Sharing Nicely

Fiona King sent me an email about launching a list of “100 Resources for Teaching Without Textbooks“. Enabling teachers to teach without textbooks has an ironic twist in South Africa, where many teachers don’t have the choice - and are already teaching without textbooks. Unfortunately, they also lack Internet access, so these resources won’t improve education in townships very much. But that’s not what this is about!

I am torn between wanting more of these lists of resources, because there is always something new and exciting to be found in them, and wanting less of these lists, because it takes a lot of time to look through 100 resources, and what I really want is someone else to tell me which ones are the top 5 (3? 10?) tools and give me a little more information on how to use them. It seems that increasingly the value is in the content that helps me find what i want, rather than the content that i think I want, because often, there are lots of almost equally good alternatives for what I want. At least when it comes to online content - It’s totally different for food, where the cheesecake at Birds remains unrivaled.

In the UNESCO OER Toolkit discussion, I posted a question about collecting resources and making sure they are appropriate, updated regularly, and annotated to so readers don’t need to spend much time reviewing tools and content themselves - unless they want to. Unfortunately, it was not a topic that sparked many responses - maybe because reviewing, annotating, and updating links is simply hard work, and does not lend itself as nicely to community-based collaboration models. There is del.icio.us of course, but it’s ranking mechanism is too crude for the particular purpose of the OER Toolkit.

Derek pointed me to this post on entrepreneurial education by Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire.com. I like the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that Jon promotes. Where I don’t agree with him is that entrepreneurial is the same as market-driven. Reading through his post, I remembered Derek Bok’s excellent “Universities in the Marketplace“, which analyses in some detail the detrimental effect that a market focused approach can have on education, providing examples from mostly U.S. universities.

Jon makes a sound argument that top teachers need better compensation and incentives, but in South Africa it is not just the top teachers, but all teachers. Only focusing on the top 1%, and by proxy the top few% of graduates that are taught by these teachers, is not enough. My sense is that many developing countries have a small group (maybe 1%?) of highly-educated and skilled people, but what is needed is a broader middle-class of professionals; and the teachers to educate them.

It’s exciting to see different voices bringing different perspective to the argument for breaking down boundaries, and increasing innovation!

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams from UCT’s Opening Scholarship project and I ran a short OER Workshop for participants of the ICEL 2008 conference yesterday. We split the workshop into a shorter seminar/presentation and a longer hands-on practical session and ended up having a lot of fun with participants from the Cape Town universities as well as from other South African institutions, and people from Namibia and Ethiopia.

The workshop wiki is online and we would love to get feedback and comments for improvement. Some participants already asked us to run the event in their universities and we are planning to build a workshop blueprint/model that others can use as well.