Some Pre-Session Thoughts On Creating And Using Open Content
2 min read
In preparing for my Educon session, I've spent a fair amount of time reviewing the existing open content repositories, as well as sites dedicated to sharing individual lessons. Leaving the licensing terms of some lesson sharing sites aside for the moment, this review showed that if you are looking for either a complete openly licensed text or an individual lesson, you will have plenty - really, an almost overwhelming amount - of options.
What's largely missing, though, are any comparable sites supporting the work of teachers looking to create and share coherent sets of resources and activities that can be used to support learning. In working on the details of the Ancient Civilizations project, I found myself creating exactly that: a set of resources that hold together as a unit, and inform the daily work within the class.
To put it another way, what we're aiming to create in this project is a toolkit that is much bigger than an individual lesson, and fits alongside a traditional text. Maybe it replaces the traditional text, maybe it doesn't, but really, that's not the point. Open content can chart a different path that is rooted in the daily experience of learners.
This is likely obvious to a lot of people, but I had never thought about it in this way prior to really digging into building this Ancient Civilizations toolkit. The middle ground - between a text and larger than an individual lesson - could be a sweet spot to help more people understand and use openly licensed resources.
