Open Culture

Open Culture is an online community that brings together hundreds of different high-quality cultural and educational media resources. It basically consolidates and organizes any kind of educational content out there and designates it to a course, e.g., Spanish, Physics, Literature, etc. They've been featured in the New York Times along with other online learning communities, including Busuu.com and Fluenz. Dan Colman started Open Culture in 2006. He's an extremely educated guy who, in his creation of Open Culture, has been following his passion by "bringing relevant, perspective-changing information to large audiences..." (All of us in APOC can understand from our Monday night guest speakers the importance of creating a community about something you're passionate about).

Last week I emailed Open Culture to inquire about a possible internship opportunity. Later that day, I received a direct email from Dan himself wanting to talk over the phone next week about a potential internship and some ideas that I may have in improving Open Culture's site. I couldn't be more excited to discuss with someone who has already established an online learning community! After perusing through Open Culture's site for some weeks now, I'm mostly disappointed in the inability for users to be able to make comments on the site's resources and material for a specific course, video, or podcast. Especially as a Spanish teacher, I want to be able to view immediately what resource works and doesn't work and why. And I want to know about it from a user's genuine perspective. Have a look yourselves: Open Culture. Please feel free to share with me (and Dan) about what you think!

Haiku

I was invited to attend a district meeting last week with a handful of teachers who teach high school courses online. At first I was excited to see teachers who have taken on the task of online learning as novices, but it disappointed me that more teachers haven't taken advantage of the new online network to help improve their teaching experience. The meeting mostly discussed how to use the district's newly acquired online learning management system, Haiku. Similar to Blackboard, Haiku is catered to the needs of a K-12 education. It's easy to use for both students and teachers in that information about a teacher's classes can be accessed from one platform. Teachers can embed lectures, Power Point presentations, videos with options for students to literally voice their comments (VoiceThread), photos, and post discussions and Google docs. They can embed the web, including lectures from AcademicEarth.org, videos from SchoolTube.com, and photos from flickr. Teachers have access to a plethora of options on Haiku, but how can it kick off if not enough teachers know how to use it? Haiku needs to be implemented consistently throughout the school's staff so that all students can go to one platform to access information for all their classes instead of having to flip-flop from individual teacher web sites to student portals. But how do you get them tuned in on the wave of online learning, especially tenure teachers who are too stuck in their ways? It seems as though the district has initiated the first step in transitioning teachers to online learning, but they've failed in executing the plan so that all teachers can become users. There needs to be more teachers who are willing to understand and implement Internet and technology to improve their curriculums. Teachers need to get on board, have no fear and learn to use evolving online learning systems and tools before it's too late.