The picture of innovation in education is messy. Cost reduction is a big thread. But the approaches vary enormously. And we see radical innovation that aims to work outside the current educational establishment as well as more incremental innovation. Effecting change in education is hard and many of these initiatives still look very early stage. But they are an exciting glimpse into the future, the “straws blowing in the winds of change” that you typically see in Act 2 of the Creative Destruction 7 Act Play.

Photo: Steven Parker from Flickr

California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP)

This initiative is driven by one consideration: cost. As we learned in our first post, the cost of textbooks are rising just when schools are under the most pressure to cut costs.

“What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?”

Answer: a loud bang!

This is how COSTP explain it on their site:

The California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) is a collaborative, public/private undertaking. It has been created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12 textbooks in California.

California currently spends more than $400M annually — and rising — for K-12 textbooks. With K-12 enrollments projected to rise in the coming years, revenue demands for textbooks and other curriculum materials in California will increase proportionately.

COSTP will employ the advantages of open sourced content and innovative licensing tools to significantly reduce California’s K-12 textbook costs — eventually turning K-12 curriculum and textbook construction from a cost into a revenue generator for the State of California.”

This looks pretty raw today. I checked out the COST World History Project (my subject at college) and when I dived into a subject I knew, it was far too basic.

But all innovation looks raw when it first appears. Mass collaboration projects follow non-linear dynamics. They can go from “pathetically useless” to “de facto standard” while most of us are not looking.

Publishers Are Thinking About “Education Beyond The Book”

The Association Of Educational Publishers has an upcoming conference in June in DC on Content in Context, Education Beyond The Book.

The existing publishers are working hard to figure out how to create sustainable value in a world of open access and digital economics.

Here is how they are reaching out to teachers in their “Teacher Video Challenge”:

This is a good example of crowdsourcing innovation. Publishers are basically asking their customers – the teachers – to give them ideas for what they should publish in future.

That is great. But the web has a way of enabling the community to interact directly, byepassing the current institutions.

This is where next innovation is interesting:

Teacher Created Materials

Teacher Created Materials looks like it could be an end run around traditional publishers. It is radical in the same way that COSTP is radical.

Their tag line says it all:

“Created by Teachers for Teachers and Students”

This is not new. They have been around since 1977. The site looks like a traditional online catalog But they have a disruptive mission that aligns well with the current cost squeeze. If teachers can make some extra income creating work that is used by other teachers, we can all cheer.

But we could see this moving to a more distributed model, something like eBay or Etsy for K-12 textbooks. Materials could be created by teachers, peer review rated by teachers, delivered digitally and printed in the school on demand using something like the Espresso Book Machine.

This more radical version may look something like Curriki.

Curriki

Curriki = curricula + wiki. Curriki is a non-profit:

community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world.

Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our name is a play on the combination of ‘curriculum’ and ‘wiki’ which is the technology we’re using to make education universally accessible.

But as we can see from a quick traffic snapshot on Compete, this does not have a lot of momentum:

Curriki was incubated by Sun Microsystems. One assumes that it is no longer a top priority at Oracle. But anybody can run with this, it is open source.

Semantic Wave Still Out There, Not Hitting Education Yet

Surfers know waves that look good way out there on the horizon that peter out before hitting the zone where you can jump on.

The Semantic wave that was about to hit education looks a bit like this.

One of the leading thinkers in this area is Jason Ohler who published an article in Educause in July 2008 where he describes:

“three areas of impact: knowledge construction, personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational administration.”

His description of “knowledge construction” would be familiar to semantic web folks working in any other market.

His vision of “personal learning networks – PLN” takes this a step further and describes the intersection of semantic and social networks. The key is that:

“PLNs are built primarily around subjects, not services”

He describes personal learning agents that:

“identify relevant information from any source that is semantically accessible and provide an information synthesis tailored to our personal learning objective”.

It is his third factor that is the most radically interesting. He calls this Personal Education Administration:

“Most of us use a multi-source approach to resource gathering. If we want to develop a wardrobe, feed ourselves, or stock a tool shop or music library, we go to several providers to do so, including local stores, online vendors, garage sales, eBay, and even friends. Currently, it is very difficult to use this multi-source approach in obtaining an education and particularly in earning a degree. Educational institutions tend to be stand-alone entities that don’t facilitate working with each other.”

Jason describes this as a threat to the current institutions:

“The Semantic Web has the potential to challenge this kind of institution-centeredness in the same way that distance learning technologies challenged place-centric education.”

We will leave Jason with the last word. Jason asks, Is The Semantic Web inevitable and his answer echoes what most of us who work around the semantic work believe to be true:

“Is the Semantic Web inevitable? Absolutely. I don’t make this assertion based on advanced technological knowledge, which I most assuredly do not possess. Rather I make it because I have come to respect what Michael Dertouzos called “the ancient human in each of us” as a primary force in the evolution of our tools.3 As ancient human beings, we want to connect, share ideas, maintain relationships, understand the world around us, and sustain ourselves physically and emotionally regardless of—and sometimes despite—technological advancement. Those in the 1980s who told me e-mail would never catch on ignored the ancient human, as did those who told me just a few years ago that the world would come to see blogging as superfluous.

Remember, 15 years ago the web was science fiction to most. Today it is taken for granted. Eventually, we will take the Semantic Web for granted as well. Our thirst to make sense of the information available to us and to broaden and deepen our relationships with the world and each other will most certainly urge us on through whatever complex and challenging development period awaits us. The ancient human will see to it.”

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !