Kids Teaching Kids has developed a free service that will ultimately allow any kid with access to a cell phone or computer to watch a video teaching how to solve every problem in every textbook.
Does that sound impossible? Consider these statistics: YouTube now has two billion, views a day; every day 35,000 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
The educational system acts on kids as if they are objects, without voice or intelligence. Imagine if the idea of competitive shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos could be harnessed to motivate the creation of exciting, entertaining educational videos.
Tag: open
Khan Academy is an Indictment of Education | Action-Reaction
The fact that TED, Bill Gates, and the media love Khan Academy shows the failure of education. Khan Academy looks great because our country has reduced teaching and learning to preparing students to bubble in answer sheets for multiple choice tests. But if we shift the purpose of education from consuming knowledge and stating answers to creating knowledge and exploring solutions, the fallacy of Khan Academy “reinventing education” is blatently apparent.
Khan Academy can help students find the answer to this exercise:
Interesting post that compares what the Khan academy is good at and what it is not good at – and the latter is the heart of what education should be about.
2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Open Content
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it. Part of the appeal of open content is that it is also a response to both the rising costs of traditionally published resources and the lack of educational resources in some regions, and a cost-effective alternative to textbooks and other materials. As customizable educational content is made increasingly available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.
via wp.nmc.org
Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE
The word open is receiving a lot of attention in education circles. Openness in higher education has been discussed recently by writers in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EDUCAUSE Review, and EQ, among other publications.1 In January 2010, The Horizon Report, produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), declared that open content will “reach mainstream use” in higher education within the next twelve months.2 But what does that mean? What is this open we keep hearing about?
For over a decade, open has been used as an adjective to modify a variety of nouns that describe teaching and learning materials. For example, open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks are all part of the current higher education discourse. In this context, the adjective open indicates that these textbooks and other teaching and learning resources are provided for free under a copyright license that grants a user permission to engage in the “4R” activities:
- Reuse: the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
- Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)3
via educause.edu
Development towards educational openness
The progress of content
the movement is as follows:
Phase I: content held as HTML within sites. Little or no interoperability. Content mostly viewed “on site” (more…)