May 2008 — Open Source
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Content, Anyone?
Rob Lucas, a doctoral student at Stanford University and a former sixth-grade social studies instructor in Rocky Mount, NC, was distressed enough by the staleness of the textbooks from which he was teaching that in 2004 he developed a wiki site he named The Teachers' Lounge where educators can share content.
"I was frustrated as a young teacher with what I thought was the dated quality of my textbooks and the lack of a system for collecting the best stuff that veteran teachers knew from around the country," he says. "It was kind of hard to find the good stuff-I spent a lot of time searching the web for lesson plans, but it was taking me longer to find them than it was to create them from scratch."
Lucas, who has ported the content from his site to Curriki, was so affected by the state of traditional academic resources and his difficulties with finding editable instructional material online that he decided to go back to school and get his PhD in instructional design.
"I think open source content is going to change things pretty significantly over the next five years," he says. "We'll see a lot more sharing of resources, but I also hope the textbook publishers and school curriculum planning committees will use open source resources so schools will have up-to-date teaching tools."
"[An online textbook] is a far more flexible piece of content than something that's put together in a static way and remains between the covers until the next edition comes along."-Sanford Forte, California Open Source Textbook Project
David Stevenson, vice president of business development and government affairs at Brooklyn, NY-based Wireless Generation, says tightening school budgets are helping drive the trend toward open source and away from printed textbooks. "In some cases, districts are able to get the same or comparable materials for free through open source content."
Stevenson's company created an open source literacy program called Free-Reading that was recently adopted by the state of Florida for use in its public schools. With school districts becoming more comfortable with the use of open source content as instructional material, he says, "the barriers to participation and contribution have essentially fallen. Teachers are now right there online with the rest of the world."
Open source has been edging into the educational system for years, but not for instructional purposes-rather, mainly as a way for school districts to trim their technology budgets by adopting open source software. Open source content, however, is in its relative infancy. It was first established in the higher education space, led by the
