ClassConnect makes sharing resources and collaborating easy

By some estimates there are approximately 4 million teachers in the US. On any given night, weekend, holiday, teachers are thinking about what to do in their classrooms. Some are developing worksheets, others are designing projects, maybe they are searching around for something previously made. The problem is that millions of hours a week are wasted recreating these materials. Educators are professionals and they are also human beings. I believe we have better things to do with our work and personal time than start from scratch every day and with every new teacher.

Now many of us share resources already, whether it is with your colleagues at work or online but how easy is that and what happens over time? This process doesn't scale, it only helps some. There are repositories of lesson plans all over the web. But how do you separate the good from the...um not so good?

ClassConnect is driven by a passion to solve this problem. The developer behind this has put every resource he has into making this awesome, and it is awesome. My colleague Audrey at Hack Education has already done a great job of giving an overview and showing how ClassConnect is the Git Hub for Education (a code sharing platform for programmers). What I want to focus on is how easy it is to get started right away. Did I mention it's free!

We were each taught how to create lessons in our credential programs. We take pride in creating them and making them great. However, each time we create a new lesson we are running an experiment and the results of that experiment (good or not so good) cannot be refined and reapplied for an entire year until you use that lesson/project again. What makes matters worse, is we are independently running that experiment thousands of times each year! The boon of the web is to allow researchers to share their findings and to crowd source experiments to solve problems more quickly. There is no reason why we can't do the same, in fact we must.

ClassConnect makes it easy for you to find and vote up the best stuff so it rises to the top. You can also search by topic, subject, standard, file type, and even type of lesson.

However, this platform is only as good as the resources we share. For every colleague you add, you get additional storage for your files. But get this, for every file you share publicly, it doesn't count against your quota! A great way to store your files in the cloud and an even better incentive to share. I shared this resource on Google+ and within a day I had more storage than my Dropbox. Plus I was now able to share it with you and have you benefit as well! You can even add a class online so you can share the entire curriculum or resources (I used it with my robotics team to maintain shared resources).

You can add anything: a link to your favorite YouTube video, a file, Google Doc, or an entire folder.  Click the share button to the right of the file and check the box that says Public, you just saved another educator valuable time!

Don't forget to add tags and a description to make sure we can easily find it.

Now you have access to some of the best projects and assignments I have found or made over time. Some of it was mentioned on this blog, but having it all in one place and searchable makes it much more convenient. Did I mention that you can claim a url? http://www.classconnect.com/brokenairplane/shared, head on over and claim yours to easily share. I'll add more as time goes on them, but the important thing is to share the best so over time we can refine and remix it for our own needs and continue to iterate.

By doing this, over time we can develop a large community developed collection of best resources. Imagine back to when you started teaching, wouldn't it have been wonderful to be able to use others resources (perhaps you were lucky enough to have a great mentor) and focus on your pedagogy and finding your feet? Then as time goes on you make the curriculum your own, refine and share like others shared with you. I would imagine we could crowdsource a lot of our resources and have great lessons, projects, puzzles/problems, etc. ClassConnect is inspiring a movement called United We Teach, I've joined the movement to help my fellow educators and our students, will you?

Stay connected with BrokenAirplane.

A Defense of Wikipedia - Crowdsoucring the World's Knowledge

Wikipedia is one of the largest Crowdsourced projects on the planet. With 3 million plus articles in English and millions more in other languages, it is the work of many people working tirelessly to share information and knowledge. It is also one of the most visible crowdsourced projects out there as it is usually the top result in your searches.

Wikipedia has received criticism since its inception almost ten year ago. With the idea that anyone could write and edit articles, the trustworthiness (truthiness as Stephen Colbert would say) was called into question. Many teachers will not accept research sourced from Wikipedia because of their concern that it would be incorrect. I hope this articles encourages the wider adoption of the Wiki and convinces people of its usefulness while still being realistic about its shortcomings.

In Defense of Collaborative Editing
The amount of articles that are added every year to Wikipedia are astounding. To have a small team of encyclopedia writers start from scratch would be an impossible task, yet hundreds of thousands of articles are added each year to Wikipedia. How is this possible?

According to the Internet World Stats page almost 2 billion people are online and while only a fraction of those are writing and editing for Wikipedia it divides the labor enough to make it possible for anyone to contribute.

Wikipedia has received criticism from media sources, comedians, teachers, and almost everyone else because there is the perception that anyone can just log in and within 10 seconds make themselves the President of the USA or make 2+2=5.

The best way to convince you otherwise is to encourage you to go online and propose a new article or edit an existing one.

Are you back? Are your hopes of being cited as the inventor of the light bulb or married to a supermodel dashed? If like me, you have submitted an article or changes for review, you will soon either have your change rejected or be told to modify it to meet the Wiki's high standards for submission. There are people in the community who contribute primarily by reviewing changes submitted for approval and they do an excellent job of catching errors.

Reliability of Wikipedia Articles
While there have been scandals and pranks, they are eventually corrected. In fact, when Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica were compared side by side, the number of errors found in each were similar. In fact there are some errors n the EB that have been corrected by Wikipedia.

Rest assured, if you are going to Wikipedia to learn or research a topic that is pretty much set in stone you have nothing to worry about. If you are trying to learn a skill or concept then you should be good to go. However, if you are looking at something related to Pop Culture you are much more likely to stumble upon a point of contention. If there are errors it may be because there is dispute about certain historical events but even the controversy is often discussed in the article.

Out of concern that Wikipedia's articles were not trustworthy for student consumption, alternative movements like CK-12 textbooks and Free High School Science Texts emerged. These are peer reviewed textbooks free for anyone to teach and/or learn from. Additionally, CK-12 has the unique feature of being able to customize your textbooks for your class so some topics are there while others are not.

Diversity always drives evolution and Wikipedia and the learning community as a whole can only benefit from alternative sources of learning. I hope more teachers will compare their trusted textbook or resource with Wikipedia to see how accurate and high quality of a resource it is.

Freedom of Information
No one group or person should control information. This was the premise behind a free press because  history shows that dictators and rulers alike have known that to control information is to control the culture and society. In the incredible work by Myles Horton and Paulo Freire We Make The Road by Walking, Freire remarks that in Brazil, the revolutionaries would come but the oppressive education and bias textbooks/lessons would remain.

We cannot let movements like Wikipedia die out. They are our defense against tyranny and as Thomas Jefferson remarked, "freedom of the press is not meant to protect the right to publish, it is to protect the right of the citizen to know."

Appropriately Using Wikipedia in the Classroom
I know I have referenced Sugata Mitra's Ted talk before, but the results are just too powerful to ignore. Students will learn if they are given the tools and time to do so. Rather than directly instruct the students all the time (or ever), why not teach them how to use the information on the web and how to discern what is useful and reliable. Many teachers use the Internet to research for lessons, why not shift that responsibility of learning to the students?

Wikipedia is a resource, an incredibly valuable resource with flaws. Yet, it is the perfect place for students to get their feet wet. When they leave the classroom walls in a few years (or even that evening) they are going to plug back into the Web to learn and they will most likely click on Wikipedia. Knowing how to navigate the web wisely is one of the best skills we can pass on to our students.

Closing Thoughts

1.  Support the movement. The project is always in need of contributions both financial and of time.
• Wikipedia is Free to everyone (i.e. Free as in Speech and as in Pizza) which embodies the World Wide Web's founding principles of connecting people and sharing data and information.
2. Wikipedia is useful as a jumping off point. Sometimes the articles are confusing or too technical but the link references at the bottom or something mentioned in the body of the article often are extremely useful to guide one in the next steps for research.
3. The controversy is important as people need to be critical of their media. I am extremely grateful to sites like Snopes, that encourage critical thinking and independently scour the web for errors and myths. Don't believe everything that you read or only read one source no matter where it is coming from.

Favorite experiences with Wikipedia? Disagree? Leave a comment!

Crowdsourcing - Be a Part of Something BIG!

Those who coined the term "Information Age" were certainly not kidding. We produce information and data at such a steep rate that it is near impossible to track and store it all. The major search engines like Google and Microsoft's Bing are scrambling to build new Data Storage Facilities just to keep up. According to the thought provoking video Did You Know, last year we produced 4 exabytes of information (that's 4 with 19 zeros after it). 

Now while this data includes YouTube videos and SPAM emails, it also includes new galaxies discovered in the heavens, potential new medications for AIDS, maybe radio signals from other planets. Yet, there are not enough professionals out there to look through all of the data and find what is useful and what it irrelevant.

Humans built computers so they could communicate, calculate, and simply do things faster. Now computers need humans to look intelligently at the data and interpret it. In 2006 Jeff Howe wrote an article in Wired Magazine called "The Rise of Crowdsourcing". A combination of crowd and outsourcing, it details a necessary new route for our species to work with data. According to Clay Shirky we have lots of free time (as a species), if useful projects are able to harness that free time we can collectively accomplish some great things.

To make this point clear, this is not an individual task but something that simply could not have been done easily or at all without the collective power of all of us. You and your students are capable of being a part of these projects. Some need active participation but some only need your computer's spare cycles (e.g. when you are not working on it). 

Here is a video from the Solve for X conference where one of the founders of Foldit (more info below) demonstrates how powerful crowdsourcing can be.

Some examples of crowdsourcing effectively serving a need are:

• Ushahidi - Referred to in the Cognitive Surplus Video, allowed reports of violence in Kenya to be collected easily. This software was later Open Sources and used in the Haiti earthquake, and to know when road conditions are bad in Washington D.C.
• Netflix - After you watch a video on Netflix, the site will recommend others to you. A couple of years ago, Netflix offered a one million dollar prize to someone who could improve the service. Groups stepped up and competed back and forth to best each other's algorithim.
• Open Source - The philosophy behind open source is summed up in Linus' Law, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". This refers to Linus Torvalds who started the development of the Linux Operating System. Rather than have a few programmers working on software/hardware, the code is freely published so others can improve and modify as needed. This has proven to be extremely successful with the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Browser, Open Office, and many more listed on my software recommendations page.

So what projects are available for you and your students to participate in? The number grows every day and spans all disciplines:

• Guttenberg - An amazing site with lots of free literature available for download. But how did all of that literature get there? Through their Distributed Proofreaders program, you can sign up and review books that have been scanned or transcribed for typos or grammatical errors thus making more resources available to the public. LibriVox provides an opportunity to record books to audio.
• Galaxy Zoo - This is fun for all ages. Telescopes are becoming more and more powerful and scientists cannot keep up with all of the new pictures coming in. After taking a brief training, you are provided the opportunity to classify what type of celestial object you are seeing a picture of (e.g. galaxy, star). The most famous instance of this was when a Dutch School teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered such a unique object that scientists are still studying its nature. This object might never have emerged as relevant had it not been crowdsourced.
• FoldIt - When was the last time you could say that playing a video game could win you a Noble Prize for science? Innovative thinkers at the University of Washington developed a game that made it fun to discover new proteins and molecule structures. This has led to greater understanding of protein folding and structure and can reduce the amount of research and development needed to create new cures for HIV/AIDS, Cancer, and Alzheimer's.
• BOINC - Perhaps you want to contribute but just don't have the time, then BOINC is for you. Created at UC Berkeley, it allows scientists to run complex data analysis by using the combined computing power of humanity. 
• For example, creating models of what could happen if our global average temperature increased by 1 degree is too difficult for any one computer, and super computers are expensive and at a premium for time. However, when you download the BOINC software to your computer, it will run the calculations when you are not using your computer (like a screensaver) and then send the completed data back to the scientists.
• There are projects related to global climate change, the search for extra terrestrial life, prime number calculation and more. You don't have to do anything except download the software and let it do all the work. Note: this will not affect your work or privacy.
• Brainrack - Companies post challenges and how much of a reward they are willing to offer. Then students submit their ideas and they are voted on by the community. The winner gets the prize money and an awesome resume/college application blurb.
• Phylo - Support research in comparative genomics by playing this game simple enough for elementary students.

Maybe you are saying to yourself, "well this is amazing stuff but what has crowdsourcing done for me lately?" If that is you, then you might want to consider looking at crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter, where anyone can propose a project and ask the world to fund it through micropayments. 


Projects that individuals or groups were previously unable to do because of funding, are now happening. That is the fundamental lesson from crowdsourcing. Some might say the computer is taking away our humanity, but the combined power of our species connected by the Internet is making altruistic acts, discoveries, and creative expression more possible than ever before. When we choose to give our free time or resources to a worthy cause, we can make a huge difference.