Open Source Education?
I was talking to a friend about the Farm yesterday, and she asked me how I was planning to structure the curriculum - more workshops and seminars towards the beginning, and then send the students off to work on the production, or just let them fly free from the start? I realized as we talked that I don’t have a definite “This is how I want it to work” plan. I have ideas about ways that it could work, but I don’t want to be the one that sets all the rules. As much as participating in the program will be a collaboration between the staff and students, I want the creation of the program to be a collaboration too.
Ideally, I’d love to be able to hire the staff advisors well before we accept our first students - 6 months, maybe even a year ahead of time - so that we can spend that time working together to come up with the structure and details of how the program will work. Even when we have that figured out, though, I envision the way it works changing slightly every semester. We’ll adapt what we’re doing based on input from current and past students, as well as the working style of the current guest director, and what the current students are looking to get out of the experience.
I started thinking about all of this after reading this article - specifically the part about how open-source ideals can be applied to education. Derrick Kwa had some interesting comments on it, and I agree with a lot of them - open-source is about the users controlling the development, and that’s really where I want to go with the Farm. Our whole purpose in existing is to serve the students - so why not let them be involved in creating and changing the program?
What I’d really love to do, at the same time that we’re collaborating with the staff to come up with a curriculum, is talk to current undergrad students who might be interested in coming to the Farm. Find out what they’re looking for in an internship, and what we could do to make the program even more useful to them. Maybe set up a Student Advisory Committee of some sort - or maybe just go to their schools and talk to them. I really think that they know better than anyone else what they need to fill out their educations - so why not ask them?
Rob said,
June 18, 2007 at 2:55 pm
For collaborative curriculum planning, you should take a look at Curriki.org. Right now, you can share and collaboratively edit documents. There should be some group and project management tools coming later this year, which sounds very much like what you need.
Sarah said,
June 18, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Rob,
I just took a quick look at Curriki.org - it looks like there’s some really interesting resources there. I think planning the Drama Farm curriculum will be less about specific lesson plans and more about an overall structure - maybe calling it a “curriculum” isn’t as accurate as something like a “roadmap” to guide us through the semester. Either way, though, I look forward to seeing the new features - project management and collaboration tools with an educational focus would be a great resource to have. Thanks for the tip!