When I was a teacher in the 80’s, I taught a special program in “Critical Thinking Skills” and, as you might imagine, there was no formal curriculum available, at least not one that my small school district would buy. I either made up my curriculum from whole cloth, or I had to find materials in a never-ending scavenger hunt for resources. I pieced together whatever I could from my courses as a recent college graduate. I took materials from my courses in Science Education, in Law and Philosophy, even in Silk Screening. I wandered around bookstores, copying down ideas that I found in genres from graphic novels to historical fiction. I cobbled together a curriculum in media literacy by cutting out newspaper articles and magazine photos. One of my best units was an index card version of popular television game shows, always accentuating the higher order thinking skills, of course.
I’ve often wondered what life would have been like if ‘The Internet’ had existed when I was teaching. For one thing, I doubt I would have felt quite as isolated. I was the only teacher in a small, rural district, teaching this kind of program, so clearly, I had to work hard to find my mentors.
And obviously I would have had a lot more resources at my fingertips. Data from a variety of sources, including focus groups that we have conducted at Curriki, point out that teachers regularly use materials they find on the Internet to supplement their curriculum materials. There is no doubt that teachers are able to find plenty of stuff. The hard part, of course, is winnowing it down to find materials that are relevant, high-quality, from reputable sources and easy to integrate with core materials (not to mention, legal to use). High-quality content repositories (yes, like Curriki) are excellent resources for saving teachers time and pointing them to the right stuff. But Curriki is trying to do more than that, and that’s the part that has me wondering.
The Internet is no longer a place to just find materials. It’s the place where educators can come to exchange ideas, share their good work, collaborate with colleagues and generally benefit from each other’s experiences. I’d like to think that when I was a teacher, I might have derived a lot of pride and joy from posting my Mock Trials curriculum after I created it. I would have loved to pass on my ideas to other educators and to read their comments or see how they tweaked and changed my curriculum to fit their students’ needs. I would have liked the Internet for the resources it provided, but I think I would have loved it for the opportunities for collaboration.
However, the full spectrum of collaborative use of open source resources – the ability to contribute your own unique materials, share with other teachers, work on a piece of someone else’s content, to add to it, improve it, mix and remix it, customize it and then republish it as something a little different, is still not how most teachers use the Internet. From my observations of use patterns on Curriki, loads of teachers come to the site to find and download resources, a respectable number do contribute resources to the site, but only a small percentage take the time to edit and republish resources, to modify, customize, tweak or add to them to make them their own and share them back to the community.
So why do the percentages work this way? Why will teachers use the site for downloading but not take advantage of the ability to mix it up?
One possibility of course is time – it takes more time to add to, combine or otherwise customize a piece of content than to just print it out and use it. In this line of thinking, it’s possible that the content is getting customized, but that teachers are doing that by marking up hard copy, or maybe just making changes on the fly, using the printed piece as a guidepost. Another possibility is that teachers live in, as one recent focus group teacher put it, a “culture of polite”. In this analysis, teachers are supportive of each other and don’t want to change something that someone else submitted. A third possibility is that lesson planning might not be that much fun. Whereas plenty of people find the time to use an Internet photo-sharing site, lesson plan-sharing sites sound a bit less sexy and after a long hard day in the classroom, might look like work, not fun.
These are some of the reasons I’ve thought of that may keep educators from contributing their resources, or sharing them with others, or building on other peoples’ work. Of course, there are many reasons TO engage in this way. One reason teachers might want to share content or improve a piece of existing content is to help out other (perhaps less experienced) educators. Another is to share high-quality materials with people and in places that might not have access – this could be sharing globally or with under-resourced school districts within the US. Of course, beyond using the materials themselves and helping others, teachers who post content or mix and remix content enjoy a lot of recognition – they become mentors to other teachers and their work is noticed and used by many which is a nice side benefit, even for those among us (like me) who are shy about that kind of thing.
So again, with all these good reasons to share, contribute, customize, repost, etc – why don’t more people do it? How do we move people from searching and finding to contributing? How do we get someone who has downloaded a resource and used it in a new way to share that new innovation back to the site? How do we move people who contribute to mixing and customizing? How do we encourage teachers to take advantage of all the different ways that an educator can now interact online?
What do you think?
