Open Source Education
Be it primary, secondary, private or public,
instead of firing teachers and furloughs, perhaps they should cut some overhead in textbooks and technology by going open source?
Bloated overpriced education software and IT is an understatement and the collective knowledge of years of science, math, history, language arts, and otherwise belongs to no one person, especially not that of the big education publishers and technology providers. Flat World Knowledge has a good model of licensing using Creative Commons while still taking a profit on the teacher and resource materials.
If this means anything to you, there is a conference you should watch this Saturday to further inform you so that you may pass that knowledge along to your schools. http://tedxnyed.com/
Open source != free and may not be best (but I concur, too many shysters selling crap and too many naive folks buying crap)
$50,000 for a set of testing supplies for three schools.. houghton mifflin? vivendi universal? the bain capital or the blackstone group? smartboards, blackboard, novell, microsoft, webct, blackboard ~ rest my case. Speaking of publishing co’s 🙂 … Houghton is about to restructure it’s debt from $5 billion to $3 billion this month.. leaving Apollo, BlackRock, Guggenheim Partners, Fidelity and Avenue Capital & Paulson & Co. in charge of the board. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau would all simultaneously roll over in their graves if they knew what that their work helped build this little boston publishing company empire.. come to think of it.. maybe not Hawthorne, but definitely Ralph and Henry.