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Ask HN: Do other industries pool resources like the software industry?

• japhyr 12y ago
  The education profession could benefit greatly from a stronger implementation of the open source model. The software industry has been using vim and emacs for 40 years now. But the education profession has no dedicated lesson planning tool in widespread use - the most commonly used planning tool is Word. This situation is as if the software industry had everyone writing programs in notepad (the original notepad, not notepad++). People have attempted to make open source lesson planning tools, but the ones I've seen have been low quality. People have attempted to make proprietary tools, but teachers don't have the funds to pay for proprietary planning tools. I think the education world is ripe for a revolution in open infrastructure. The ed-tech world is seeing a flurry of startup efforts, but many will die out because their goal is to make money. We need high-quality open tools and resources in the profession. I wrote a longer post about this a while back: https://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do-programmers-have-better-tools-than-educators/ https://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do-programmers...
  • rahimnathwani 12y ago
    Teachers don't need open source lesson planning tools. It is the lesson plans themselves which should be shared and improved. Sure, not all teachers are the same, and not every class of students is the same. However, there is no reason why 1000 teachers need 1000 different lesson plans. Your proposal for teachers sounds to me like you're saying that all web developers need text editors so they can build their own web frameworks. No, they can pick a framework or two invented by DHH or whoever, and then use those in their projects.
    • joncalhoun 12y ago
      I completely agree that more shared lesson plans would be valuable, but as someone who has little experience teaching - isn't this generally what textbooks are meant to do? I realize teachers don't just go over what is in the textbook verbatim, but I would imagine they are intended to set a pretty reasonable guideline for what material should be taught and in what order, so I guess my real question is, what are lesson plans plans to you, and how to they work alongside textbooks?
      • rahimnathwani 12y ago
        > what are lesson plans plans to you, and how to they work alongside textbooks? Target audience: Textbook: student / Lesson plan: teacher Type of activity it guides: Textbook: Solitary / Lesson plan: Group Scope: Textbook: Subject / Lesson plan: Single lesson Objective: Textbook: Comprehensive set of explanations for a broad subject / Lesson plan: Tactics for a teacher to facilitate learning I'm not a teacher, and it has been many years since I was at school, but I see little commonality between a textbook and a lesson plan.
        • joncalhoun 12y ago
          I'm not asking this to be snark, but because I am still not seeing a major difference. For example, take a math textbook. Generally they are broken into subjects (eg circles) and then that topic is broken into lessons (eg circumference or area). Each lesson provides tactics & formulas for solving problems, examples of applying them, and a problem set to practice with. In my experience this is basically what a teacher would present in the classroom, with the exception of their samples being more interactive, and teachers having the ability answer questions. Were you thinking of another type of textbook? I can see how this may be different for history or literature textbooks, but to me that just means that said textbooks are doing a poorer job of covering everything they should. I think a textbook shouldn't just cover content, it should facilitate learning the content.
          • rahimnathwani 12y ago
• phantom_oracle 12y ago
  You have to see it from both sides. Building awesome "X" service is part of this markets culture/behaviour and being the "it-concept" of the day/week/year is a good way of entrenching the market participant and creating a channel for finding good assets (in the form of labour). If I recall, an "okayish" industry that gives back is the mining industry. Although some of them are there to solely plunder and flee, a lot of responsible miners build small economies around their activities. They help finance local housing, schooling, etc. If you need more info on this about virtually every industry, look for the HR/marketing buzzword of "Corporate Social Responsibility" otherwise well known as CSR.