources” (OER). Another facet is re-use. The movement does not simply aim to allow educators and learners to share materials, but additionally seeks to empower those users to edit the content and customize it for their own context/environment (sometimes referred to as ‘remixing’).
This challenges current academic content paradigms on a number of levels. At a fundamental level it challenges the concept known as the ‘iron triangle’ binding access, quality and cost — the notion that these are fixed relationships.
Good Video Games and Good Learning
Corollary 9A: Kids aren’t just future adults. They are that, of course, but they aren’t only that, because children’s needs and perspectives are worth attending to in their own right. We violate this precept — and do a disservice to children — whenever we talk about schooling in economic terms, treating students mostly as future employees.
Mayor Bloomberg was shocked by the negative response to Black’s appointment – just as he was shocked by the visceral public backlash against his elimination of term limits. Black was appointed precisely because of her lack of education experience, just as billionaires nationwide have campaigned for office as consummate non-politicians. All that our benign corporate overlords expect, of course, is the occasional “thank you”.
The school privatisation movement is one of unparalleled genius. It proposes free-market solutions to a problem created by the free market: wealthy taxpayers refusing to adequately fund poor people’s schools and a deindustrialised service economy that has eliminated good jobs for the working class. Once upon a time, in the 1990s, young people who wanted to change education for the better read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities. Today, they watch the film Waiting for “Superman”, join Teach for America for a couple of years …