For twelve years scientists Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell have been posting the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on to the internet. The APOD archive contains the largest collection of annotated astronomical images on the internet. It is a quintessential open educational resource: free to use and of interest to us all. Astronomy does not belong to any person, or to any single or multiple nation, race, creed or culture: the stars are ours, owned in common. (There may be some aliens who would take exception to that statement, but until they lets us know, “the stars are ours” is true — their ownership is global.)
There are 3 aspects for which APOD is a stellar example of the open education resources emerging for the future. For our look at those 3 aspects, the example of the Astronomy Picture of the Day of August 8, 2007 is used: Phoenix Rises Toward Mars. It is the picture above showing Phoenix rising from its launch pad on its way to Mars. The image is from NASA and in the public domain.
The first aspect by which APOD exemplifies open education resources is that delivers knowledge directly. It is almost impossible to look at an APOD webpage without learning something. Drilling into the resources it links to in the text under the featured picture leads to more direct knowledge. For example, a click on “Phoenix mission” reveals a description of the history leading up to the lift-off and many aspects of the mission beckon with clickable titles. I clicked on “History” and learned that:
The phoenix, a fabulous mythical bird the size of an eagle, symbolizes rebirth in many ancient cultures. According to the ancient Greeks, the bird lives in Arabia, nearby a cool well and sings a beautiful morning song. The phoenix lives 500 years or longer with only one phoenix existing at a time. When the bird's death approaches, it bursts into flames, and a new bird springs from the consumed pyre. Similar to its namesake, the Phoenix Mission "raises from the ashes" a spacecraft and instruments from two previous unsuccessful attempts to explore Mars . . . .
A second aspect is that APOD is open — it is a creature of the commons by its open nature. This is not true of many online materials about science, and even about astronomy in spite of the fact that the stars are ours, belonging equally to every person on earth. An exception to the openness of APOD is the fact that many of the images are copyrighted. Nonetheless they are all open to the extent that anyone can look at the pages they are on and learn from them. As the commons spirit moves into the future, we should keep working toward eliminating limitations like those of copyrights on images in open webpages.
The third aspect of APOD — and the one that most that makes it a creature of the future of learning — is that interconnectivity of ideas interlaces rampantly through APOD pages. A 20th century educational resource would have printed the picture of the lift-off in a book, placed an essay about it by an expert on the opposite page, and then bound the book and sold it to schools. When a student or teacher used the image the pages would be opened and then what could be learned was only what the print lying on the pages conveyed. Any APOD webpage now connects into materials that every day for the past 12 years Nemiroff and Bonnell have interlinked with information about their subject of the day. The third aspect of APOD is that each new page enriches the web of ideas that a learner can engage to enrich the ideas in his or her own head.
The stars are ours to learn because of APOD. We should be creating open educational resources like APOD for everything we want to teach and learn. A lot of people are doing just that. The result will be a global open learning commons from which the new phoenix of education will rise from the closed and obsolete analog education of the 20th century.
tags: united states education phoenix mission mars nasa open resources apod
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