Open Content Movement

Education Week recently published an article about the move towards open content use, which means utilizing free teaching tools/databases on the internet to aid or guide instruction. To me, this makes sense. Are we not moving toward a time when almost all knowledge is free and accessible? If you log on to Itunes, you can download free lectures from dozens of universities. M.I.T. offers free courses online to high school students. Wikipedia is the largest and most successful--perhaps--experiment in the history or human knowledge.

Traditional textbook teaching is anachronistic (or should be). Textbooks used to be a main information source, a pillar of knowledge...when we didn't have so many digital resources available. Textbooks do provide teachers with guidance and unit plans, but they don't necessarily foster the creativity, curiosity, and other desirable traits in our students. We should be moving to a point where we spend just as much time training students to filter, explore, and investigate the countless information resources out there. Should we continue plodding through core content standards without leaving ample time to use open content? Heck no!