I like the way you are looking at this as a process that is likely to go
through various stages. Most of the faculty at my school are very tied to
their textbooks and are unlikely to be comfortable moving quickly to an
open-content collaborative model.
That being said, I really like the idea of a consortium of schools putting
some real resources (money and time) behind supporting teachers who want to
share their knowledge in this way. We too have a number of master teachers
who are nearing retirement age and would welcome the opportunity to give
back to the larger community; especially if it was clear that they were part
of an well-supported and organized effort with a good chance of a successful
outcome.
As part of our public purpose effort we have been exploring the idea of
filming some of our master teachers presenting lessons and then making these
videos freely available online. Imagine what could be produced with a
combination of text, art, animation, photography and video. This is all
doable. The expertise is there, the resources are available, the
understanding of how to put it together exists: how could we make it happen?
Fred
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Steve Taffee <staffee@castilleja.org> wrote:
> I had a conversation with Courseload this morning, and have a follow-up
> scheduled for next week.
>
> From what i understand, Courseload does take existing textbooks and creates
> a PDF-like document, which they then access through their own reader to
> allow for some social collaboration features within a class. Books are
> purchased, not leased, by students.
>
> I see this model as transitional; a bridge that enables teachers who are
> familiar with textbooks to see that model in play with e-readers and
> computers. Many teachers will quickly come to see that e-texts could be so
> much more with embedded links, rich media contents, and built-in hooks to
> their LMS.
>
> I agree with Fred and Bill about the potential of a consortium of schools
> to
> contribute content. If you are not familiar with CK12.org, they are a
> non-profite creating open-content textbooks (they call them Flexbooks) that
> I think might make an interesting partner. Having several teachers work
> cooperatively also reduces the burden of a single person creating a text,
> not to mention the richer ideas that emerge from such collaboration.
>
> Having schools collaborate on creating textbooks also has the benefit of
> helping to capture the knowledge and pedagogy of master teachers, some of
> whom are nearing retirement age, and whose loss to a school represents much
> more than replacing one headcount with another. Knowledge retention is as
> important in schools as it is in business.
>
> s
> -----
> Steve Taffee | Director of Strategic Projects
> Castilleja School | staffee@castilleja.org
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