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Open-Source Early Literacy Materials Gaining Some Attention
phooky writes "Although open teaching materials have been available at the university level for a while now, there have been very few materials for younger learners. That's beginning to change now with the advent of Free-Reading, a free, wiki-based resource for early literacy instruction. The availability of free materials could free up millions of dollars from school budgets for more teachers and training. From the USA Today article: 'Last fall, a Florida textbook adoption committee approved Free-Reading, a remediation program for primary-school children that's believed to be the first free, open-source reading program for K-12 public schools. It's awaiting approval by Eric Smith, the state's incoming education commissioner, who could approve it by mid-December. Florida is one of the top five textbook markets in the USA, so its move could lead to the development of other free materials that might someday challenge the dominance of a handful of big educational publishers.'"
They compiled a book completely from literature that was out of copyright from the Internet and then took that book and sent it off to be printed and bound for the whole class. This was back in 1998 and the school was Arcadia High School in California.
An excellent start! Someone with time should start some kind of wiki for projects like this...
Required reading for internet skeptics
are in ".doc" format files generated with Microsoft Wrod. Not so open source.
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Kudos. this is great. I went to a small rural school where a lot of the teachers used a somewhat open sourced tact when creating yearly curriculums. that way all the differing classes could have some sort of continuity. and by using/re-using each other's work they took quite a load off of an overburdened group of people. now with this taking over perhaps the wiki style implementation will allow for a larger group of educators to have something of a similar system. the time and monetary savings could be put to some great projects that there was never time or finances for.
King Kong Died For Your Sins
Florida is one of the top five textbook markets in the USA, so its move could lead to the development of other free materials that might someday challenge the dominance of a handful of big educational publishers.
While I'm not in Florida, I am both a college student and a fan of free learning materials. Having to pay for text books every semester (even if I buy the international editions) hurts. I agree with #21302639; there should be a place somewhere (dmoz, "List of..." article on Wikipedia, a completely separate wiki) to list, maybe even host, all of these resources. Everything from learning to read through higher level, just an all-encompassing (as near as can be attained, of course) collection of these materials.
While we're on the topic, I MUST supply the obligatory plug:
Please, please, PLEASE consider volunteering with the Literacy Council. You have enjoyed being able to read for (likely) some time now, and many people lack this ability. LC is a wonderful group. They will pair you with a student that meets your specifications. Young, old, male, female, disability, ESL, you name it. You can truly help people here, and it's such an easy thing to do.
My wife volunteers and is currently assisting an ESL mother-of-two learn to read english. I am in the process of learning to teach younger children. You do not need any prior experience, and LC will provide you with help and instruction to get you and your student started. Location is not an issue. Whether your in downtown San Francisco, or Fairbanks, Alaska, you can help.
Again, PLEASE consider volunteering. You could literally change someone's life.
Literacy Council
http://www.literacycouncil.org/
Disclaimer: I am not a Literacy Council representative in any way, I just think you should offer your time and expertise to those who lack the latter.
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
What's nice is that they can be converted to ODF, etc. The problem with MP3 is that its lossy so you really can't liberate it by converting it to Ogg Vorbis without losing some quality, you'd need to convert it from the original wav etc.
If you share anything do it in ODF, it will help it spread.
I would love more free/open source teaching materials. I have never met a music textbook I like; they are so often ridiculous, bloated pieces of garbage and it's ridiculous the amount of money that the states spend on them when they aren't even any good.
Next thing they can get rid of (or at least cut back on) is the hideously expensive standardized testing program.
Most books are on two or three year revision cycles - THIS IS GUARANTEED INCOME. Every three years time to buy another book. Wake up, its a scam to bleed our education system dry. You want to make use of a used book? Fuck you, buddy. You know how we prevent that? We make websites that you HAVE to purchase a code to get into. Professors use the sites to distribute homework and take tests and if you don't subscribe, then you are SOL. The result is everyone needs to buy the damn book every damn semester.
These publishers will do anything and everything to keep the turnover high and used book market dead.
Colleges and university really need to make their intranets more effective and make the textbook publishers work with them. Refuse to pay more than $30 for books and we'll have a much more affordable education system!!
Oh boy. Another AC troll.
- AddALL
- PriceSCAN
- Barnes & Noble
- Amazon.com
did I miss seeing the PDF link?Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
My son loves starfall. However, at the end of the stories - he continually rates them "not so good." He seems to like how they respond.
Funny - I don't remember being able to use a touchpad when I was five.
Wait - they didn't have touchpads on PC's when I was five.
Wait - they didn't have PC's when I was five...
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Parental involvement is the key and I hope that you continue with your efforts.
I've wondered about the potential for something like this- could you make "open source" textbooks?
The project linked seems to go a different way. My vision was such:
You would have a central company, not a charity, but not for-profit. It would do the things that textbook companies regularly do (or I hope they do), hire experts to write the text books, editors to check everything, a small publishing house, etc.
The difference is that it's all put online. It can be peer-reviewed by thousands, if not millions, and used by anyone. In order to make the company non-reliant on donations, it would be released under a custom license, one that allows reproduction of x pages at a time and unlimited but unedited online disbursal, while the company still sells the textbooks at cost.
The idea is that you would get a textbook that can be referenced by anyone, checked by anyone, and teachers can download updates and corrections without having to buy a whole new damn book. I don't know how well it would work in the long run, but I'd say it's a sight better than the current set up for text books in school.
No wonder they are looking for "free" alternatives, his starting salary is $197,000 with another $100,000 in benefits and other incentives.
Half the teachers at my high school in Missouri are on food stamps.
They should do this with history, too. History text books are terrible. Lies My Teacher Told Me makes a pretty good read.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My 19 month old is in the habit of using a stick to transcribe slabs of Homer's Iliad onto the surface of his sandpit. I'm a bit worried about his development though as he keeps on getting the 'a' backwards in Iliad.
Seriously though my 19 month old just enjoys being outside and experiencing the world. My task is to not inhibit his sense of discovery by trying to shoehorn him into my completely corrupted view of what constitutes success and education in this world. The priority isn't to teach him to read but to teach him to love books along with the rest of life. There's plenty of time for formal education in his future. Once he goes to school he can learn his ABCs but not how fantastic it feels to roll in the mud.
"'Florida is one of the top five textbook markets in the USA, so its move could lead to the development of other free materials that might someday challenge the dominance of a handful of big educational publishers.'"
The one time a particular open-source response would be appropriate.
Is it just a quirk of Slashdot that TFA spoke of "Free" educational material, but by the time the story made it here it was "Open Source?" Does it really matter if it is open source or built with 19 kinds of proprietary technology, as long as it is free? Free educational software is still "news for nerds, stuff that counts" even without the open source mantra.
Well the thing that comes to mind every time a post and story appear on this subject is; why did it take so long? The internet is over a decade old and this scam is how old? How about the results? Will it be a hundred Dick and Jane books on how to program climbing a hill? And ten on the sociology of nerds? With a lone book on a subject that needs reading but no one has an itch to write?
"Refuse to pay more than $30 for books and we'll have a much more affordable education system!!"
Except for the fact that books really are a small part of the overall student budget. I paid more in tuition and lab fees than I ever did for books.
The problem is that the educational system is an even bigger scam. Tuition has gone up even faster than textbooks. I worked for two separate college bookstores. At one of them one of the professors wrote a book that he used for his class. The publisher discontinued the publication and gave him the remaining copies. He provided them to the bookstore every year for the price that the publisher had. He then checked that each student had a copy of the book, if you didn't have a copy of the book, you didn't pass. Oh yeah, the bookstore wasn't allowed to sell used copies. I have two or three other similar stories.
Open Source teaching materials is a great thing, but colleges and universities will try and find a way to get money out of it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Your four-year-old has competition? Really? How sad.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
My three kids (9, 7 and 7) are being home-schooled by my wife, a former teacher. Our biggest problem is finding decent textbooks, especially science. Apparently, most home schoolers believe in intelligent design, and the science books reflect this. So we gather stuff from Wikipedia and other sources and she writes here own tests. I've been thinking about releasing everything under a Creative Commons license, but they could use some cleaning up so I've also thought about putting them on Sourceforge or something. Does anyone know of anything similar? Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Thanks.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Oh, the scam gets better, in my state they got a law passed that only the approved textbooks can be used. Okay, fine, quality control right? Except that the only people that can approve the books is the state legislature. Who is in session a whopping 1 month out of the year, and way way out of the ability of most teachers to contact.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Then History would be rewritten in the country's interest. Then it's 1984!
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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Thankyou very much for pointing this resource out to me :)
I'll be fixing my daughter's PC this morning, just to crank this site up. It seems to be excellent!
Because you can - or because you should?
This is true. By some estimates, perhaps almost as much as around 50% of the population is below average intelligence. Imagine that!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
One and all, you really need to check out world leaders, such as MIT :-)
:-)
Over 1,700 university levels courses in many fields, free of charge!
OpenCourseWare:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
Why do Slashdot article submitters keep repeating MIT's claim that they have teaching materials online? Has anyone actually gone and looked? All it is, is a reading list for some classes. No lectures or class notes.
This is not the way to get an MIT degree. It is not "teaching materials". It is a reading list.
The grammar nazi's will love this one
http://www.freerice.com/
Anyone can increase their vocabulary here, at the same time helping to feed some of the worlds poorest people.
so far it's snowballing quite nicely
makes a change from freecell.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
You didn't say, but I'm assuming you're talking about the college level (TFA was about elementary school), and when you refer to the online homework thing, I assume you're referring to math and science courses. There are tons of free online homework systems out there. I wrote this one, which is open-source, and free for students to use. The web page for my system has links to a bunch of other open-source ones, and also to a free-as-in-beer one at UT that appears to be extremely popular. Of course professors, like everyone else in the world, are lazy. If the only homework checker they ever hear about is something proprietary like WebAssign, and if the content is all set up for them in WebAssign, then they'll probably go the path of least resistance. And once the prof has his workflow all set up with WebAssign, he's going to be reluctant to switch to something free like the UT system.
Find free books.
"Our biggest problem is finding decent textbooks, especially science. Apparently, most home schoolers believe in intelligent design, and the science books reflect this."
I find this comment ironic and humorous* in light of the fact that most homeschooling started with failures in the school system, especially the bias towards evolution and hostility towards religion. Maybe there will be as much fragmentation in the homeschooling market as there is one-sidedness in the schools. Where everyone's "One True Way" is pushed and defensiveness abounds if their position isn't supported by others.
*The reaction noted resembles nothing so much as the reaction of women who wanted in into all-male clubs that were originally created to get away from them in the first place.
For me I really don't get the dominance of propriety commercial software/solutions in education. You have a hundred odd countries all with government controlled education systems paying the same companies again and again for tired old ideas. Why can't they come together and create joint resources? There are a few areas working on this, i.e. wikibooks and the openeducationdisc. Maybe the OLPC will help to bring resources together?
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
absolutely.
After all, the publishers make boat-loads of money getting schools to buy "new" math and reading every few years when elementary education hasn't changed much in a hundred years for those subjects. It also provides a way to put the correct "philosophy" in to the book as it becomes politically appropriate... believe me, the deciding factor for most book purchases is the politics a book with ideas to "radical" or not "politically correct" will get axed no matter how good it's educational value.
Book Companies will fight tooth-and-nail and politics will be the tool. The best english literature is now on many schools banned lists because it discusses slavery or race or extreme poverty. Most of it happens to be out of copyright and free... good luck getting your local school to teach what books they forced us to read even 20 years ago.
Thanks for the link. It was entirely unexpected, and my daughter (just turned 4) really likes it. It really helps her want to learn as well (not just the starfall website, but also other homework).
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I think that textbooks should be online and allow you to subscribe to them while taking the class. Of course they would still sell the hard copy but since 90% of the people taking the class will never look at the book again and most likely sell it back and with books becoming out of date within 6 months then this model makes a lot of sense.
Take off your tinfoil hat and enjoy the freedom you have.
It's different if you live in China or Burma, of course, but if you were I don't think you'd be talking about governments and taxpayers.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Who decides what books are read in your school, what history texts are approved for use in classrooms and so forth? It's usually all regulated by the Education Board or equivalent, for the state or country, with their panel of experts and so forth. Call me a tinfoil all you like, but it is evident in English speaking countries that education standards have fallen by various measures (eg: literacy rates) over years, partly, no doubt, due to poor remuneration of teachers. I argue that the drop in standards has also been due to various ideologically driven changes in education (such as reducing the numerical and conceptual load in physics and mathematics to improve female participation, elimination of tiered schooling systems). In areas of literature and history there has always been a strong influence by education boards on appropriateness of content, usually leaning towards liberal/leftist ideologies and sensitivities to powerful minorities. Education Boards have the problem of being hijacked by interest groups and tending to cow-tow to the political party of the day.
Just consider this for a moment. What if texts were not prescribed as such, but the work left for the schools and teahers themselves to find the appropriate sources for their classes? This kind of deregulation would, I'm sure, result in a very varied education across the board, but it would emphasise the role of a teacher to educate. I reckon it would result in more motivated teachers and more educated students.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]