"Curriki:" A Goofy Name for a Valuable New Open Source Teaching Resource
The Open Source Movement has a new player with deep pockets (i.e., lots of money) and a wish to leave an legacy in the world of education.
This desire to leave a legacy is similar to what Bill and Me linda Gates are doing with the Gates Foundation.
The money and vision sponsoring the Open Source Curriki™ Project is from Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems™.
Microsoft™ and Sun Microsystems™ have been competitors for years, with consumers voting (with their cash) for the Microsoft™ solution.
It remains to be seen whether the Gates Foundation or the Curriki™ strategy will succeed (win) in impacting education in a positive way for future generations.
Different Focus, Different Strategies
The method that the Gates Foundation employs in improving education is to offer grants to local districts, states, and nations to bypass the bureaucracy that under performs, mismanages, or "misses the boat" in providing quality outcomes. This strategy succeeds to the extent that the inertia, stagnant thinking, chain of command lockstep, and other creativity and idea-sapping artifacts of school district bureaucracies are bypassed in favor of enlightened teaching.
The Gates Foundation strategy fails if school district administrators divert other funds that would have gone to the programs that the Gates grants now fund, if the school district administrators "fudge" the improvement numbers, or if school district administrators choose measurements of benefits that students receive that are so generic (and inane) that what the district has always done in a mediocre fashion looks (according to the data) to be progress achieved.
The Curriki™ strategy is to get teachers to donate materials to an Open Source database.
The Curriki™ project will succeed if someone with "educational intelligence " and a real-world knowledge of education can take charge and direct the project in a way that empowers teachers.
Sidebar
Note: Classroom Toolkit labels this conceptual base as the Teaching and Learning Body of Knowledge (TnLBOK). Exploration of the TnLBOK requires a "Tell it like it is" attitude and the courage to publish "undecorated facts."
The creative and innovative ways that bureaucracies use to "decorate the facts of their collective performance" are lavish; an intricate, self-perpetuating, and a shabby substitute for success. Some folks would label this process as "Spin," but the fact-obscuring devices used by bureaucracies are much more ubiquitous, pervasive and intertwined into all aspects of a bureaucracy's "grasping-for-the-air-of-existence" to be encompassed with the simple label of "Spin."
The Curriki™ project succeeds if its mission of "Let's be the world-wide repository for all things educational," is supplanted with a sound rationale for the streamlined delivery of quality instructional materials packages.
Teacher empowerment is the key to success of the Curriki" project, and the Curriki™ project succeeds to the degree that the real-world needs of teachers can be met better with Curriki™ solutions than with other solutions.
The Curriki™ project succeeds if antidotes to the pain that teachers feel become freely and easily available. A good first step would be for the Curriki™ Project to use its publicity clout to hammer the greatest visible source of teacher pain, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
The Curriki™ project fails if the Curriki™ project bureaucracy buys in to a bureaucratic solution for educational improvement.
Most of the project's sponsors seem to work for high-level bureaucracies, a source of work experience that is unlikely to produce the kind of thinking that can deliver enough of a radical departure from "bureaucratic business as usual" of our school districts to make a difference in the lives of teachers and students.
The Classroom Toolkit Response
Classroom Toolkit volunteered to be a Curriki™ project sponsor, and we will see if this relationship pans out.
Sidebar
We presented a similar presentation to representative of Sun™ Intel™, ISTE™ the Lucas Foundation™ Apple™ and several other organizations several years ago.
We don't believe that the Curriki™ Project is an offshoot of those discussions since the Curriki™ project would need to add several key features to match our proposal.
Policy differences (between Curriki™ and Classroom Toolkit), that can be surmounted, include:
- Licensing Restrictions
- Classroom Toolkit's license requires that any repackaging of our materials remain free to teachers. Companies cannot copy Classroom Toolkit materials and resell them to teachers or school districts
- The Curriki™ license would allow others to package Curriki™ content and resell that content
- Ownership of Materials
- The Classroom Toolkit policy allows copyright ownership to remain with the original author
- The Curriki™ Project would assume copyright ownership of contributed content
- Placement of Tutorial Content
- Classroom Toolkit's Tutorials (in development) are crafted so as not to create duplicate content. Search engines seem to penalize sites (with lowered page rankings) for posting duplicate content . Classroom Toolkit is protective of the high page ranking of our articles and would not like to have these page rankings eroded. The Moodle! Open Source software that Classroom Toolkit uses allows original content to remain where it was first posted, thereby mainting the page rank of the original content.
- The Curriki™ Project does not seem to mind that content is duplicated on its site
What Teachers can Do
The Curriki™ project is just getting off the ground, is getting a lot of media publicity, and holds some potential if enough teachers…
- Register
- Post lesson plans
- Offer "Real-World" suggestions for solving teachers' needs when the online forum starts
Unfortunately, teachers who are employeed for school districts feel a reluctance (and a sense of self-preservation for their jobs), and are unlikely to provide the kind of information that the Curriki™ visionaries and sponsors need to understand teaching and learning as it really exists.
Since the project is new, we need to wait and see if the project becomes what its visionaries and backers intend it to be.
And, spread the word about the Curriki™ site among your colleagues and friends.
Background Information
