What will these services mean for school districts and teachers? And, more important questions linger, such as, “Should teachers and school districts be trying to create their own content when so much is available online already? If not, who curates OER content?”
Distribution trumps creation? Framing the OER question.
“With the technology, content and expertise that Amazon has, we believed we could provide value,” he said.
A Walmart tactic? E.g. leverage size and scale to muscle out rivals, including non-profits like Merlot etc.?
But the other, more troubling development that is implied by the issues surrounding the very avoidable errors with the Inspire platform is that the platform focuses on the least interesting element of open educational resources: distribution. It would have been great to see a high-profile effort that simplified and supported authorship and remixing. The current conversations about OER remain mired in the very narrow vision of textbook replacement. The transformational potential of OER will come when we embrace the potential of both teacher and learner as creator. Open licensing makes this potential easier to realize, as it removes many of the barriers enshrined within traditional publishing and licensing schemes.
distribution vs. authoring/remix as critical problem in OER
As the Google leaders indicated, however, a major challenge is content curation in the OER world.
the "discovery problem" . . .emerging as the common sense business criticism of OER
“Their business model is probably more about serving ancillary products around the free resources. If you’re interested in a resource about science and there are practical elements to the lesson, you might be offered a bundle of the things you need in order to deliver that lesson: batteries, wires, lightbulbs, and that sort of thing.”
vampire capitalism
For Esposito, the answer to that question is likely to involve data: “Inspire is a stalking horse to build a database of material on the K-12 professional community.”
The payoff is in the data.
Since the mid 1960s and the explosion of electronics, telephony, and the computer chip, corporate profit over net worth has been declining. This doesn’t mean that corporations have stopped making money. Profits in many sectors are still going up. But the most apparently successful companies are also sitting on more cash — real and borrowed — than ever before. Corporations have been great at extracting money from all corners of the world, but they don’t really have great ways of spending or investing it. The cash does nothing but collect.
Amazon Education working on new platform that offers free learning resources
Here is a link to a two part article on Peru and its role in the deforestation in the Amazon through mining. http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/9/Peru-mining.html
possible with modern technology,
This is terrifying but also fascinating. Imagine the data for MFA programs on the content/style whatever on the last page readers thumbed before stopping the turning!
Also, couldn't this system be easily gamed: creating bots to "peruse" texts at the right pace repeatedly?
You touch a button on your phone and something happens in the world.
This is profound, but it's also obvious. Obvious as in it makes this basic aspect of technology readily apparent to the end user.
Actually, when we press most buttons, lots of things happen in the world. One click on Amazon begins a complex process of labor and energy consumption, but this is conveniently hidden from the end user.