andrewstillman's blog

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.

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.

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.

Teachers pay Teachers started in April 2006. We started in May 2006. They claim to have over 4000 registered users, 400 of whom are "sellers" of curriculum products. We currently have an undisclosed, though far more modest number of users and an even smaller number of curriculum creators...

While Open Educator has not yet engaged a comparably assertive marketing and media campaign to attract users, the initial growth curves would seem to suggest that the marketplace model for getting quality, original teaching resources online is superior to the non-profit, pro-bono model we nurture.

Is this so? We don't yet know, but we will attempt to make the case to the contrary.

Some points to consider:

- University faculty do not conduct research or create groundbreaking knowledge products because they seek publishing royalties, but rather because such accomplishments earn them collegial esteem and enhanced employability.

- Shared teaching resources are valuable insofar as they are adaptable to the context of the teacher and the needs of the students. Curriculum is more likely to evolve to fit the needs of specific populations and contexts when it can be freely modified, and these modifications can then be shared, forked into a separate version, and supported by a community of users.

Programmers largely live and work in cyberspace. For the ad-hoc development teams that built Drupal, the software that holds the Open Educator community together, the product and the project inhabit the same domain. Thousands of users and developers converge on the the Drupal forums, groups, and project development areas of the drupal.org site (run using drupal), in large part, because they are AT WORK on real web development projects and problems that demand real solutions, now, using drupal.

The prospect of teachers building an open source curriculum seems bound by a slightly more challenging set of constraints, insofar as the real value of a curriculum is largely contingent upon its carefully attuned, audience-adapted, "in the flesh" implementation in a classroom. Whereas a programmer's code will either "work" or "not work" with respect to a set of design specifications, the design of a classroom curriculum demands a far more nuanced and dynamic production process. The expert teacher's craft is difficult to capture in a merely logical, procedural language. The act of teaching is a "value-added," context-dependent product. Rich, effective pedagogy is inseparable from the soft-skills: the attitudes, relational habits, and big-picture, philosophical stance of the individual teacher. It is these soft skills that are perhaps the most difficult to teach, and are likely our greatest challenge in building internet-based curriculum development communities that make a measurable difference for students.

Of late, there has been increasing academic and business attention given to the open-source software phenomenon. In 2004, Yale law professor Yochai Benkler examined the phenomena of car-pooling and distributed computing in an essay entitled "Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production" Summarizing his 84 page essay, Benkler writes:

As the Open Educator community begins to define what it wants to be, I thought a deeper look at the open source philosophy/metaphor should first be undertaken. In this spirit I share these selected Excerpts from "Cooking Pot Markets: an economic model for trade in free goods on the internet"

by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,

(The full text can be found at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/)

Torvalds [the creator of Linux] says, " [t]here are lots of advantages in a free system, the obvious one being that it allows more developers to work on [Linux], and extend [Linux]." However, "even more important" is that making Linux free brought "in one fell swoop ... a lot of people who used it" - not just reporting problems, but playing a crucial role in the further development of the system. Torvalds notes that a single person or organisation "doesn't even think of all the uses a large user community would have for a general-purpose system" - so the large user base of Linux was "actually ... a larger bonus than the developer base."