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Plea to put educational tools online / Business Day / January 23, 3008
INTERNET entrepreneurs Mark Shuttleworth and Jimmy Wales launched a formal declaration yesterday urging governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials freely available on the internet, a move that could cause a revolution in education.
With more than 100000 “open” educational resources available on the internet now, there is a movement towards using the internet as a collaborative tool in teaching.
The Cape Town open education declaration forms part of the internet-based revolution in the way in which knowledge is developed and presented to those seeking it.
Allowing free internet access to educational materials would encourage and make easier collaboration between teachers, and this would enrich children’s learning experience, Mark Horner, a Shuttleworth Foundation project manager, said yesterday.
The declaration, a worldwide initiative born out of a meeting held in Cape Town last year, has been signed by hundreds of people, including luminaries such as Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning; Yehuda Elkana, rector of the Central European University; Thomas Alexander, former director for education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and musician Peter Gabriel.
It encourages teachers and schools to join the international trend towards using the internet to share, remix and translate information, making it more widely accessible and more flexible, and giving pupils access to high-quality, constantly improving course materials, just as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials.
“It’ll be extraordinary one day to have teachers in New Zealand collaborating with students in China to build documents that will be used by learners in South America,” Shuttleworth said at the declaration launch in Cape Town yesterday.
The public spiritedness of the declaration was to be praised, but the education publishers had a responsibility to protect the copyright of those who produced the materials, said Lindelwe Mabandla, chairman of the Publisher s’ Association of SA’s education executive. The association has about 160 members.
“Copyright is a very important thing. If (publishers) want to, we can’t stop them from participating, but we would discourage the Shuttleworth approach.
“Authors battle for months, sometimes years, to produce these materials and publishers need to protect them. They (the publishers) hold the copyright, but the authors need to be protected,” Mabandla said.
But Horner said author copyright would be protected. The signatories to the declaration were not trying to put publishers out of business, and there would always be “a space” for physical textbooks in classrooms.
But the internet provided a platform teachers could use to adapt educational materials to their particular needs and to share their problems and experiences with their peers, he said.
“Teachers need to share, and they do share now. It’s difficult to be innovative about the same curriculum each year … This can take sharing from a small, local scale and really scale it up easily and conveniently. It can make sharing faster and more effective,” he said.
The foundation said making educational materials available freely on the internet made them accessible to a vast number of people. It said this was exciting as it allowed people to openly comment and add to the resources. As a result, the materials could be made more adaptable and locally relevant.
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