I believe education related materials should open and available to use by anybody who has a use for them. Materials that are locked behind stringent copyright regulations or locked up on a teacher’s hard drive aren’t always able to be used by students, educators, parents, or others in ways that they may like.  If someone finds what I’ve created useful I want them to be able to use it in whatever manner they find it the most useful. Alec Couros has done a lot of thinking about what open teaching is all about, and I’ve come to take many of his ideas a challenge to think about how I choose to control the materials that I create (see his recent posts: Visualizing Open/Networked Teaching and it Revisited). The way I control media- and mentor that to my students- should reflect the values that I hold.

A timid step

Towards becoming an “open/networked teacher,” I’ve decided to release my curriculum resources to the internets. Curriculum Science is a wiki I’ve set up where I’ll be posting all my handouts, presentations, and projects under a GNU Free Documentation License (hat tip to Dan Meyer who planted seeds he posted his full geometry curriculum). Though it won’t matter to many people, I’ve also aligned them with the Connecticut standards for 9th grade Integrated Science. It’s a work in progress that will be updated as I make my way through this semester’s curriculum. Not all the material I would categorize as “my best stuff,” but it is “my real stuff.”

A little help

I don’t have this whole teaching/technology thing figured out. I’ve spent a lot of time considering how to be the most effective teacher possible, but that requires constantly revisiting what it is that I’m doing and how it is that I’m doing it. A few things I’d enjoy hearing my readers thoughts on:

• Is the GNU Free Documentation License the way to go for this? Would a Creative Commons license be a better match? I’m a little fuzzy on the specific definitions of the various licenses.
• If you have ideas for how to get at the content in a more effective manner than I’ve done in my curriculum please let me know. Lately I’ve been feeling that my ideas for new materials have been stale and not as effective as I’d like.
• If you use or remix anything I’ve created it’d make me happy to hear back on what you thought of it or how you changed it.

The Resources

Curriculum Science

Locked down

Initially, I locked all the wiki pages that I created- The class home pages, weekly schedules, assignments, etc.  Students did not have the rights to edit these pages. They could create new pages and edit them, but I was worried about the slim risk of a student vandalizing a main page, which might then be seen by a parent or administrator before I (or someone else) deleted the vandalism.

I know this reasoning was fear-based, and I didn’t like it. I want students to be able to edit anything and everything. I want to give them the chance to improve and collaborate online. What I needed was a better way to monitor page edits.

RSS saved my life

After minimal searching, I realized that in addition to providing RSS feeds for the edits made to individual pages, Wikispaces also provided a “master” RSS feed for every page edit made on my space.

I quickly subscribed the the “all page edits” RSS feed via Google Reader, and instantly every page edit made on my class space was pushed to my reader. Suddenly I was confident that if anyone chose to vandalize a page I would notice it right away. I check my Reader at home, at school, and often via my phone. Gone on vacation? I can still check page edits no problem.

Currently many of the day-to-day page edits are my own. During class wiki projects, there’s a deluge of edits, but it doesn’t take much time to flip through them since you really only need to pay attention to any changes that were made.

To date there’s been no vandalism on the class wiki. I doubt vandalism will ever be a problem. But now I can unobtrusively monitor editing activity so I don’t even have to worry about it.

What it looks like

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RSS Image by photopia / HiMY SYeD