Enabling customization
I was cruising through TechMeme this afternoon and caught Tim O’Reilly’s post on Obama making history by appointing the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. He nicely lays out the case why Aneesh Chopra is a good choice (as a kind of rebuttal to TechCrunch), but the part that really caught my attention was Chopra’s work in using technology as an enabler in education during his most recent stint as Secretary for Technology for the state of Virginia. Very briefly, O’Reilly lists three,
the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook integrating iTunes U with Virginia’s state education assessment framework the Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod Touch applications for middle-school math teaching
Intrigued by Flexbook, I took a quick look at the demo and it offers some nice customization options, and because, it’s on the web, there’s none of the lag time that happens with traditional textbook publication cycles. Customization and modularity are key when it comes to web-based learning tools and I think that these needs partly explain why there’s been synergy between open source and education (e.g., Sakai, Connexions, MIT Open Courseware).
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Aneesh Chopra, Tim O’Reilly, MIT, Sakai, Connexions