member blogs

With its $81 million contract, IBM and its outsourced subcontractors have (in fits and starts) put together a shiny new data warehousing and knowledge management suite, called ARIS.   Admittedly, some portion of that fee has been put to good use in an elegantly designed GUI and difficult-to-engineer synchronization with multiple (often archaic) student data systems, however as I discovered, it seems Open Planner has inadvertantly served as a (time and money saving) proof-of-concept for a major portion of this commercial software development effort.

Changing one's planning practices is frightening business, perhaps mainly because teaching is (among many things) half performance art, half crowd control, and half content expertise.

In the face of this recipe for anxiety, when one has found what "works" ---the three-ring binder with sheet protectors, grids, and prompts. The inbox. The spreadsheet. The manila folder system. That special tote. ---one tends to cling to it like a fetish. When others profess of better ways, it can be as though dog owners are passing in a park. Oh, that's cute, (sniff sniff) but our pet practices tend to remain loyally by our sides as we go our separate ways.

I had an email from an independent publisher recently who found some of my work online and apparently it impressed her.

I am currently seeking a co-author (we have one author in place for this book already), and was very interested to look at your involvement with IB Maths, and related websites, and also your approach towards making maths relevant to the student - this is so important with Maths.

Upon first hearing of the gigantic contract ($80 million) IBM was just awarded to patch together the obtuse and obsolete software systems that appear to redundantly employ half of the administrators at the department of education, I gasped a sigh of "oh great, here we go again..."

The mash of incompatible student data mainframes for attendance, scheduling, student identification and incident reporting, each with its own exclusive, proprietary vendor, provides a rich metaphor for the Kafkaesque labrynth that has been the nation's largest single school system.

In my cynical mind, IBM would just be one more in a long line of vampiric vendors plying its bloodmeal on the urban public sector.

But alas, IBM may be a rather enlightened crew.

I recently spent a week in Washington, D.C. as part of a Federal Policy Institute, sponsored by Teachers College, Columbia University. As a student in the Politics and Education program, I have been wrestling with the policy implications of the open education content movement. While most great ideas start at the grass roots level, eventually policy makers feel compelled to get involved to regulate the environment, or to enhance the ability for the movement to grow. One of my goals as a co-founder of Open Planner is to support policies that do the latter.

As something of a policy entrepreneur, I am constantly sifting through policy problems, trying to match Open Planner and organizations like ours with the right "problem" as the appropriate "solution". In the current climate of NCLB, "Highly Qualified Teachers", or the lack thereof, are a topic of much debate. Whether the conversation during NCLB's reauthorization leads to a new goal: highly effective teachers, or to the term "highly accomplished teacher," as the NEA advocates, the problem remains the same: there is inconsistent teacher quality in this country, and this problem is exacerbated by the closed systems in which teachers usually operate.

I have plenty of blogs... not sure I need another one...  You can find me at

http://tidewatermuse.blogspot.com

http://chronicle-of-a-search.blogspot.com

I am so thankful to have found Open-Planner. Almost by accident! I followed a link from a comment Andrew had left on the discussion board at AIT, and here I am!

At this stage I seem to be the only Aussie, which means I am definitely the only Victorian, and the only person likely to be using VELS. I will try to keep that in mind as I draft my first few pieces.

melissa

The other day I watched this YouTube video of an open-source "manifesto" given at the 2006 Plone conference by Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and found myself thoroughly awed at the culture, community, and vision that has grown up in the software movement that makes the technical backbone of Open Planner possible.