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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Smart Leaves for Learning
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| Leaves in the analog world, by Judy Breck |
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You artists reading this have probably noticed long ago that picturing the Internet visually is not possible. To picture the Internet we would have to put the same thing in many places at the same time. In cyberspace, any leaf on any of the zillion trees of information out there can be on a whole lot of different branches at the same time. Such a thing is not possible in the physical world. In my brother’s pond in New Mexico that is pictured here, if you take a leaf off of the branch hanging in the foreground and stick it on to the lily plant growing in the water, the leaf has moved. It is on the lily and not on the tree.
Something altogether different happens online. If you consider this post of mine as a leaf with some ideas on it, you can link this post leaf to your webpage where you keep ideas. The leaf is now in both places! If I send the post to my brother and he gets excited because a picture of his pond is on the iCommons website, he might send the link to each of his three sons and they might link the post to their own websites somewhere. By then the post is on six web trees at the same time.
Thus, one way that the leaves are smart is because they can be in lots of places at once. This is a particularly valuable new way of distributing education resources. The leaf of a virtual book can be studied by an unlimited number of students at the same time—even though the students are physically scattered all across the world. If my brother’s son who is a wildlife scientist writes a web report about his father’s pond as a feeding spot for migratory birds, that bird web report would, in the beginning, be on my nephew’s webpage. The word could get around among scientists that the page about the pond had some things worth learning on it and scientists interested in migratory birds would start linking to the page.
We are all very used to a page of content for learning that is open on the Internet appearing at the same time in many, many places where education is happening. There is, for example the Migratory Bird Center page at the Smithsonian with interactive images for 12 birds. One of these birds is the sandpiper. Since the Smithsonian is an American museum, the featured birds are primarily found in the USA. The sandpipers, though have a more global habits: These shorebirds breed in the Arctic but are found throughout the United States, especially along the coasts, during migration. They overwinter throughout the tropics and in the southern United States.
In terms of educational resources, the Migratory Bird Center's interactive page is a smart leaf because it is open online and can be linked to limitless places online where it can be studied. You can, for example, put the link on your own website or send it to others you think would like to click in and out to see the gorgeous images of the birds and learn more about them.
Is this page about migratory birds REALLY in all of those places at once? You may be thinking to yourself that when you have this leaf of my post displayed on your monitor so that you are now reading it, that actually it is “just a link.” The real page is on the iCommons server. But where are the 50 pages that are being read simultaneously if 50 different people have this post open at the same time on their computers? At the least, the post can be virtually in 50 places at once. You cannot do that with a printed textbook. Open educational resources can be virtually in thousands of places at once. You have to print and ship thousands of textbooks to do that with analog educational resources.
There is a new book out called Everything Is Miscellaneous. It was written by David Weinberger, one of the authors of the best selling 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto. In his new book Weinberger says (page 14):
“The digital world . . . allows us to transcend the most fundamental rule of ordering the real world: Instead of everything have its place, it’s better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously.”
Everything Is Miscellaneous is, for me, the best book yet to come along for understanding the behavior of digital content. It describes how the new global digital venue is open in a way no physical pond can be. As Weinberger says (page 103), we can:
“Put each leaf on as many branches as possible. In the real world, a leaf can hang from only one branch. . . . [In the new digital order] it’s to our advantage to hang information from as many branches as possible.”
Opening educational resources is required for us to move learning into this advantageous new venue where we can assign things to multiple places.
tags: new-york united states education miscellaneous open resources
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