‘Open source’ education

Unlike what might be expected from a blog dealing with educational technology, this post isn’t so much about using open-source software in teaching, but instead about my thoughts on the sharing of information between teachers.

It distresses me somewhat when teachers talk about protecting their intellectual property when it comes to teaching materials. It’s probably not all that surprising, given that we exist in a system that rewards based on individual merit – it’s even worse when schools actively encourage teachers to work on their own rather than sharing ideas and resources. I’ve heard that such places are really competitive, cutthroat environments to work in – I’d hate to be working somewhere like that!

Personally, I think that educators can take a leaf from the “share and share alike” philosophy adopted by some open source software designers. If everyone were willing to share their work and to borrow from other existing work, wouldn’t this result in benefiting all parties involved? Students would likely end up with superior materials being used in class. Teachers often seem to be lamenting their lack of free time – won’t the easy availability of quality material help to address that? It’s not like teachers aren’t already adapting material from off the internet, won’t a formalised sharing system help to make that even more efficient?

For a more specific example, I refer to a wiki created by someone in my NIE Physics class who also thought it’d be good to share materials during our training practicum – I ended up sharing my PowerPoint slides on General Wave Properties, and at the same time learnt from a classmate who’d used motion paths in PowerPoint pretty well to demonstrate simple Kinematics concepts. Unfortunately, the site’s since fallen into disuse – possibly because, like myself, a number of them aren’t teaching Physics anymore; though I suspect the more likely reason is that people have become jealous of their intellectual property once more.

I know there are problems with sharing – as alluded to earlier, there’s the problem of proper attribution, of giving credit where it is due. There’s also the risk that with such resources available, people will become lazy and stop creatively contributing to such a pool of teaching resources. Yet another problem would be that the bigger the network of sharers, the more materials there would be – which might not seem like a bad thing, until you realise that you have hundreds of possible lesson plans and it’s impossible to go through all of them to see which ones suit your classes best.

On the other hand, I’m sure that solutions to these problems could be worked out, such as a rating system of some sort to deal with large amounts of material. Also, I might simply be hopelessly naive, but I believe that there are enough serious educators in the industry for such a sharing concept to reap benefits – the skivers would probably not have contributed much on their own anyway, so won’t the improved materials at their disposal just end up benefiting their students? The largest stumbling block right now, I feel, is really the negative attitude towards an open sharing environment.

Things are picking up, though, with more sharing sessions and all, but I still notice many teachers (and schools) holding on to certain ‘prize materials’ as theirs and theirs alone. On my part, I’ll attempt to share my own experiences in implementing technology into my English lessons on this blog. They’re not all success stories (quite a number of failures, in fact), but I think that such failures would still be worth learning from (people would know what to avoid!), and I could stand to learn from others’ suggestions as well, so – why not?