Educators, I have some bad news to give you. You aren’t going to get rich. It doesn’t matter how many of your lessons you carefully hoard, or how many great ideas you keep to yourself, none of that is going to make you rich. You will probably never publish your "book" and you aren’t going to get famous.
You could however make a difference. You could give what you’ve got away for free and help make the world a better place. The technology exists to make it relatively easy to share your project ideas, assessments, lesson plans, curriculum, thoughts, whatever you are working on with students. The problem is right now, not enough educators are sharing what they are doing.
The main reason we as educators do not share more of what we do, is that we lack time. We don’t see the value in sharing what we do because it takes effort to upload & share our ideas, and the return is not immediate obvious. Getting that test written, or deciding what you are going to cover for the next week is tedious. To this I say, let your students help you out. Instead of having your students write summaries and rewrite notes from class, have them share the great ideas you come up with collectively with the world. Enable your students to help you. Petition your administration for collaboration time to polish your ideas with your colleagues and then share the result with the world.
Another reason not to share resources is that what we do is fairly specific to our group of students. Many of us customize what we do to the particular group of students we have. To this I say, share the core of what you are doing then, and not all of the details which make it work for your specific case.
Michael Nielsen makes the case in the TED video for Open Science, but in my mind, the same should hold true for education. The resources you make for your classes should be owned by the public, since in the long run, we all benefit. We need to move toward a more open collective experience in education, an Open Education, rather than our current isolated walled garden approach.
Mylene says:
Hi David, I like the “open-source” idea you’re proposing. I agree with your stated reasons why we sometimes don’t share resources as much as we could. I suspect that, at least sometimes, there are two other reasons: fear that of unfounded criticism of our teaching, and fear of founded criticism of our teaching! Maybe my explanation of (obscure technical concept) has contained a subtle misconception all along. Maybe someone will point out that the instructional technique I use to teach X actually focuses students’ attention on Y… Obviously we could see this as an opportunity to improve, but it can make you feel pretty stupid to get busted for something when you’ve been doing it that way for years. I’m not sure how to solve this, but one idea is the same one we offer our students. When they are unsure of their skills or unconfident about presenting them, we can have them work in groups beforehand. That way, they are sharing their mistakes with a small group, not the world. It gives them a chance to become more confident, maybe realize they know more than they think they do, and also allows the group to work together to improve the overall product. I think that your suggestion to “petition your administration for collaboration time” is the key that ties all of these ideas together. How can we advocate effectively for this?
April 10, 2011 — 5:02 pm
Earl Samuelson says:
I’ve pasted an excerpt below from the “personal description” that I included in one of my blogs; I believe it fits in nicely with David’s topic here.
My children attend school apart from where I teach and, as a result, I will not have the opportunity to “teach” them on a formal basis. I have therefore created a blog detailing how I would teach Introductory Calculus; in this way, my son and daughter can check in on my notes at their leisure, if they so choose.
This medium has given me the opportunity to re-connect with Calculus, a topic I have not taught in over 12 years. I have also actively “promoted” this blog over Twitter and Linkedin in an effort to gather feedback and constructive criticism on my explanations of Calculus so that I might make improvements to my approach. From this process, I have gained far more than I ever imagined through the ensuing connections made through those social networking platforms. I feel very fortunate to be connected with so many great people.
April 10, 2011 — 10:03 pm
Whitney Greer says:
David,
I am a student at the University of South Alabama, I am currently enrolled in Dr. Strange’s EDM 310 Course which is a course in informing students of how important the use of technology can be in our world as teachers. I was quite impressed with your view of shared knowledge for this is something new that is coming about. While I was in high school, work that was completed was our own personal work, now it is very important to share what we learn. For as we are taught to teach our children to learn group collaboratively, we as the educators must practice this as well. I thought one of how our ideas are so precious to us, especially when some one gives you credit for a job well done, but keeping this precious idea for only yourself to benefit from seems kind of selfish. So i do agree that while we are all genius in our own mind, the world could only become a better place if all of these valued ideas were shared via technology. This is great way to learn things that have been successful for teachers all around, our education system has it’s flaws and I feel a lot of this is due to teachers not doing their homework to bring success into their own students lives. I couldn’t agree with you more, and I have seen other blogs of where the teacher is demanding her students to use blogging, podcasts, and much more of technology and this is changing the school as you and I may remember. Very great post, so informative and I will be checking back once my thoughts are published so I can share with you! We will make a difference if we take the right approach, we just have to find relevancy in our instruction to our students individual needs!!
April 11, 2011 — 3:55 pm