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Mokurai
403 days ago |
Since I wrote about the economics of OERs here more than a month ago, the critical piece fell into place for Sugar Labs to launch an ambitious OER project, called Replacing Textbooks. I have been calling for such a project for years, and so I jumped at the chance, and was accepted as the project manager. That is one important reason why I have not written much here in the last month.
We have been working on the installation and configuration of a test server for creating OERs, using the recently-released booki software from FLOSS Manuals for writing, editing, illustrating, publishing, translating, and remixing OERs. Also, I have set up a fundraiser at Crowdrise, which you are all invited to join and support.
I would like to invite a discussion on the directions others would like to see us take. Note that you can create whatever OERs you like. You don't need my permission. The booki software is freely available to anyone who has access to a computer server and a system administrator to set it up, and there is a public instance that anybody can use. Nevertheless it should prove useful to bring some of the important ideas involved out into the open and hear various points of view on them.
The basic mission is to create OERs to replace textbooks in every school subject for every age or grade level for every country in every language needed. Children commonly take five subjects at a time, including Physical Education, divided into semesters, for 12 years of primary and secondary education. There is some variation in this plan, which does not change the fact that this comes to a requirement for more than 100 semester class OERs, without counting electives. The real count is doubtless greater than 300, including academic and vocational subjects, and numerous languages.
Some children have to deal with their native language, the common local language, one or more official national languages, and a separate language of instruction before they get to the study of foreign languages. No country is entirely monolingual. India is the most extreme case, with 22 "scheduled" national languages using ten different alphabets, and more than 800 other languages in varying degrees of use. Even the United States has cities with more than 60 bilingual education programs, mostly for immigrants.
In addition to the subjects where it is possible to have an international curriculum standard, such as math and science, there are topics where each country has specific requirements of its own in addition to its own languages and literatures. These include health, agriculture, history, geography, civics, business, art, music, and more.
It is trivially easy to create OERs in the form of PDFs of existing printed textbooks, as at the California Free Digital Textbook Initiative, but that is not our plan. We mean to integrate our OERs with Sugar education software at every point. Some of them will consist entirely of software.
We also mean to think afresh about the nature of every subject taught in schools. In general, the plan of our schools goes back to those of Charlemagne in the ninth century, and our universities to those of France and Italy in the 12th century, before printed books. Thus lectures began as dictation sessions, so that each student could end the course with a complete copy of the textbook. Similarly, the divisions of our subjects have more to do with history than with the logical connections of ideas. We divide mathematics into
- Arithmetic--Egyptian, from prehistoric times, but using Indian numerals
- Geometry--Greek, 3rd century BC
- Algebra--Arabic, 9th century
- Analytic Geometry--French, 17th century
- Calculus--British and German, 17th century
- Statistics--French, German, and some others, 18th and 19th centuries
and ignore all of the other elementary kinds of mathematics that have come to the fore since then, such as logic, combinatorics, and symmetries, and a great deal more that is well within the reach of students.
We acquiesce in C. P. Snow's Two Cultures (artistic and technical) in spite of the fact that the greatest of the Renaissance artists were also the greatest of the Renaissance mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, or Michaelangelo. We reduce history to names and dates, so that students are not fired up over the ideas that our ancestor fought and died over. Or we pretend that we all agree on those ideas, when in fact the disagreements are at the core of all politics. We expect high school students to read a Shakespeare play (usually without seeing it acted) with no commentary on the relevant historical events or the literary theory he worked from.
Much of what is conventionally taught is factually incorrect, even in mathematics. See Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's rant about this, called Judging Books by their Covers. I don't mean the arithmetic problems, but the concepts of mathematics. Children ask the deepest questions in the foundations of mathematics, the sorts of thing I studied in graduate courses such as Incompleteness and Undecidability.
Is .99999999... equal to 1? Children are sharply divided on this question. So are mathematicians, it turns out. It can be 1, if you define arithmetic that way, but it doesn't have to be. You can't prove it is, you just have to assume a rule, an axiom or a definition, that says it is or it isn't, and settles all other such cases in the same way. In what is called Non-Standard Analysis, first taken seriously in the 1960s, .99999999... is infinitesimally less than 1. Don't be fooled by the name "Non-Standard". It's every bit as good as what you learned in school, just different, like non-Euclidean geometry. In some places, students are learning Non-Standard arithmetic and analysis in school. Using infinitesimals, as Newton and Leibniz did, makes calculus much easier than the laborious methods worked out to avoid them when they were mistakenly thought to be impossible. California has an OER on the subject.
We reduce science to memorized facts and formulas, and insist that children be able to get the correct answers to problems they do not understand. It should be no surprise that so many of our children grow up unable to tell science from pseudo-science, to the great peril of our politics, our health, and our world.
We fail to teach even the most elementary principles of truly civilized life. I recommend to all of you, indeed I insist that you cannot understand this discussion if you have not read Vivian Gussin Paley's book, You Can't Say You Can't Play.
Most of all, education has been subjected to the tyranny of the Right Answer, even though the most important questions don't have right answers.
- Who am I?
- Why should you believe me?
- Is this real?
- What is the most important thing that we should do next?
But in spite of all that, we will also produce fairly conventional OERs following existing curriculum standards, because some Ministries and Departments of Education, some school boards, some textbook-buying committees, believe that such things are necessary. Even when there are no textbooks being bought. We will just subject them to a better Quality Assurance process than print publishers use.
Feel free to pick on anything I wrote here. Feel free to suggest book projects. I might give you the URL of our testing server even before we go public. We have projects on math, discovery learning, economics for and about children, civics (including what to do when your government isn't working), and more. No Creationists, Global Warming deniers, or Market Fundamentalists need apply, nor circle squarers and perpetual motion machine inventors, even though I enjoy talking to such people to see how their minds work. Well, we can consider Teaching the Controversies. Everything else can certainly be discussed.
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