Project: Education Sector Working Group
Matt McGregor
Public
Seen by 373
In this thread, we'll provide updates on the progress of a new education sector working group. My hope is that this group will develop into a consortium of education sector organisations working in support of open education in the New Zealand compulsory education sector.
Danyl Strype Thu 17 Mar 2016 8:38AM
On a more general note, I just watched the debate about Charter Schools on Waatea 5th Estate. As I said there, the challenge is to come up with a vision for 21st century education that combines the best of the public school system we have inherited with the new opportunities created by the internet;
* redirecting money away from software corporations to other school needs by adopting free code/ open source software (like Warrington School in Ōtepoti)
* supporting open source development of Open Educational Resources under CreativeCommons license, so teachers can share their work across the whole education system, locally, regionally, nationally, and globally
* access to a wide range of teachers through online chat and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) for homeschoolers and extramural students
* collaborative projects like Hive Dunedin that bring community groups into collaboration with the education system: http://www.hivedunedin.nz/?page_id=5173
None of this requires replacing the community-led, not-for-profit school system established by Tomorrow's Schools with owner-controlled, for-profit businesses, subsidized by public education funding. I challenge any defender of the Charter Schools scheme to present credible evidence that it provides better educational outcomes per dollar of public/ parent funding than public schools do. I should add that I support parents' freedom to choose kura kaupapa, special character schools, bilingual education, or homeschooling/ unschooling, so long as they cover the curriculum. For me the issue is one of organisation structure, not educational style, and unfortunately there is a lot of speaking at cross purposes in the Charter Schools debate (EDIT: as shown in that Waatea 5th Estate show).
William Mckee Wed 13 Apr 2016 4:03PM
Seems like a good spot for me to dump these slides I have been creating. For a talk on Creative Commons in Schools that will be given in Waikato. Still a work in progress but any feedback or contributes would be great..
Danyl Strype Sun 1 May 2016 12:14AM
I've been planning a project with a friend to develop a hosted authoring platform, using a fully free code stack built on top of GIT, but with a user-friendly interface aimed at average users collaborating on multimedia documents. Of course, the platform will include full support for the CC suite (including CC0 and the Public Domain Mark), GNU FDL, and any other open publishing licenses, as well as Toi Iho, the Creator-Endorsed Marks, and any other relevant marks, using an easily extensible plug-in structure. Our target use case initially was policy development, and I still think there's a need there. But I can also see the same kind of platform being really useful for creating and maintaining Open Educational Resources (OER), or Free Unschooling Resources (FUR), as I like to call them, with tongue firmly in cheek ;)
It would be great to get some feedback from folks here on whether this would be a useful project for the OER community of practice, and whether you think you or anyone you know would use it.
Matt McGregor · Thu 17 Mar 2016 10:46PM
One of the main functions, I think, is to provide more NZ education-sector-specific metadata on educational resources (open and closed) found online. This would include teacher reviews and real world examples of how the resource was used.
So, yes - not really replicating Wikieducator.