Awards for online learning tools

I was just perusing the great set of professional development resources our EdLab team created for the Teaching the Levees project, and I’m saddened that there are no awards for online learning resources. OK, so I’m not entirely surprised. (Would any existing award include this in anything but a minor way?)

Short of finding a place to nominate this set of resources and bring it to the attention of teachers everywhere, I’m thinking there is an opportunity here to create (or add to) a social networking site – where its members could nominate and vote on the best free educational resources. Fun! And its not like this model is unheard of…

With all the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, Webbys, and so on, how could there not be a place for those of us dedicating our lives to education to gather and congratulate ourselves about our greatest achievements? It would be a reason to dust off our finest dresses and tuxes.

Cheating is the pedagogy of the internet

I ran across this fun and informative lecture by Jon Ippolito discussing various tensions between cultural production (in general) and the current culture of intellectual property law – where he introduces his idea that “cheating is the pedagogy of the internet.” It’s the written version of a lecture he gave at Columbia University a few years, when I was lucky enough to hear him. His ideas and criticisms about pedagogy and the internet led to his project called The Pool.

Watch and be introduced to other goodies such as:

I’ve been trying to take some of the ideas he touches on here and push them forward a bit. The law stuff is great, but perhaps it’s not the most accessible inroad to thinking about academic honesty. In lieu of that, I’m interested in what kind of conceptualization of education we would need to make room for new technologies that accelerate cheating. (Maybe it would turn out to be an approach to education we’ve always needed?)

Sociable media development with MIT

MIT’s Sociable Media Group looks like an interesting bunch of people. I like the Webbed Footnotes project, where one can “annotate web pages with comments and can read and reply to the annotations left by others.”

I think the existence of groups just like this one suggest a course of action for EdLab’s software development activities: sharing our code. A downside may be that it takes more time to write code that is suitable for sharing, but a benefit would be that if a project gets some legs, we could benefit from collaboration from outside our small development group. There seems to be momentum in this direction, and it could be a great way to compete in the educational software market in the near future.