Flickr: NP_Josh

As the open education movement grows, the ripple effects of what it means for teachers to take control of what they teach is being witnessed across all spectrums in education. Customizable content, sharing and becoming part of a community, and deconstructing entrenched ideologies about what constitutes quality learning materials — these are just a few paths that the open education movement is creating.

At the Big Ideas Fest in December, we spoke to stakeholders in open education about how it’s transforming learning.

For some, like Una Daly, associate director of Open College Textbooks the movement is inevitable. Open education is a natural progression in the freeing and sharing of information on the Internet. “Open education is an evolutionary step in making sharing easier for students teachers and public,” she said.

Neeru Khosla, founder of CK12, a nonprofit open education source for free Web-based content in the form of digital “Flexbooks,” points out that customizable content allows educators to meet each of their students’ specific needs, unlike the rigid text format.

But for public school teacher Constance Moore, who teaches art in Oakland, Calif., the logistics of finding open education resources online is a major challenge. “You can’t get online,” she said. “You can barely send a fax from a lot of public schools. There’s a big gap between what’s available and how to access it.”

And that’s exactly the point made by Christian Long, vice president of education at Cannon Design, a firm that works with school districts to redesign learning environments. Long is worried that all the available resources online will get into the hands of those who already have means, leaving those who don’t even further behind.

“Those who have leverage, power and resources are going to pull it off, and those who don’t will be further marginalized in terms of opportunity,” Long said. If the debate is tangled around issues like “public versus private versus charter, we’re going to wake up sooner rather than later with a massive discrepancy.”

Watch the full interviews here.

[Co-produced with Matthew Williams.]

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It’s not a new question, but it’s certainly a divisive one — how to best measure student learning. As the Department of Education works toward finding a way to assess student learning beyond what most agree are sub-par standardized tests, and movement for opting out of assessments grows, educators and those who work in the education system are attempting to define the criteria for themselves.

At the Big Ideas Fest a few months ago, where teachers, administrators, entrepreneurs and policymakers gathered to parse valuable ideas and figure out how to bring them to action, we asked a few participants their opinion on how to measure learning. Their answers showed the broad range of the differences in opinion.

“It depends on how you define what we mean by learning,” said Neeru Khosla, founder of CK12, a nonprofit open education source for free Web-based content in the form of digital “Flexbooks.” Our current form of assessment only measures what students know “in the moment,” she said. But what we should be measuring is dynamic learning — how students can understand a concept and how they can apply it based on what information they have.

Art teacher Constance Moore from Oakland, Calif., suggested that students assess their own work. “They can reflect on their own learning and drive their own progress so they can take it where they need to go,” she said. It’s unfair to use the same measurement for every student, she said. That kind of assessment has no meaning.

Kaycee Eckhart, who teaches at Sci Academy, a public charter school in New Orleans with a high special education population, believes she would do a disservice to her students to dismiss standardized testing outright.

“There are so many ways to measure student growth,” she said. “I’m not against standardized testing and multiple choice testing. It’s one way we need to assess kids,”in light of the fact that students need to be prepared to take tests like the SAT to get into college. “It’s unfair of me to say we’ll never take one of those tests. ‘We’re going to do all creative learning, and by the way, when you’re a junior there’ll be a really hard test, and don’t worry about it.’”

Even taking standardized tests, she says, requires learning a skill set — things like understanding questions and deciding between two difficult choices.

Embedding assessments in the context of what students are learning at the time would be ideal, according to Bernadette Adam Yates, senior research analyst in the Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology, which recently launched Evidence Framework for Innovation and Excellence in Education. “So you’re getting feedback, instruction is changing, adapting to what kids need,” she said. “It’s a hard thing to do.”

Watch the full interview here.

Produced by Matthew Williams

Check out the stellar lineup of speakers, including, among many others:

• Lee LeFever, founder and principal of Common Craft. Have you seen Common Craft’s excellent explainer videos? Take a look at this one about augmented reality.
• Gerald Richards, Chief Executive Officer of 826 National, the highly respected tutoring and publishing nonprofit that focuses on helping students with expository and creative writing.
• Martha Kanter, Under Secretary, U.S. Department of Education, who reports to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and oversees policies, programs, and activities related to almost everything.
• Neeru Khosla, Co-Founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation, a non-profit organization that offers customizable digital content for K-12.

Big Ideas is organized by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, which is also behind Open Educational Resources (OER).

KQED Education will be there, as well, offering tips on Twitter and other digital media advice. And like last year, I will be there representing MindShift and covering the event.

Last year’s event was a phenomenal experience, full of high-concept and practical big ideas.

I spoke with Salman Khan for the first time.

Dr. Sugata Mitra told me about his ideal for a school.

Maker Faire’s Dale Dougherty talked about how kids can build their own schools just the way they want them.

I’m really looking forward to this year’s event and hoping to see you there!

Flickr:EthanHickerson

How young is too young to trust a child with “grownup” information? Dr. Sugata Mitra tends to give kids the benefit of the doubt to be able to handle what we perceive to be adult-only information.

Dr. Mitra is well known in education circles for his Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, where students in the most challenging life situations are able to figure out how to learn and what to do with the knowledge they gain when they’re given the right tools and the opportunity to do it in groups.

He applies this theory –  a learning tool plus a group of kids will invariably lead to learning — to beyond the boundaries of schools.

Not long ago, Dr. Mitra came upon a nine-year-old girl who was having a hard time at home. She lived in a tiny one-room studio with just her mother — a single parent who was an alcoholic. The girl told him she was frustrated and didn’t know what to do.

“Have you talked to your friends about this?” he asked her.

“Yes, we talk about it all the time,” she said.

Dr. Mitra wasn’t certain it was entirely appropriate to do it, but in this case, he did what he typically does:  directed her to research her conflicts and questions with her friends and see what she comes up with.

Over the course of the next few days, the girl and her friends spent their time looking up topics like single mothers, alcoholism, and parenthood online.

“So what did you find out?” he asked her days later.

“I know a lot more now. And I understand her,” she said.

Dr. Mitra told me this story as we were talking about the impact of technology on culture earlier today. After speaking with innovators and educators for the past few months for MindShift, I told him it was becoming more and more clear to me that technology — and the Internet specifically — is changing the role of children and adults. In our past lives, children were meant to be seen, not heard. Even in recent generations, although kids have become much more the focus of parental attention, it’s been more about what parents should do for kids, and how they should protect them from imminent danger. So it goes with education. The relationship between teacher and student went in one direction: the teacher teaches and the student learns.

The Internet — the wonderful world wide web — is subverting these relationships. Kids can now find out about any subject under the sun on their own, if they have the right tool. And this can be unsettling for everyone, certainly parents and teachers.

Dr. Mitra believes that somewhere in this shifting equation, allowing children to self-learn as parents and educators serve as guides rather than all-knowing sources of information, there’s an answer in solving the problem of crime.

He believes that violence comes from a need for kids to get attention, and that there’s a correlation between self-learning through technology and eradicating crime. He talks more about this in an interview we taped at the Big Ideas Fest today, which we’ll post online in the next week or two.

Dr. Mitra hopes to be able to research this correlation further. Somewhere in these stories, he believes, there’s a potentially life-changing lesson to be learned. We just have to listen to the kids.

Sifteo

David Merrill, co-founder of Sifteo, demonstrated what appears to be the future of play at the Big Ideas Fest.

They’re Siftables: small, digital tiles that connect to each other to create different types of games. You can flip them over, shake them, tilt them, and pour them onto each other, and they’ll react accordingly.

“It’s bringing physical and digital together in a new way,” he said.

Check out these videos that demonstrate the tiles in action. It’s incredible.

http://vimeo.com/3164983

http://vimeo.com/3164229

Tina Barseghian

As part of the Big Ideas Fest conference, each participant is asked to be a part of an Action Collab. I’m participating in the one called “How to enable teachers to have the greatest impact on learners.” We’re following a typical design challenge step by step, and the first step is to identify the opportunity (aka challenge).

After our 22-member group interviewed two teachers, we came up with a wall full of words that described their challenges — everything from lack of resources to inflexible working structure that discourages innovation. In the next couple of days, we’ll attempt to find solutions to these challenges (or at least some of them) through design thinking.