Most of of Liza Kindred's Lullabot Case Study will interest only Lullabot fans, but 9 minutes in, she tells a story that makes a great subject for an Open Source Education post.
In brief: a key Lullabot employee makes a small data import error late at night that causes huge legal problems. She fixes the problem and waits for a "you're fired" call from one of the partners, Matt Westgate. The call comes:
Traditional American public schools are bureaucracies (Max Weber), the best are learning organizations (Peter Senge), and most are in a transitional form between the two. I believe that the structure of open source communities, like Drupal, can inform this transition.
Bureaucracies
"Open source" means more than "people can change it" and "free to use".
There's something also wonderful about the culture of open source organizations: the way communities form, establish norms, build systems, and induct new members, all for joy of sharing and contributing to a collective effort.
I think schools could be more like this, and this blog will be that exploration.
ePortfolios are a high-cost, high-risk, and high-return pattern to adopt. Although the State of New Hampshire (ambitiously) required all public schools to adopt ePortfolios by a common deadline, not all schools were (or are) ready for that level of technology integration into instruction and assessment.
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