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

[James Salsman]

Greg, I agree with all your main points. SCORM is little more than a
packaging format like .zip or .csv without any semantic assessment
specification. It's only redeeming quality is that it references Dublin Core
metadata.  IMS QTI, on the other hand, specifies assessments, but it's a
bloated xml spec which isn't very human read-writable, so it could benefit
from Dublin Core's adoption of RDF and microformats.

If we want to establish a volunteer commons of assessments, I recommend
re-casting the basics, some subset, of QTI in RDF or an xml-based
microformat.

Do you have a preference for whether editing RDF or an xml-style microformat
is easier for beginners?

On Jan 30, 2010 11:16 AM, "Greg DeKoenigsberg" <greg.dekoenigsberg at gmail.com>
wrote:

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 shou...
So the question is,

>> Both of these issues are very real, and the second the Senate bill >>
emerges from committee, I'...
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