eLearning

Using Creative Commons Resources for Teaching!

2011-11-26T22:38:00.000-08:00

A great post and video from our friends in Cape Town!

Cable

=============

The OpenContent UCT project at the University of Cape Town tries to encourage academics to create resources which can be shared and reused by their colleagues as well as other educators or self-learners. These resources, shared openly on the internet, can then be discovered, used and remixed by teachers around the world.

In order to make resources openly available we must adhere to issues of copyright. We encourage academics to source and use works licensed under Creative Commons whenever possible so that we can legally share the resulting materials more widely. Creative Commons provides an alternative legal framework for specifying conditions for reuse of creative materials. Creative Commons provides the vehicle for content creators to specify a licence for reuse of their content with “some rights reserved”, thus providing an alternative to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright.

This video attempts to bring awareness to some of the implications in sourcing materials online without considering the copyright on the material. If we can transform teachers practice so that they use Creative Commons materials exclusively, we can legally share much more of our teaching and learning content!

The Quiet Revolution in Open Learning

2011-05-17T09:19:00.001-07:00

Chronicle: The Quiet Revolution in Open Learning

"Then, the Education and Labor Departments decided to do something highly uncharacteristic of large federal bureaucracies: They began to talk. To one another. Constructively. What they devised could change higher education for huge numbers of students, many of whom will never attend a community college at all.

The concept is simple: Community colleges that compete for federal money to serve students online will be obliged to make those materials—videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, and more—available to everyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. The materials will become, to use the common term, open educational resources, or OER's."

Cable Green moving to Creative Commons

2011-05-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to announce I have accepted the position of “Director of Global Learning” @ Creative Commons (job details below). CC posted the news this morning.

While I am sad leaving the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (it has been the best job of my career!), I have an intense passion for open education resources and open policy… and this is an opportunity to work those issues on a global scale. I believe, as the marginal cost of sharing digital content approaches $0, we have a collective obligation to help learners everywhere access a quality, affordable education.

Creative Commons is about realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture, and driving a new era of development, growth, and productivity.

I think it will be a good fit ;)

Cable

New e-mail: cable@creativecommons.org

===================

JOB TITLE: Director of Global Learning

Supervisor: CEO, Cathy Casserly

PURPOSE OF JOB:

· Responsible for setting strategic direction and priorities to build regional momentum and a global movement to enable robust and vibrant practices and policies for free sharing of education and learning assets.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

· Develop relationships with constituent communities (such as high-profile institutions, organizations and governments) to openly license their content, and to promote Creative Commons.

· Identify and foresee trends in learning and education communities and determine how Creative Commons' licenses and technologies can influence creation, distribution and funding practices.

· Work with countries, states / provinces / territories, and higher education and K-12 systems / institutions to adopt policies that require publicly funded works to be openly licensed with Creative Commons licensing.

· Coordinate annual and long-term strategic planning processes with staff and Board committee and work with learning team staff to develop short and long-range work plans with clear objectives and timetables for achieving goals.

· Work with learning/education vendors and communities to integrate Creative Commons tools into their content creation or distribution processes.

· Take feedback from the education community and refine existing Creative Commons tool- set to better meet the needs of the community.

· Ensure timely reporting and communication between the learning team and full Creative Commons staff, board of directors and stakeholders so that all are properly informed of team activities.

· Serve as an effective and professional spokesperson for Creative Commons; represent the programs and point of view of the organization to agencies, organizations, governments and the general public.

· Work with CC affiliate network and others to scale impact globally.

Flat World Knowledge Puts Faculty in Control With "Make It Your Own" Textbook Platform

2011-04-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

Wow! Check out the video below...

Flat World Knowledge is breaking the textbook publishing rules yet again.

All together now… “We want FREE, online, customizable, open textbooks where STUDENTS get to choose price and format.”

Let the disruption begin,

Cable
Press release.

Creative Commons Announces Support Program for Department of Labor C3T Grantees

2011-04-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.

The free of charge technical assistance services will provide a competitive advantage for organizations seeking C3T grant funds and ensure that the open educational resources created with these federal funds are of the highest quality. The partnering organizations will provide the following areas of expertise: open licensing, learning and course design, professional development, and adoption and use. C3T applicants interested in these free services should include boilerplate language in their proposal. This suggested language, as well as a high-level description of services, can be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/taa-grant-program

Creative Commons is excited to participate in this groundbreaking effort and grateful to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its generous support in facilitating open learning.

*****

The following is updated copy from http://creativecommons.org/taa-grant-program

Updated April 13, 2011

Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI), CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).

Applicants interested in partnering with Creative Commons for this support should incorporate the following paragraph into their C3T proposal:

Aligned with Section III D of the SGA “Leveraged Expertise,” [enter applicant name] will partner with Creative Commons, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. These highly experienced organizations will provide comprehensive infrastructure support and capacity building along the following dimensions:

Creative Commons is the global leader in open content licensing and will provide technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of C3T funded content.
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative brings expertise in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation, evaluation and continuous improvement of open web-based learning environments.
CAST is a pioneer in the field of Universal Design for Learning and will offer grantees technical support and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project succeed with the widest range of learners possible.
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is one of the leading community college systems in the nation fully embracing open educational resources and open licensing, and will develop best practices in adoption and use, policies and professional development that work for participating institutions.

Services will be coordinated through Creative Commons, at zero budget impact to [enter applicant name].

Good luck with your applications! Creative Commons will contact all successful grantees after the first round winners are announced. More in-depth detail on services will be provided after the DOL announcement. Questions should be directed to TAA@creativecommons.org

------------------------

High-level description of services

The partnering organizations will provide C3T grantees a comprehensive set of support and technical assistance to ensure their success. Those services include reinforcing open licensing practices, increasing access to existing open educational resources (OER), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), accessibility and web-based design best practices, as well as professional development in critical policy and adoption practices. Every effort will be made not only to link grantees with existing resources, but also to encourage linkages among them to maximize benefits and build open licensing capacity in the community college space.

Open Licensing Support: Creative Commons will lend technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of content. Creative Commons will explain its licenses and tools (especially CC BY) to grantees, and provide both explanatory documentation and outreach to help institutions understand and effectively implement this requirement.

Course Design and Best Practices: OLI and CAST will provide expertise and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project are designed to succeed with the widest range of learners possible.

Web-Based Learning Environments: Plus Platform and Plus Co-Development: OLI and CAST will offer two additional options for deeper involvement in building web-based interactive environments. Institutions selected to participate in the “Plus Platform” option will have access to OLI's web-based learning platform to host their own open educational resources. A group of multiple subgroups will be selected for “Plus Co-development” support and engage in a full design process for OER resulting in 3-4 complete learning environments created and hosted on the UDL-enhanced OLI web-based learning platform.

Making the Case: Policy and Best Practices: SBCTC will utilize its system-wide experience in adoption, re-mix, re-use and distribution of OER to help grantee institutions develop best practices and policies that take full advantage of the C3T grants and process. SBCTC will help grantees understand the direct connections between OER adoption and performance-based funding. SBCTC will develop and provide professional development on adoption and re-use of C3T open content for faculty, deans, provosts, presidents and trustees.

Must Watch: Sal Khan: " Let's use video to reinvent education"

2011-03-11T16:09:00.000-08:00

This is a must watch (just released) TED video on the Khan Academy: “Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education”

Look at what Sal does with curriculum pathways and gaming theory (video).

And yes – it’s all free and openly licensed ;)

Good weekend,

Cable

Transforming Teaching & Learning: ARPA-ED: A “DARPA for Education”

2011-03-08T15:43:00.000-08:00

White House Blog

ARPA-ED: A “DARPA for Education”
To accelerate America’s efforts to out-innovate other nations and win the future, the President has proposed the creation of an Advanced Research Projects Agency – Education (ARPA-ED) in his FY 2012 budget. ARPA-ED will aggressively pursue technological breakthroughs that transform educational technology and empower teaching and learning the way that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has supported the development of the Internet, GPS, and robotics. The President’s FY2012 budget calls for $90M in funding for ARPA-ED in its first year.

ARPA-ED will complement and build upon innovative work being done across the public sector and the private sector, and could catalyze development of:

·         Digital tutors as effective as personal tutors. Researchers have long aspired to develop educational software that is as effective as a personal tutor, one of the “grand challenges” in the President’s innovation strategy. DARPA and the Navy have supported the development of a “digital tutor” to train new Navy recruits to become IT systems administrators. The early results from the DARPA project show the promise of additional investment in this area.

·         Courses that improve the more students use them. Recently, Internet companies have developed tools to: conduct low-cost, rapid experiments; use large amounts of consumer data to continually improve the usefulness of their services; and personalize their offerings to meet the needs of particular customers. Researchers are exploring whether similar techniques can be applied to education. For example, after developing a game designed to teach fractions, researchers could study how tens of thousands of students master different concepts, creating a “virtual learning laboratory” for continuous improvement.

·         Educational software as compelling as the best videogame. A well-designed game can keep players engaged for hours by becoming progressively more difficult without being impossible, and requiring complex collaborations in multi-player games. The insights from great game designers can and should be applied to develop rich and compelling learning environments for students.

Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education

2011-02-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

You’ll want to read these articles, the report and attend the webinar.

This is Clayton Christensen’s “Disruptive Innovation” theory applied to public higher education… and we should pay close attention to the theory, the analysis of how it applies to higher education, and the risks to our existing business models.

After reading this report, you might ask: “How can we reduce complexity and cost by fundamentally adjusting (or creating new) business models and fully leveraging technologies (and open educational resources) to produce and deliver educational products and services that are simple, affordable, and convenient?”

· Chronicle / Inside Higher Ed articles

· Report: “Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education”

o full report

o executive summary

o video of the report

· Webinar: Disrupting College

o Date: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 from 11:00am – Noon (pacific)

o Location: Elluminate

Archive is posted (2/16/11)

Hit Play – then Pause – then let it load (it’s slow). Then advance to time index: 20:25 ... for Michael Horn. I also liked the panel after him (WGU President, Ohio’s Chancellor, Christensen and others).

Digital Transformation Key to K-12 Success

2010-12-22T14:27:00.001-08:00

These K-12 policy recommendations look solid to me. Your thoughts?

Ed Week Article

Report

A report from the Digital Learning Council outlines 10 policies it says states and districts need to put in place and support to ensure high-quality digital learning.

1. Make all students eligible to be digital learners.

2. Give all students access to high-quality online courses and content.

3. Allow students to customize their learning via online content.

4. Allow students to advance at their own pace.

5. Ensure that all online content is high-quality.

6. Ensure that instruction and teachers are high-quality.

7. Allow students access to multiple providers of content.

8. Measure content and instruction by student learning.

9. Create funding and pay incentives for performance.

10. Build infrastructure to support digital learning.

And…. I, of course, would add:

11. Ensure public access to all publicly funded educational materials.

Cable

Online Education Grows by Almost a Million Students

2010-11-17T11:43:00.001-08:00

Online Education Grows by Almost a Million Students
Eighth Annual Sloan Survey of Online Education Shows Economy Still Driving Growth

The 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that enrollment rose by almost one million students from a year earlier. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide finds approximately 5.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2009, the most recent term for which figures are available.

Other report findings include:

Almost two-thirds of for-profit institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long term strategy.
The 21%growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 2% growth in the overall higher education student population.
Nearly one-half of institutions report that the economic downturn has increased demand for face-to-face courses and programs.
Three-quarters of institutions report that the economic downturn has increased demand for online courses and programs.

Please click here to download the report.

Chronicle Article

Khan Academy on the Gates Notes

2010-11-09T14:24:00.001-08:00

100th Post on this Blog: Top 100 Tools for Learning (2010)

2010-11-07T18:17:00.000-08:00

Seems appropriate that the 100th post on this blog is:

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010 List

Changing Education Paradigms (RSA Animate)

2010-11-06T14:46:00.001-07:00

If you don't know about RSA Animate - check it out -- better than TED talks!

Questions I’m no Longer Asking (Siemens)

2010-11-05T21:30:00.001-07:00

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2010/11/02/questions-im-no-longer-asking/

1. Is online learning more or less effective than learning in a classroom? Who cares. That question is irrelevant. Society answered the need to use technology through its broad adoption of the web/internet/online medium....

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

2010-10-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

Course-Management Software Deal Marks a First for SunGard

2010-09-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

Interesting move for the Sakai platform: Chronicle article...

"SunGard and Blackboard have largely kept out of each other's turf, with Blackboard dominating the market for course-management systems and SunGard focusing on administrative software for student records and other tasks.

Now SunGard is crossing that line. For the first time, the administrative software company will directly sell a course-management system to colleges and universities.

SunGard is making the play through a deal with rSmart, a for-profit company that packages, supports, and hosts freely available software that has been produced through a collaborative "open source" process. Under the partnership, SunGard will sell subscriptions to rSmart's version of Sakai, an open-source course-management system developed by universities.

The arrangement puts SunGard's muscle behind that project at a time when a growing number of colleges are considering open-source systems. SunGard counts 1,600 customers worldwide, including 80 percent of all American research universities. Its partner, rSmart, typically works with colleges that are switching to open-source systems from commercial products like Blackboard."

====================================

Related Article: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Blackboard-Makes-Nice-With/22399/

“This week's news follows a somewhat similar tactic announced recently by Datatel Inc., one of SunGard's business-software competitors. Datatel formed a partnership with Moodlerooms Inc., which sells services for Moodle, an open-source course-management system. The idea is to offer colleges the opportunity to combine their administrative and learning software.”

Webinar: 9/21/10: Rethinking Higher Education and Creating Colleges for the 21st Century

2010-09-03T21:44:00.001-07:00

WCET's Next Big Audacious Conversation:

Rethinking Higher Education and Creating Colleges for the 21st Century

Please join WCET’s executive director, Ellen Wagner and Dr. Peter Smith as they discuss the future of higher learning and the relevance of technology in education in narrowing the gaps in education and economics. The 60-minute webcast will be on September 21st and is free. Space is limited so register today!

In his book Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent, a New Ecology of Learning (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010) Dr. Smith makes the case the current model for higher education in the United States will continue to perpetuate education gaps unless we start to immediately rethink teaching and learning. He points to numerous statistics citing the urgency to innovate so we can educate students who fall through the cracks of traditional education, better serve all learners, and improve student success:

Within ten years, less than 20 percent of all ninth graders in the United States will have earned an associate's degree.

We are the only developed country in which younger workers are less well educated than older workers.

The number of new jobs is growing, with predicted skilled worker shortages of 21 million in 2020.

85 percent of all new jobs require at least some postsecondary education.

The gap between educated people to fill skilled positions will be 50% in 2014.

Join us for this provocative conversation on September 21 at Noon PDT/3:00 PM EDT. Learn more and register for the free webcast. Registration will close on September 17!

Bill Gates Predicts Technology Will Make 'Place-Based' Colleges Less Important in 5 Years

2010-08-10T10:32:00.000-07:00

Chronicle article

"Five years from now on the Web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university," he argued at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based."

"After all, what are we trying to do? We're trying to take education that today the tuition is, say, $50,000 a year so over four years—a $200,000 education—that is increasingly hard to get because there's less money for it because it's not there, and we're trying to provide it to every kid who wants it," Mr. Gates said. "And only technology can bring that down, not just to $20,000 but to $2,000. So yes, place-based activity in that college thing will be five times less important than it is today."

Announcing the "WikiEducator Gives Back" Online workshop

2010-06-19T18:39:00.001-07:00

Enroll now for the "WIkiEducator Gives Back" free online workshop - 21 July - 4 August 2010:

http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Workshops/eL4C41/Register

This wiki workshop is presented online over 10 working days and requires approximately 15 - 20 minutes per day. The course is presented asynchronously -- so you can work at times which fit your own schedule. Join educators around the world who are returning to the core values of sharing knowledge freely.

About the Learning4Content workshops

Learning4Content is the world largest attempt to build wiki skills for Education and is administered by the OER Foundation, an independent non-profit organisation.

We have achieved our targets in providing free wiki skills training to 1000 educators this past year. In celebrating this gift of knowledge, we will host the "WikiEducator Gives Back" workshop were all facilitators donate their time freely to help their wiki Neighbours.

L4C facilitators will be giving back in two ways:

Donating their time freely to assist with facilitating this record breaking workshop attempt - (Designated as L4C Facilitators on the workshop page)
Sharing their knowledge with future L4C facilitators to join our international team of WikiEducator online facilitators so we can scale capability development for OER the wiki way. (Designated as L4C Co-Facilitators on the workshop page)

The OER Foundation will institute this as an annual WikiEducator event which aims to:

Break the previous year's record for hosting the largest free online wiki workshop measured by the number of registered participants
Provide an opportunity for educators around the world to meet and interact with some of WikiEducators' top editors and seasoned wiki facilitators measured by their approximate edit count in WikiEducator

We aim to have a little fun. We will award community Kudos achievements for:

The workshop participant who achieves the highest number of edits during the workshop
The Facilitor / or Co-Facilitator who achieves the highest number of support edits during the workshop.

Please share this gift of knowledge and spread the word. We invite you to register here:

http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Workshops/eL4C41/Register

WE look forward to meeting you in the wiki!

Cheers
Wayne

--
Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D.
Director,
International Centre for Open Education,
Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.
Board of Directors, OER Foundation.
Founder and Community Council Member, Wikieducator, www.wikieducator.org
User Page: http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg
Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg

Must watch videos...(RSA)

2010-06-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

Y'all know about TED: http://www.ted.com

My bud Sue Gallaway @ Centralia College turned me onto RSA last week:

All three of these videos are a MUST watch:

· The Secret Powers of Time

· The Empathic Civilisation

· Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

If you work in public education, you’ll find your work in all three videos.

UC Considers Online Classes, or Even Degrees ... OH MY!

2010-05-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

Update on 5/12/11: Reversing Course, U. of California to Borrow Millions for Online Classes ------------------------------------

Read this Chronicle Article Good grief … I had to check the date on this Chronicle article to see if it was 1999. An Open Blog Post to the University of California System and the Chronicle: (a) Welcome to the 21st Century. Many of us have been providing quality, flexible online, hybrid (blended) and web-enhanced learning spaces for more than a decade.

Frank Mayadas said it well: "It's like doing experiments to see if the car is really better than the horse in 1925, when everyone else is out there driving cars.

(b) Enough with the arrogance. The word "elite" was used in the article 9 times.

Proposal for virtual courses challenges beliefs about what an elite university is—and isn't

Online education is booming, but not at elite universities—at least not when it comes to courses for credit.

"Somebody is going to figure out how to deliver online education for credit and for degrees in the quality sector—i.e., in the elite sector," said Christopher Edley Jr., dean at Berkeley's law school and the plan's most prominent advocate. "I think it ought to be us—not MIT, not Columbia, not Caltech, certainly not Stanford."

Mr. Edley believes demand for degrees would be "basically unlimited." In a wide-ranging speech at Berkeley last month, Mr. Edley, who is also a top adviser to Mr. Yudof, described how thousands of new students would bring new money to the system and support the hiring of faculty members. In the long term, he said, online degrees could accomplish something bigger: the democratization of access to elite education.

"In a way it's kind of radical—it's kind of destabilizing the mechanisms by which we produce the elite in our society," he told a packed room of staff and faculty members. "If suddenly you're letting a lot of people get access to elite credentials, it's going to be interesting."

Over all, the "quality sector" in higher education has failed "to take its responsibility seriously to expand itself to meet the national need," Mr. Greenstein said, dismissing elites' online offerings as "eye candy."

In what he called a "first-mover problem," elite public universities have resisted following a trend associated with community colleges and for-profit institutions.

"A move online could be seen as an admission that you're moving downscale," he said. "Nobody wants to move downscale in this viciously competitive environment."

And this was my favorite:

Suzanne Guerlac, a professor of French at Berkeley, found Mr. Edley's talk "infuriating." Offering full online degrees would undermine the quality of undergraduate instruction, she said, by reducing the opportunity for students to learn directly from research faculty members. "It's access to what?" asked Ms. Guerlac. "It's not access to UC, and that's got to be made clear."

Existing research into the strength of online programs cannot simply be applied to UC, she added, objecting to an oft-cited 2009 U.S. Education Department analysis that reported that "on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."

"I'm sorry: I've read that report. It's statistically fuzzy, and there's only something like four courses from a research university," she said. "I don't think that's relevant for us."

======================================

UC can go right on thinking it is (a) "elite" and (b) that online learning will "move them downscale" and (c) that national studies from the US Department of Education don't apply to them. The rest of us will continue to innovate, provide quality learning spaces to meet the needs of 21st century learners ... and we will be happy to assist our colleagues at UC when they are ready.

College, Inc.

2010-05-04T10:25:00.001-07:00

On PBS Frontline … starting tonight: (preview)

Overview

Higher education is a $400 billion industry fueled by taxpayer money. One of the fastest-growing--and most controversial--sectors of the industry is the for-profit colleges and universities. Unlike traditional colleges that raise money from wealthy alumni and other donors, many for-profit schools sell shares to investors on Wall Street. But what are students getting out of the deal? Critics say a worthless degree and a mountain of debt. Proponents insist they're innovators, widening access to education. FRONTLINE follows the money to uncover how for-profit universities are transforming the way we think about college in America.

Chronicle: Distance Education's Rate of Growth Doubles at Community College

2010-04-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

Article:

"Distance education is growing quickly at community colleges, according to the results of a study published by the Instructional Technology Council. For the 2008-9 academic year, enrollment in distance learning at community colleges grew 22 percent over the 2007-8 academic year, up from a growth rate of 11 percent in the previous year."

NPR Story: The Digital Classroom

2010-03-30T11:04:00.001-07:00

This aired yesterday: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124695289

The sound of chalk on a blackboard is something you rarely hear on many campuses these days. That's because more and more professors use technology to distribute course materials, issue grades and enhance communication with students.

DOE National Technology Plan: "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered By Technology"

2010-03-10T22:02:00.001-08:00

On Friday, the US Department of Education released the new National Education Technology Plan, entitled “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered By Technology”.

· Abstract

· Full Report

David Nagel reports in T.H.E. Journal that the new plan advocates radical reforms in schools:

If there were any doubts about the Obama administration's intentions toward education technology, the United States Department of Education settled them Friday with the release of the first public draft of the National Education Technology Plan (NETP). The 114-page document reveals an intent not only to infuse technology throughout the curriculum (and beyond), but to implement some major--sometimes radical--changes to education itself.

The plan, titled "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," sets forth, in part, a manifesto for change, questioning many of the basic structures of American education, enumerating the principles of change that are the foundation for the plan, and setting goals and recommendations for achieving this change.