Tag: OER

OpenEd – week 6

I’m a simple guy. Kind of a very basic hacker. In 1978, hanging around in the nuclear medicine lab – have been there for a thesis in physics – and trying to find a way to be useful to someone. Nuclear medicine doctors used software. It was easy to find missing features. Many nights went in browsing the department computers for software sources. Tried to improve and add features. Occasionally, doctors found a notice on the computer table: “Hello, new feature available … Andreas” …

In those years, R.M. Stallman was struggling with his famous printer beginning his adventure towards the new free software idea.

I had no idea of Stallman’s work, no idea of Internet, no idea of the possibility of sharing over the Internet, but I was hacking computers, hidden in a room in Florence. I was, again, a leave of grass of a grass-roots phenomenon. Times were just mature.

Then, whole life hacking something to give, if possible, a solution to someone’s else problems.

Very confused ideas about copyright issues. Trying to understand something, especially once discovered Stallman’s ideas, around 1990, but with poor results.

Now trying to read these papers and finding them awfully boring, except …

“Bound by law”. Thanks a lot to Keith Aoky, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins! This was affordable for an under-skilled guy as I am.
I will buy their book to say thank you!

Thanks to Elisa Spadavecchia for explaining that in Italy it is even worse: no fair use concept!

In these years, I’m producing educational stuff for my students but I’m also putting it in the public domain because it was just the obvious thing to do, I believed …

NO, POOR SILLY BOY! Reality is much more complex! Your vision is really naive, poor boy! As soon as your stuff is published in the Internet, it is fully copyrighted!

A SHOCK!!!

And now? Well, it seems you can use a kind of CC license to state what you want other people are allowed to do with your work. Oh fine!

But then, you discover it is not trivial. Which license? When digging to discover all the implications … oh boys! Too much time! I want to work for my student and, if possible, sometimes, to solve problems for them.

So, I put the less restrictive CC license on all my stuff, Attribution, I believe. It seems to me fair but I feel quite uncomfortable!

Anyway, thanks to this course I have some clearer ideas on the subject, perhaps. This is the good part of the story …

OpenEd – week 5

This week I had to work for my students. They come first.

So, I browsed a little bit just the MIT OCW and Connexions. Will do the rest, probably will find useful pieces …

With such a lack of time, it was very useful to exchange comments with friends in LTEver community.

Very interesting experience.

OpenEd – weeks 2-3-4

Mood

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is …

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

Finally, I know what I am … a leave of grass!

This is what I have to say after having read the three essays, Giving Knowledge for Free from OCDE, OLCOS Roadmap and the Review from Hewlett Foundation.

Interesting the progression: on open education resources the first, extended to open education practices the second, looking forward to a new learning culture – pardon, “a” learning culture – the last one.

It is good to feel to be a leave of grass … it is not the first time that it happens to me … I believe it is quite common, either … you have a problem and you do not know much about the context, actually, you do not see some useful existing frames that may help you, your scholastic knowledge is useless … however, you need to solve the problem and you are pushed in a direction, you just feel it.

You follow your feelings and you begin to put pieces together, carefully, accepting to try steps and step back if necessary … then something new is born … something new is born because you had to survive … but later you discover that what you have done has a place in the world, may be that what you have done is well known somewhere and belongs to a field, is described by appropriate names, belongs to a culture.

You took that direction because times were mature … because you breathed something that pushed you there instead of somewhere else … you discover to belong to a grass-roots movement … and this is fine because it gives you the feeling to have a place in the world.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars …

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

Problem


Seven years ago I was put in face of 700 students per year, unequally spread in 2 semesters, about 25 classes in 6 different places within 100 Kilometers … they were of the first year of various curricula at the Faculty of Medicine, medicine, odontoiatry, nursing, physiotherapy and so on … I was supposed to teach basic informatics, computer literacy plus something else, more or less specific to the curricula …

First panic, then reflection, then a basic thought: if something appears to be very frightening may be it becomes a blessing when you change perspective … 700 girls and boys per year to talk to may represent a wonderful opportunity …

Too many to teach them something? Well, it depends on who are the people you are supposed to teach, what you are supposed to teach, what you mean by teaching, how you could do it.

Computer literacy.It may be useful for some 10

Impossible? No, it is possible but you have to change the perspective radically.

Solution


Put all the basic material as courseware in an open source LMS together with sets of tests for auto-evaluation as well as for evaluation … just one or two conventional lessons telling the students:

“Hello, now it’s different. You have the opportunity to learn something about informatics and related matters, I can try to help you if you need it or if you have some extra curiosity. The basic material is in this platform. You must register and you must use the forum for doubts and problems. We will discuss all together and, if necessary, organise lessons, seminars, lab work … when needed if needed … if you are good at something you can add or improve the courseware … you propose … we discuss … you place your contribution in the wiki … we discuss again … you will improve your final grade or, in some cases avoid the final test at all … you should propose extra new activities if you get ideas… we can create groups … this work will influence grades as well …”

Basic idea


You will find a broad distribution of skills when talking about informatics in a population of young people. About 10

If they find what they need in the courseware you can concentrate on the 10

It turns out to be very exciting to work that way.

Some numbers


The course has been proposed to about 2500 students so far.

I was very surprised to read about the existence of a kind of empirical law, the 1

I find out that the affordable challenge is to work on the 10

Other very stable numbers have been found about the compliance of the students: would they like to use this system, mutatis mutandis, in other fields?

In a poll, that they were free to answer, 50

Did these first four weeks change something?


A lot.

First of all it is good to have a survey of available courseware. I liked the MIT courseware for the broad spectrum of materials, even if in pdf, and Connexions, a significant step towards reusability of materials. However there may be other good courseware … need some more time to browse all the references … sure to find something to reuse.

Very much influenced by OLCOS Roadmap and the Review from Hewlett Foundation, I will make blog-RSS and wiki the main communication channel within and between the classes in the next semester. Must hurry up because the semester starts on 1. October. Just working on it.

Conclusion


Before this summer I did not know almost anything about what I’m finding in these readings. I only knew about the existence of open source LMS and read, by chance, two books of Seymour Papert.

Thanks to Antonio Fini, another student of this course, I’m here now, glad to know to be part of a grass-roots movement and looking forward to finding friends and to improving what I’m doing.

OpenEd – week 1

The “right to education” is a basic human right because there is no way to enjoy other human rights without an appropriate education. The case of Brasil (Primer 1, Tomasevski, page 8), where “illiterate” people were not allowed to vote, was simply brutal. Glad to know from Catia that illiterates are no longer precluded from the right to vote. However, the existence of an education does not mean that people have the right to education. This is a very important point raised by Tomasevski.

It is crucial to point out that education is not a positive concept per se. One can educate kids to become soldiers. Education can be used to make proselitism. Recently, I found a school report (year 1943) of my father, 79, where, among other usual curricula, such history, math and so on, there were “cultura fascista” and “cultura militare”.

This makes me think also of Don Milani’s case. A priest active in Tuscany, next to Florence, in the sixties. He was in the church against the church, his basic point being (synthetically and in my floundering English 🙁 , partly result of poor education 😉 ): “We tell people that we want to explain them the Gospel but if people are illiterate they cannot grasp the meaning of what we are trying to say. Therefore, to begin with we must give them an education, and a lay education, not a religious one. If we don’t care about people’s lay education first, then we are hypocritical.”

Don Milani was sourly accused and prosecuted by the church. Therefore, he was placed in a very small village, Barbiana, at the top of a mountain (Monte Giovi), inhabited by a handful of peasants. He did not give up. He created the “school of Barbiana” were he taught the peasants’ kids. The school became incredibly famous. Teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, intellectuals form all Italy went to visit his school. Don Milani put all of them among their young students and all these relevant people were not allowed to talk from a cattedra (chair) as they were used to do but they could only participate in the lessons together with the students.

In order to understand the work of Don Milani it is worthwhile to have a look to a book written by eight students of him, Letter to a Teacher, which became very famous. Incidentally and interestingly, I found this English translation in an Indian site, called Shikshantar, devoted to education and development in India. This book is a sharp accusation of a public compulsory school system conceived for rich people against poor people.

It is difficult to say if something has changed in Italian school after Don Milani’s experience. Of course, many things have changed because the context has changed. But Don Milani intended a high quality education, a practical education (in Italy education is too theoretical), an education able to give autonomy of thinking. In this sense, I’m afraid things are still worse.

These are relatively recent examples taken from a democratic western country. I believe that, “just” to set up an educational system is the small part of the job, the tough part is to make the educational system able to give knowledge and skills but also free thinking and autonomy.

Existing education is so often biased , so often conceived for passive being instead of human beings, that I’m quite afraid to make it compulsory. Let us make education available everywhere first, and let us improve the quality of education all over the world. Instead of making education mandatory I would make it available, free and accurately fitted to local social realities.

In my opinion, compulsory things do not work. In order to let something work it must respond to some real need of people.

Curious question posed by Karen:

Do animals have basic rights in nature?

At a first glance the question seemed to me just funny, but after some thought not that much and I discovered to have an answer: yes, I believe:

  1. Form an ethological point of view, animals have laws and they respect them. In a group, a young beta has the right to challenge the old alpha, when circumstances turn out to be appropriate. Competition is subject to strong rules, very seldom the looser looses his life. In any competition, the looser has the right to preserve his live.
  2. More generally, animals are part of humanity. We live on earth thanks to the diversity of nature. Yes, we exist also thanks to the existence of mosquitos! Animals have also “human rights” because they are important for us. Domestic animals are even more important for us, we grew together. Very interesting are the books of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman, a wonderful person, who now is a professor of animal science. I knew her reading her book: Animals in Translation.

It may sound strange to talk about animals rights after having seen the abyss between what should be done and what has been done in terms of human rights of children, all over the world. However, children and animals have this in common: they did not ask to come into this world and they cannot express their reasons among adult humans; or better said, adult humans are not able to understand the language of children and animals. To think about animal rights it helps us to see the problem in a sufficiently broad and correct perspective, perhaps.