Petition to philanthropists: liberate educational content
If you agree with this appeal, please sign this petition of support!
This is a public appeal to philanthropists who are supporting the education of children. The author (Dr. Larry Sanger) is co-founder of Wikipedia and editor-in-chief of the new Citizendium. Originally posted March 22, rewritten March 24. This petition was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog, and elsewhere.
Dear Philanthropist,We (the undersigned) have a simple, deeply powerful suggestion: “liberate” the best educational content. Buy or commission truly excellent content, aimed at school children (K-12). Then post it online for free. Let children reap the rewards of your generosity forever. Just think:
- Free, top-grade textbooks about everything, free to everyone online
- Free, in-depth, expert-designed educational software
- Free, high-quality educational videos
Just imagine the possibilities of good this would do for the whole world.
Isn’t this already happening? No. Most educational content you find for free online lacks either detail or high quality. But we want the best for our children: for that, we still must and do pay. There is not much truly excellent free educational content online.
Why not? We do not know. Perhaps because those who create and support educational content generally view the Internet either as a dangerous competitor or as an adolescent free-for-all. Perhaps. But also think of the Internet as an amazingly efficient and cheap distribution mechanism. You (philanthropists) can single-handedly use it to provide curricula to the entire world, for free. You choose the type of content, the subject, the grade level, the authors, everything. You need not ask anyone’s permission. If you spend the money, content will appear online — and millions of children will benefit. It is up to you!
Let us put this in perspective. Back in 1960, if a billionaire wanted to give the best possible textbook to every child in the world, that would have been too costly even for the richest billionaire. But no longer. Even those with small fortunes can provide a textbook (etc.) to everyone with Internet access–hundreds of millions of children. Philanthropists, you could do this.
You have been spending millions of dollars annually to improve education, but we believe you have largely ignored this key opportunity. Sometimes the simplest ways are the best. If you want to answer, “But the problems with U.S. schools do not have to do with our textbooks or content,” we might agree with you. Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else. We do not offer an answer to that.
But this opportunity is “low-hanging fruit.” High-quality, free content undeniably and directly benefits the world, the entire world, through the magic of the Internet. Educational content gives knowledge to children. Why not pay for it? What is stopping you? After all, it is not only collective “Web 2.0″ efforts that can liberate content. You have a fantastic mechanism for distributing free curricula to virtually every school child in the U.S., and the whole world can benefit, to boot. Why not use it?
Regards and deep thanks in advance,
P.S. Follow-ups to the petition will be posted both on this blog and the mailing list SharedKnowing. Sign up to that mailing list if you want to be sure to receive info about how this petition fares.
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mcGraw Hill sells a lot of e-books online.http://www.mheducation.com/home/index.shtml
LWW also began an online sales of books now too: http://www.lww.com/index.html
Comment by t — March 23, 2008 @ 3:42 pm
bad spelling / english above. don’t know how to edit the last post
Comment by t — March 23, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
I’m sure it is possible to buy all sorts of digital textbooks. I’m suggesting that philanthropists buy (digital) copies of the best textbooks (and other educational material) for everyone, basically. Suppose a philanthropist gave a million dollars to a team of people to create a sixth-grade science textbook, as good as or better than any available on the market, to be released to the world for free. That’s what I mean.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 24, 2008 @ 7:40 am
thank you, larry, for bringing this up. I will add just a few points:
* Such initiatives integrate well with projectes like the One laptop Per Child initiative (http://laptop.org/; here, governments play the role Larry proposed for the philanthropists) dedicated to foster computer literacy among children in poor countries, so as to provide them with options for a sustainable future
* In order to provide free education on a global scale, cultural diversity has to be taken into account, which will certainly complicate the picture. This primarily concerns language but also more subtle issues like biased perspectives on historic events (for an interesting approach to tackle these, see http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2078903,00.html ).
* Free online education already takes place at an acedemic level (e.g. http://www.world-lecture-project.org/ ) but projects of this type are not well integrated with each other, nor with other similar projects targeting other stages of education (e.g. children or pensioneers)
* There is an ongoing petition on the subject (The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/ )
Comment by Daniel Mietchen — March 24, 2008 @ 1:47 pm
There is also quite a bit of “abandonware” educational content, either out of print commercial curricula or material created by academics but never marketed. Some of this material is of very high quality. As an English teacher I’m particularly irked by the unavailability of the Pacesetter English curriculum formerly marketed by ETS. It was a very forward-looking 12th grade English course developed in the 90’s that came out right as their AP curriculum began a new spike in popularity, taking away the need for it in their product line.
Comment by Tom Hoffman — March 24, 2008 @ 4:25 pm
I got that, but I thought a sentence implied that publishers were not selling content digitally. I guess I misread it. Or maybe I needed to click the link. I also, just wanted to spread the word for some great online resources for sale.
Comment by t — March 24, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
Daniel — interesting thoughts. On your second point: curricula are tied not just to specific languages, but to individual countries and (in the U.S.) individual states, school districts, schools, and teachers. No one should expect any philanthropist to spend his money trying to meet all these different specific needs; that’s just unrealistic. The hope is that, eventually, support from all around the world will materialize for the very large diversity of content needed. It shouldn’t all come from, e.g., American philanthropists. Also, I’m familiar with the Cape Town declaration; pleasant sentiments and good PR for the open education movement, but that movement has existed for a long time now.
Tom H — precisely. It’s a travesty that such content is sitting idle, making no one any money and benefiting no one, when it really could benefit a lot of people. I’m not sure entirely what to do about this, but I feel that something can be done.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 24, 2008 @ 5:51 pm
this is a great idea. if this doesn’t help american schools, it should still help the students of the poorer countries who cannot afford textbooks & papers & pencils but are still ambitious & want to learn & have the advantage of that MIT’s $100 laptop program.
Comment by Chunbum Park — March 24, 2008 @ 6:50 pm
I’ve just completely rewritten this blog post and transformed it into a petition drive. Please sign!
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 24, 2008 @ 8:28 pm
Cultural perspectives aren’t much of a problem when dealing with hard science. Books like Stryer’s Biochemistry and Vender’s Physiology.
This effort reminds me of Blender’s history. It was a closed source proprietary software but when the company owning it went bankrupt, the free software community bought the source and released it under the GNU Public License.
Comment by Yuval Langer — March 25, 2008 @ 6:04 am
I strongly agree in principle with this but it is premature and thus misplaced. Teaching must first routinely provide a truly living wage, a much more important place to focus.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — March 25, 2008 @ 10:58 am
To illustrate my post above, consider the following.
Larry said, “Suppose a philanthropist gave a million dollars to a team of people to create a sixth-grade science textbook, as good as or better than any available on the market, to be released to the world for free.”
One unintended outcome of this would be that teachers who are able to supplement their typically inadequate teacher’s salary by writing and publishing textbooks will by and large have this venue removed. It becomes a very poor choice of one’s time to attempt to write a good textbook when the market has been subverted by a philanthroposit making one “as good as or better than any available on the market” available for free. An unintended consequence of that would be diminished innovation in writing superior textbooks.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — March 25, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
I don’t know, but I imagine that very, very few teachers make any significant money from textbooks. More importantly, teachers continue to be paid this way, just not by publishers — they are paid, instead, by philanthropists.
The whole idea of “the market being subverted” is fascinating, but needs elaboration. I am inclined to reject the very possibility of markets being “subverted” by philanthropy. Philanthropists are part of a free market.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 25, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
[...] Larry Sanger, jeden z założycieli Wikipedii, apeluje o finansowanie darmowych podręczników w licencji open-source. [...]
Pingback by Historia i Media | Larry Sanger apeluje o darmowe podręczniki — March 26, 2008 @ 12:14 am
I would look into opening up educational software, too. And like someone above mentioned, there is some abandonware or older stuff out there that would be nice if it were opened up.
For example, the Understanding by Design website charges teachers to share and access lessons. There was a very effective video-based math curriculum called the Jasper Woodbury series. See some other research-based educational software and resources here:
http://edtechdev.blogspot.com/2008/02/learning-sciences-open-education_14.html
The Concord Consortium and TERC and other organizations like those have done great work developing K-12 curriculum and software. But those organizations and most funding goes purely to math & science. You see little funding or free software or textbooks for history, geography, writing, etc.
Comment by Doug Holton — March 26, 2008 @ 1:50 am
You know, I included educational software under my second bullet point above…without realizing that, er, that’s software, not content. (So I agree there.) Well, I’ve been using enough educational software lately that it just seems to me mainly content, not software. The software part is not the part users are interested in; we want it mainly as a way to deliver content.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 26, 2008 @ 11:03 am
[...] week Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger issued a statement urging philanthropists to support the creation of free online textbooks. Wired Campus reports: [...]
Pingback by Wikipedia Co-Founder Supports Free Textbooks at Degree Space — March 27, 2008 @ 8:38 pm
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Pingback by Ecclesial Dreamer… » Food for thought… — April 2, 2008 @ 9:36 pm
I really would like to have some help with getting a proposal funded for teaching about maps to my first graders. We have to start somewhere and I for one know that kids love learning, but if teachers do not have the tools necessary, they have a very difficult job! I have written a proposal for books to teach about maps and space. If you want to read it, I have added the link below:
http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=161418&verify=-392735715&zone=0
Comment by Kelly — April 7, 2008 @ 6:42 am
I am assuming that posting this information on a secure sight to avoid any manipulation of the material that users will be learning from is a given!?
Kids Learning Tools
Comment by amerlino — May 28, 2008 @ 5:01 am
[...] http://blog.citizendium.org/2008/03/24/a-plea-to-liberate-educational-content/ [...]
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