A public school student in
Uruguay learns how to use $100 laptop computer.
Uruguay is one of the first countries to begin
implementation of the One Laptop Per Child program.
(See related article.) |
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Washington -- A Web site that provides
free access to school curricula developed through collaboration
by a community of educators has won a prestigious international
award.
Curriki: The Global Education and Learning
Community recently was named a winner of the 2007 King Hamad
Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize, sharing the honor with the Claroline
Project, which is based in Belgium at the Université
Catholique. They were selected on the recommendation of
an international jury by the director-general of UNESCO,
Koïchiro Matsuura, who will present $25,000 to each
of the two laureates in a ceremony at UNESCO headquarters
on December 19.
Curriki, originally founded in 2004 by Sun
Microsystems as the Global Education & Learning Network,
is different from other e-learning sites in that it focuses
on complete curricula and not just a textbook or lesson
plans, and provides easy-to-use tools for creating curriculum
packets out of content available on the site.
“Curriki is a kind of Wikipedia of
education curriculum,” Executive Director Barbara
Kurshan told USINFO. Wikipedia is the multilingual online
encyclopedia that has been built collaboratively.
In 2006, Curriki became an independent nonprofit
organization under its current name in response to a need
expressed by many ministers of education around the world
for cost-effective, universally accessible curricula.
The 10,000 learning resources available
on Curriki are used regularly by 35,000 people, Kurshan
said. Current offerings range from lesson plans, assessments
and media clips to complete textbooks, all available at
no cost.
When community members view the resource
pages, they are able to comment, edit and group content
to create a lesson, course or curriculum.
When Kurshan visited Ethiopia recently,
the minister of education told her the biggest problem he
faces is not staffing the country’s 13 new universities
but meeting the need for educational materials. That is
precisely what Curriki and the open-source community can
do, Kurshan said.
“With the advent of the Internet,
we now have a unique opportunity to change the curricula
paradigm, and thereby to dramatically expand access to quality
learning while reducing the cost,” she said.
The Curriki Web site is available in French,
Spanish or English, but educators can post materials in
any language. The Web site soon will be available in Portuguese,
Russian and Hindi.
A WORLDWIDE DIGITAL PLATFORM
Curriki hopes to join forces with the $100
laptop project launched in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s Nicholas Negroponte. Curriki is involved
in discussions to ensure that as much of its material as
possible will be accessible on the laptops. (See related
article.)
“One of the largest problems is that
kids don’t have access to textbooks, they don’t
have access to libraries, they don’t have access to
information; and teachers don’t have materials to
teach in their classroom,” Kushan said. “Books
are too expensive and they don’t get distributed and
they don’t have a capacity for instructional design.”
Curriki provides a digital “platform and a community
for people worldwide to share,” she said.
The AARP, formerly the American Association
of Retired Persons, recently announced it would be partnering
with Curriki and will encourage its more than 1 million
retired educators to vet and screen submissions for accuracy
and appropriateness for educational application.
Curriki’s initial focus is on kindergarten
through grade 12 curricula in the areas of mathematics,
science, technology, reading and language arts, and languages.
Educators can use Curriki’s online
tools to share resources with others or to write a textbook
or build a curriculum. Starting early in 2008, Textbook
Wiki will enable groups of educators to take a curriculum
framework and use the tools to create and edit a book map,
or sections and pages of an instructional textbook. The
Currikulum Builder enables users to select individual lesson
plans, course syllabi, learning activities, scope and sequence
hierarchies and other educational elements found at www.curriki.org
to build a complete, fully-integrated curriculum.
Curriki intends to do research on its impact.
“We believe strongly in research,” Kurshan said.
“We have to show it works” to convince governments,
teachers and school districts to use it.
“The instructional design process
historically -- not just in the United States but worldwide
-- has been very top down,” she said. “Ministries
of education say, ‘Here’s the curriculum, here’s
the objectives, and here’s the pedagogy we want you
to teach it with.’ We don’t know what’s
going to happen when you collaboratively build curriculum.
To me that’s what’s exciting about Curriki.”
“We’re upsetting the cart in
a lot of ways,” Kurshan said.
Additional information about the educational
resources and the open source educational community is available
on the Curriki
Web site.
Jeffrey Thomas
USINFO Staff Writer
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