[education-wg] endorse S. 1714 and ask for help with FOSS English reading and speech freemium

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

This is quickly becoming a very technical discussion, so I'd kind of
like to step up one level.

I think we need some direction for our working group.

1. There are many problems in public education that an open education
approach could solve.

Open textbooks, open content platforms, sharing content platforms,
better reporting systems for schools, intelligent tutoring systems,
improved access to computers, and so on.  The unifying thread is that
we believe all of these tools should be made available via open
licenses.

2. OSFA/edu-wg should articulate the open solutions to these problems.

OSFA/edu-wg should, as simply as possible, describe the nature of
these problems, describe why the open solutions would be beneficial,
identify who is doing the best work in those spaces, identify what
work has been done, and identify what work is next in the critical
path.  I believe we're talking about position papers of no more than a
few thousand words, perhaps updated quarterly or semi-annually, geared
at folks who may have a very general understanding of the issues, but
not necessarily a deep understanding of the technical nature of the
issues.

The whole notion of "open education modules that contain content,
drill, and assessment, that can take a student from zero to mastery"
is a powerful, powerful idea, and everyone wants it.  But someone has
to dig deeply and critically into the current efforts to see what's
what.  Who's close?  Which standards are better?  Who's using IMS, and
who's using SCORM?  Who are the leaders in the space, and what are
they using?  How do the SCORM modules for Moodle look?  Are there any
open education modules to which we can point and say "this one is
perfect"?  If not, what needs to happen to get us to that point?

If there are organizations that are already doing a good job of that,
then we should find them and tell their story on Capitol Hill.  If
there are no organizations doing this work, then someone must take it
up -- and that may as well be us, if we think we can do it.

3. Where there are policy issues already on Capitol Hill that clearly
require an informed position about open source, we should articulate
that position and figure out how to advocate that position.

We've clearly got two bills that fall into that category.  How do we
work together to make sure that our position is heard?  Honestly, I'm
not sure.  I'll do my best to use opensource.com as an effective
vehicle for this, but how does OSFA work to have influence inside the
Beltway?  That's the key question for me.

--g

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 1:14 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree the OSFA should wholeheartedly support this legislation, too.
> I hope both this and S. 1714 pass.

So the question is,

>> Both of these issues are very real, and the second the Senate bill
>> emerges from committee, I'll be writing about it on
>> opensource.com/education (which I encourage all of you to read, and
>> perhaps write for).  It may be that this working group could do a lot
>> of good work by spreading the word and asking difficult questions, if
>> it comes to that.
>
> I have subscribed to your RSS feed: http://opensource.com/education/feed
>
>>> I have proposed an open assessment
>>> content standard at http://bit.ly/assessCont which I believe also
>>> warrants support, and I hope others will join me.
>>
>> This is definitely a key area of interest for ed.gov.  Ideally, what
>> they want to see is an open source version of a cognitive tutor
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_tutor) and/or other
>> intelligent tutoring systems
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system).  There's a
>> great deal of frustration with the folks at Carnegie Mellon, who did a
>> lot of the cognitive tutor research with grant money, and then turned
>> around and handed the research to Carnegie Learning, who are now
>> putting intellectual property protections around that work.
>
> I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon in the late '80s, and saw some
> of the corruption inherent in the intellectual property provisions
> imposed on faculty, students, and staff. Sadly, similar constraints
> were imposed on most universities by Dole's patent reforms in the
> '90s.
>
> If there is one bright spot it is the evidence that the specialized
> cognitive tutors are not much at all better than the general
> assessment systems adapted by commercial software vendors like Plato
> Learning and Renaissance Learning.  Those general question formats are
> the kind of assessment systems described in http://bit.ly/assessCont
> -- with the addition of:
>
> 1. A way for anyone, including anonymous users, to add assessment
> items (questions);
>
> 2. A way for others, including other anonymous people, in
> independently validate the accuracy of those questions;
>
> 3. A set of very general data structures ( http://bit.ly/assessNormal
> ) and methods (from del Soldato, T. and du Boulay, B. (1995)
> "Implementation of Motivational Tactics in Tutoring Systems," Journal
> of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 6(4): 337-78) allowing basic
> cognitive tutoring functions for general questions in any domain,
> including the ability to adapt the question selection to the learner's
> apparent ability level and previous knowledge without detailed
> assumptions about mental state modeling (only four statistics are
> scored: the familiar proportion correct along with the learner's
> confidence, independence, and effort levels); and
>
> 4. An expanded pronunciation question relying on acoustic spoken
> production instead of choice selection or other traditional forms of
> input.
>
>> It might be a bit of an uphill climb to replicate that work as open source, but
>> it's precisely that kind of project that ed.gov hopes to fund with
>> their $500m over 10 years.
>
> It would take about $60,000 for the non-speech aspects if someone
> would sub-contract it out to MediaWiki developers through the
> Wikimedia Foundation.  They've already done a lot of the groundwork.
> Perhaps we should join the very active #mediawiki channel on Freenode
> IRC some time next week to get more opinions on the question from
> experienced developers.
>
> The speech-related aspects would take about another $60,000 to
> independently replicate a 5,000 word database of beginning and
> intermediate English. I would be happy to explain how in writing
> and/or on teleconference to anyone who's interested.
>
> I wish someone would do this sooner with existing funds instead of
> waiting for Congress. I've been going it alone for more than 13 years
> on these same issues, just as a spare time hobby mostly. I hope
> whatever gets approved pays for actual courseware development and not
> as many deductible junkets as such funds have been squandered on in
> the past.
>
> Sincerely,
> James Salsman
>