Hi All! I want to thank Hank for his excellent explaination of how things work in school systems regarding curriculum materials. In particular, the following comments hit the nail on the head:
To create a newcurriculum for a single subject at the local level typically involves a team of 5 teachers meeting half-days for several weeks during the summer (if not much more, depending on the degree of sea-change).
But if they are presented with the materials ready to go, and a few web-based workshops can teach them how to use the materials, then the chance of adoption shoots up.
I think what we need is a sort of contentforge.net for teachers. It would be a place where teachers could share open content lesson plans and other educational materials. It should be aimed at teachers and developed in consultation with them, inorder to be a tool that will meet their needs. As someone who has participated in several of the newcurriculum teams that Hank speaks of, it has always struck me how inefficient the system is. Teachers in each local area are forced to recreate the same materials over and over. A lot of sharing does happen at conferences and other meetings set up for this purpose, but it is not nearly as well organized as it could be. The two biggest drawbacks have been: 1. How to distribute the materials (paper copies are the way it is still normally done, making it both difficult and expensive to get the stuff in the hands of the teachers). 2. Copyright restrictions. I have seen many fine teachers willingly share their materials, but I have also been at confernces where much of the best stuff is only for sale. I think that and open content environment could be created that would encourage more teachers to share. We would need to find a site to host such a contentforge, and I believe Frank Willison at Oreilly is looking into this. Maybe CNRI could host it as well, particularly a site aimed at Python educational materials. jeff elkner