Students save while learning

This feature article in the Hewlett Foundation news shows how students at community colleges around the country have saved approximately $80,000 by using a single open textbook from Connexions. Collaborative Statistics has been adopted by eight colleges, and one high school and adoption continues to spread as more faculty and students hear about this book and the open education movement.

Siyavula jumping through hoops to teach lenses

Previously on the Connexions blog, we brought you an update on the Siyavula project and their Teachers' Weekend workshop, where teachers were trained to use Connexions to upload and share curriculum in South Africa. Among the activities was one that used hula-hoops to explain how organizations, communities and individuals can use Connexions lenses to select and highlight useful, relevant, and/or high-quality content. This picture illustrates how participants were able to use the hoops to physically group items in the "repository" to build their lenses.

Feedback from attendees indicated that the hula hoop explanation was powerful and memorable. No word yet on who won the hula hoop freestyle dance competition held after class. :)

Under Construction: New features, new help area on the way

For those of you who have been following the blog for while, you've probably noticed that we haven't been posting quite as much of late. There are two big reasons for this.

First, we recently said goodbye to Kyle, who has been a major contributor to the blog from its inception both as an author and designer. Alas, despite our best efforts, we could not convince him that the slave wages and table scraps we were offering as payment were better than finishing his degree, so he's now back at Rice as a full-time student. Maybe in a few years when he's off working as a NASA engineer he will look back and realize just exactly how much he misses us, but until that day comes, we'll have to find a way to soldier on without him. Good luck, Kyle!

The second major blog speed bump is related to some of the work we've been doing to enhance the site, which has kept us all pretty busy. In the coming weeks Connexions will be upgrading its collection structures - the "blueprints" that define textbooks, courses, etc. - to use a new XML format called CollXML. While we won't be offering the ability to edit CollXML documents directly just yet, this work is setting the stage for a slew of new collection-related features that we hope to introduce over the coming months that will give collection authors even greater control over their work. For now, the new CollXML export function will provide opportunities for outside developers to take full advantage of the content in the Connexions repository.

You may soon find yourself updating your content to the newest version of CNXML, version 0.7. For those of you who remember the CNXML 0.6 upgrade earlier this year, don't worry - this is NOT a major change from the previous language, but is primarily an administrative update to support the CollXML rollout. The one difference for authors is that we are making it easier to include alternate images for online and pdf formats, allowing you greater control of what is (and is not!) displayed to the reader based on how they are viewing the content. Additional details and documentation will be available when the update rolls out later this month.

We've also been working hard to restructure the Connexions "Help" pages (http://cnx.org/help/). Several of these resources are being merged, moved, and/or expanded in order to help visitors and authors better find the most relevant guides and tutorials. As a part of this effort we've also identified and "retired" several outdated or duplicate tutorials, so if you have bookmarked some of those pages you may need to update your links. These changes will make life a lot easier for those looking for help, but as always you can email techsupport@cnx.org if you have any questions or comments.

And the fun doesn't stop there ... next month we're planning to release a major update for organizations interested in promoting their brand along with the content they provide. Stay tuned, these updates are scheduled to be released sometime around Halloween ...

Revisionist History

So I was sitting on my couch, reading another article about Robert Bobb's fight to save Detroit's public schools, this time with a little bit of help of one William Cosby Jr., Ed.D. And I'm struck again by how much potential there is for open education to do a world of good here, for a district so desperate that it's closing 40 schools and laying off 1,000 teachers. As I read this, I began thinking more about Dr. Cosby's activism and tough-love approach to race, crime, socio-economic struggles, and so on, how he is not content to allow those around him to bemoan their circumstances but rather calls them to action to right the wrongs in their world ...

And that's when it struck me. We often talk about Connexions being a platform for so-called "shut outs" - authors who for one reason or another don't have access to traditional publishing media to spread their work and ideas - and I began to realize that there's an angle to this, an important question at the center of our educational philosophy, that we haven't fully considered in this discussion: what is the real story behind the world we live in?

Consider for a moment the subject of US History (those of you reading from outside the US will likely have your own variation on this same theme). There are often complaints that our history textbooks are too centered on the actions of white men, and neglect the contributions of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, women, etc. Normally the conversation ends there - after all, what can you do but complain and hope that somebody, somewhere, is motivated to write a better textbook?

But now we have Connexions. Now we have an opportunity to - literally - rewrite history as it is taught to our students. Educators no longer have to choose between history books that restrict certain views, but can instead provide any combination of historical and cultural perspectives by including modules with different points of view that otherwise may never make it into the traditional texts. When our teachers, parents, or community leaders get frustrated that their kids aren't hearing the full story, they can feel empowered to so something about it: to write and share those stories, and give the educators the ammunition they need to effect change.

Coming back to the story in Detroit ... I think about the districts who are hurting the most right now by budget issues. Detroit. Houston. New Orleans. Washington. The State of California. All hurting financially, and all serving populations traditionally shortchanged by revisionist history. And you have to ask yourself: How awesome would it be for these districts to, at the same time, realize the monetary saving provided by free textbooks AND the add ability to provide a pluralistic view of the content they teach?

The K-12 arena is the Holy Grail of open education - a opportunity to ease the burden of education on society while ensuring that each and every student has access to high-quality educational content. Ironically, one of our biggest hurdles in this fight is that the books are, well, free. The problem is that too often, people assume that if you are giving something away, it must not be worth anything. But if we can show district leaders a tangible advantage that has nothing to do with price - show them how a site like Connexions can help present a more complete view of our society and the topics our educators teach - I think a lot of those same players will begin to understand the true value of OERs, and will find the political cover necessary to begin adopting such materials.

We need to stop promoting open resources primarily as a way to save money, and show them off for what they are: powerful pedagogical tools for a pluralistic society. If we can do this - if we can show our educators and administrators and legislators that we can provide better materials (for a lower price to boot) - we might just find ourselves making greater headway within the public school system. How great would it be for Connexions to be the platform of choice for promoting an inclusive curriculum, a way for educators to provide their students with a complete and accurate view of the world in which they live rather than blindly accepting the version places in front of them by strangers?

And hey, if someone can figure out a way to get Bill Cosby to shill for us, all the better. :)

Update: Siyavula's first Teachers' Weekend

Our friends at Siyavula have written up an interesting and exciting piece about their first Teachers' Weekend workshop. Participating teachers were trained to use the Connexions platform to upload and share their respective curriculum for grades 1 through 9. From the article:

We are almost finished with the uploading of English and Afrikaans content for all learning areas for grades 1-9 (you can see it here) and we felt that enough had been done to start getting teachers involved on a large scale. So we jumped right in with a weekend workshop for teachers. We had a great turnout and we had to turn away many enquiries for participation in the weeks leading up to the event. A total of 70 teachers eventually participated in the weekend.

The objective of the weekend was to:

• show the power of the Connexions platform for using, building, sharing and adapting resources;
• promote the formation of new communities forming that use Connexions as a use to support their activities and provide the possibility of for new communities to form; and
• provide an environment that can enhance existing communities or swap and share groups.

Congratulations to Siyavula for a job well done!

View from the top ...

Today marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first demonstration of his telescope, and those of you using Google today may have noticed their homage:

Curiosity got the better of us, so we clicked and ... Connexions! Yes, the #1 return from Google for the search "Galileo's telescope" returns a module by Albert Van Helden, long one of our most popular (and sure to top the charts this week based on the traffic we're getting from Google today!):

We often talk about our site having good "Google karma" - when search engines visit our site, they are able to learn a great deal about the page due to a combination of rich content metadata, search-friendly XML structures, and the modular nature of our site which provides a number of links to and from each piece of content. The result, as you can see above, is that search engines tend to return Connexions content very high in the list of results, meaning greater visibility for authors and their work.

Congratulations to Dr. Van Helden - it's not every day you score a number 1 hit on Google!

Did somebody say free beer?

Think free as in speech, not free beer.

When we say that Connexions offers users access to "free textbooks and learning materials", most people assume that we're talking about materials that can be used without paying for them. And that's certainly true.

But our materials aren't just free in the monetary, "free beer" sense; they're also free in the liberty, "free speech" sense. Authors are free to modify existing content - through updates, corrections, translations, customizations, localizations, etc. - to meet their own needs. They are also free to take these materials and use them outside of Connexions. In fact, the only restriction that is placed on our users is that they give credit where credit is due by providing attribution.

I am often asked why we elected to go with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-by) license, rather than one of the other Creative Commons licenses. For example, many open content enthusiasts promote the use of the "share-alike" restriction, which compels anybody using licensed content to make their derived works available under the same terms. Others question the lack of a non-commercial restriction, arguing that authors who willingly give up opportunities to profit from their works should not have to stand by while others cash in on their efforts by repackaging and selling derivatives (or exact clones) of the original material.

The short answer is this: the more restrictions we place on these works, the less free ("as in speech") they become, and the less flexibility we have as a community to use those resources. Instead, we choose to free ourselves of these limitations, engaging authors, learners, and even publishers to promote the free exchange of ideas so that everybody can benefit from our combined wealth of knowledge.

Is the CC-by license the best choice for every open content project out there? No, it's not. But we feel that it is the right choice for Connexions, and the right choice to support our mission to provide free - truly free - educational materials that benefit the entire community.

Speaking of which, did I hear someone say free beer?

---

Talk back:

How do you feel about the choice to use the CC-by license for Connexions content? Do you see this as a barrier for authors who might otherwise contribute, or an opportunity for innovators to develop new ways to use knowledge to its fullest potential? Do you feel that this license benefits authors by promoting the use of their content by others or lacks respect for the value of their work? We'd love to hear what you have to say!