{"id":654,"date":"2012-05-21T15:55:13","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T19:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/oer2012\/?p=654"},"modified":"2012-05-21T15:59:14","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T19:59:14","slug":"hack-day-pitches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/oer2012\/2012\/05\/21\/hack-day-pitches\/","title":{"rendered":"Hack Day Pitches"},"content":{"rendered":"

On April 10th to 12th, the Berkman Center, in collaboration with the\u00a0William and Flora Hewlett Foundation<\/span>, co-hosted a conference on Open Educational Resources\u00a0(OER<\/span>) in Cambridge, MA. \u00a0After two days of discussion, debate, and design-oriented activities, this conference culminated in a\u00a0Hack Day\u00a0on Friday, April 13th<\/sup> that attracted designers, developers, and educational innovators from around the world.\u00a0 This post shares the ideas and descriptions of minimum viable prototypes that emerged from the Hack Day.<\/p>\n

The Hack Day was co-organized by the Berkman Center and Andrew Magliozzi<\/a>, SJ Klein, and Erhardt Graeff, who also organize a Boston-based educational technology practitioner meetup. The goal of The Hack Day was to give a chance for local technologists and educational technology enthusiasts to engage with likeminded OER conference attendees and push some of the conference\u2019s ideas toward concrete products. A similar event was organized by the group in December to try to use a design thinking approach to solving problems in education. Erhardt Graeff acted as facilitator, on both occasions.<\/p>\n

The Hack Day started with a rapid brainstorming session splitting participants randomly into groups to come up with project ideas, and then folding the groups together in order to winnow down the field of ideas. Participants then pitched their favorite ideas to each other, which led to the formation of interest-based teams to work on the projects themselves. The majority of the afternoon was given to developing the ideas, mocking up interface designs, or coding minimum viable products, but strict timelines dominated the process start to finish. At 3:30pm, each team pitched the fruit of their labor to a panel of judges that included a local high school student and teacher. The judges, impressed by all the projects, failed to select a single winner and awarded both FreePencils<\/em> and the OER Annual Awards Ceremony<\/em> prizes of free attendance at this year\u2019s Open Education Conference<\/a> (courtesy of participant David Wiley).<\/p>\n

We\u2019d like to thank all the participants who traveled from near and far to help pool their expertise and energy and make the Hack Day a success. For participants\u2019 reflections on hacking education, see blog posts from SJ Klein<\/a> of OLPC\/the Wikimedia Foundation and Rebecca Nesson<\/a> of PRX.<\/p>\n

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1.<\/strong>\u00a0 Draft Design for<\/strong> Octocat<\/strong><\/p>\n

We utilized the collective\/collaborative authoring engine within GitHub<\/a> (a web-based hosting service for software development projects with networking functionality, e.g. feeds, followers, etc.) to see if it could be used as an academic authoring tool for OER material.<\/p>\n

We downloaded OER material from Open University\u2019s LabSpace<\/a> and placed it inside the Github, creating a project space.\u00a0 We then set about collaboratively editing a section. \u00a0We then accepted these changes collectively and subsequently placed the reversed open educational resources material back into LabSpace.<\/p>\n

Rather than develop a single authoring tool, we envision something that would provide the same benefit\u2019s as Github\u2019s authoring functionality, which can be collective, community-driven, and collaborative. \u00a0For instance, imagine you are an English teacher or the head of the English department at a school. \u00a0You could ask your first-year teachers to collectively find and edit OER within a space like GitHub. \u00a0You could also work with fellow teachers from other schools, etc.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>2. FreePencils<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many states (48, including D.C. and two U.S. Territories) have adopted the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics. This is the first time in the history of U.S. public education that we will see common learning standards across so many states. Part of this effort is the development of a shared assessment platform that seeks to provide an open source adaptive assessment system that will support formative and summative assessment for classroom, school, district, and state-level use.<\/p>\n

Building upon the success of the World Food Programme’s\u00a0FreeRice.com<\/span>\u00a0site, we proposed to build a tool that would mimic the style of FreeRice’s educational and fundraising process: answer questions correctly and earn tokens that have real-world value for a local or national good cause. We called our effort “FreePencils”, and would use the pencil as a token similar to FreeRice’s 10 grains of rice per question. The tool would sit between the end user and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia\u2019s (SBAC) adaptive testing engine<\/a>, and use released items shared through that system. Schools would be able to localize this tool so that students earn pencils as they answer questions correctly. These pencils would have an equivalent real world value based on the school’s local fundraising efforts. For example, a school could get local sponsorships from families, local business, and others. These funds would be distributed to the school or any identified good cause based on correct answers to actual released items from the SBAC assessment engine. This would provide practice to students and at the same time, provide a method of fundraising.<\/p>\n

In addition, the tool could be set up at a national level with national sponsorships. Funds from this effort could be directed to a national cause, educational or otherwise. To watch the pitch, see: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rrPpXjn5B_w&feature=relmfu<\/a><\/p>\n

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3<\/strong>.\u00a0 Capsule: A Digital Portfolio<\/strong><\/p>\n

Curation 1.0 is an unportfolio project in which high school students engage in an excavation of the artifacts of their learning in search of the story\/stories these artifacts express when they are installed in one large visual representation (mural, installation, collage). \u00a0Students ungarage, unbin, unbox, unfile, unfolder and uncloud as much as they can and spread it out into a graphic timeline, engaging in a variety of questions and prompts along the way that help them to make connections between artifacts and to look for threads that express continuity between early childhood and high school. \u00a0We help these artifacts mean something to one another–to talk to one another; and we make ourselves present to that voice.<\/p>\n

Curation 2.0 is a web-based application proposed as a way to scale Curation 1.0. \u00a0This capture, host and curate tool will help students and educators in and beyond early childhood scaffold the Curation process going forward (instead of backwards as above) so that these students do not have to engage in an excavation–an invaluable operation, but a rescue one we wouldn\u2019t have to carry out if we started doing this from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Curation 3.0 is an innovation on 2.0 that helps us use, integrate and recycle digitized multimedia artifacts and web media. This more dynamic digital storytelling tool will function as an application capable of hosting material, or as an add on for existing storage spaces like Dropbox or iCloud that would allow us to visualize the contents of these spaces attractively, datestamped along with web content referenced in those resources attractively integrated, as a multimedia timeline\/gallery of content with p2p access and participatory learning functionality. \u00a0In either case, the collection becomes a documentary of your learning through the work you produced. \u00a0But also use it to create specific documentaries through and with selections from your work or to discover documentaries that were there all along and could help you find direction. \u00a0Use this as a presentation tool that incorporates web content and peer student work into your own multimedia presentations. \u00a0A fun phrase that came out of the OER day was \u201cZeega on top of Dropbox.\u201d To watch the pitch, see: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=aXyfUL2BmsU&list=UUuLGmD72gJDBwmLw06X58SA&index=6&feature=plpp_video<\/a><\/p>\n

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4.<\/strong>\u00a0 OER WikiProject<\/strong><\/p>\n

We created a wiki page to start the planning for an effort to improve articles relating to\u00a0open educational resources: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Education\/Open_education_project<\/a><\/p>\n

The idea is to help various people interested and knowledgeable in OER and related areas to learn to improve Wikipedia content, while simultaneously engaging existing Wikipedians to help in that process. The project is founded in a deep respect for, and knowledge of, Wikipedia’s values and policies; it will be conducted in a transparent way; participants will be trained in distinguishing between advocacy and neutral, verifiable information, and leaving any advocacy efforts out of their work on Wikipedia content.<\/p>\n

Between now and the end of June, we will be in an exploratory, planning phase. We are going to start off with an exploration of existing Wikipedia content that is possibly related.\u00a0 We are hoping to put something together that will engage a number of people in learning how to edit Wikipedia in ways that honor its policies and vision. To watch the pitch, see: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XK3b5eE4QJQ&list=UUuLGmD72gJDBwmLw06X58SA&index=5&feature=plpp_video<\/a><\/p>\n

5. OER Annual Awards <\/strong><\/p>\n

For an extended description, see: http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/2012\/04\/30\/oer-awards-celebration-of-free-knowledge\/<\/a><\/p>\n

This ceremony will celebrate the world\u2019s best educational materials \u2014 where \u2018best\u2019 includes openness, accessibility, and flexibility. Right now it seems the focus will be on materials that are:<\/p>\n

Open\u00a0and accessible<\/em><\/p>\n