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In 1997 when my mother was in the last months of her life, she chose to come here to Oregon to die.  I'd been living in Oregon for a while and while she never said it explicitly, it was clear to me she wanted to have the options open to her under the Death With Dignity law.  Her disease progressed faster than she or her doctors expected and she never excercised her right under the law, but she took comfort in the fact that she did not have to face a lingering, excruciating death.

posted 1 year, 3 months ago
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Ofeargall,

I'm the technical lead on the ORVSD project.  ODE has contracted with us here at OSU to handle the hosting and development of the ORVSD tools and content.  I think there are some misconceptions here that I can address.

The Oregon Virtual School District is somewhat mis-named (we were assigned the name, we didn't choose it) - it's neither a school or a district.  ORVSD is not "the state sanctioned virtual school".  ORVSD doesn't employ teachers, grant credit or enroll students.  

I expect the impression you received that ORVSD is "operating at limited capacity" is rooted in the fact that its services are in no way intended to be a complete virtual school.  It offers a set of free tools and content for teachers.  We're doing exactly what our mission directs us to do: help Oregon teachers use more technology.  We're giving resources away to Oregon teachers for free so that they can enhance their existing classrooms.

The services of the ORVSD are available to any Oregon public school - including charters like ORCA, AllPrep, etc. - free of charge.  For example, Estacada Web Academy (an AllPrep school) is delivering courses right now from a server hosted in the ORVSD architecture.  The project is in no way intended to suppress or compete with any of the incumbent virtual schools.  If anything, the project is supporting the arguments made here that traditional schools should be learning from the online schools.  ORVSD is bringing the tools the virtual schools are using into the hands of traditional classroom teachers and training them how to use those tools to enhance their classes, thereby blurring the lines between"virtual" and "B&M" schools.

The state isn't "stalling" ... there aren't any nefarious motives here.  The goal of the ORVSD project is to increase the use of technology in Oregon's public schools in general - nothing to do with the current debate that's bouncing back and forth between the Legislature and the Oregon School Board.

posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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echolynch,

You asked how do we encourage traditional schools to learn from virtual schools - welcome to my world. :-)  100% of my job at OSU is dedicated to helping Oregon public school teachers use online tools to enhance their teaching and students' learning.  

Change in our traditional schools is a long, slow process.  Schools are hierarchical organizations steeped in tradition - "it worked for me 20 years ago, it'll work for kids today".  The key, I believe, is finding a few enthusiastic "early-adopter" teachers in a school or district willing to try something new.  Help them with training and resources like server space, software, and content.  When they start seeing successes, word spreads.  Their students start asking other teachers, "Why aren't you doing (whatever) like Ms. Jones?"  Or administrators notice that students in Mr. Smith's class are consistently scoring better.  Teachers talk to each other - "Hey, that's cool.  Your students are all excited about this lesson.  How did you do that?"

We're starting to see some momentum.  The early-adopters have been doing it long enough now that results are starting to become more apparent and word is getting out to other teachers in the building.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Oregon is incorporating online learning into its existing public schools.  It's happening on many levels:

• The Oregon Department of Education funds the Oregon Virtual School District to provide any public school teacher in Oregon with free tools, content, and training to incorporate online learning into their classes.  Any public school teacher in Oregon can in 5 minutes have a web site pre-loaded with course content that maps to Oregon standards. 
• Dennis from HDESD spoke about all the great work the ESDs are doing - both today and for the past 10-15 years.  Take a look at all the courses being offered through the various ESD programs.  I think you'll be surprised at how much is being done.
• Schools, districts, and even individual teachers all over the state are doing it on their own.  In Ashland,  Astoria, Enterprise, Salem, Redmond, Ontario - there are teachers incorporating online learning into their classes right now.  

"Virtual schools" are not a one-size-fits-all panacea.  Online education is not just a student at home accessing a distance learning course on virtual school web site.  It's also kids in their brick and mortar school watching a video on TeacherTube or a child submitting their homework electronically from their home computer after spending the day in a traditional classroom.  It's a broad spectrum - something I see as a very good thing as it provides many different options for students and teachers to find the best way to maximize each student's learning.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Why does it have to be either/or?  Why not provide a range of choices - online, face to face, blended - to students and teachers so they can build an individualized learning plan that fits the student's specific learning style and needs?  In this case you can have your cake and eat it too.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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I work for Oregon State University building online learning systems for public K-12 teachers under the Oregon Virtual School District banner.  

One important point that seems to be missed in this discussion is that "online learning" and "brick and mortar" aren't mutually exclusive.   There seems to be a common, but erroneous, assumption that you either attend a virtual school from your home computer or go to a physical school building.  It's not necessarily an either/or situation.  There are tens of thousands of public school students around the state who are using online learning tools as an enhancement to their existing face-to-face classroom work.  This hybrid or blended model allows the teachers and students to take advantage of the benefits of both in-person and virtual online instruction.

Note there are approximately 500,000 K-12 students in Oregon.  This whole controversy relates to only 1% of the students in the state.  I think the debate and discussion is good, but let's not get lost in the weeds.  There are many more students and teachers around the state who are teaching and learning online than there are enrolled in the virtual charter schools being discussed here.

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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The Oregon Virtual School District (http://orvsd.org) is a program funded by the State of Oregon to provide online learning tools and course content free of charge to any public school teacher in Oregon (including charter schools).  It enables teachers to innovate through the use of Internet technology to extend learning beyond their classrooms and bring online tools in to enrich their existing classroom activities.  Teachers can use tools like blogs, streaming video, online quizzes, discussion forums, online assignment submission, and podcasting to teach in new and innovative ways. 

In these times of budget cuts, it is also important to note that this program enables teachers to do more without forcing them or their districts to spend scarce resources on things like servers and technical support.  The ORVSD program enables educators do more without costing them any more.

The ORVSD currently serves approximately 250 schools and 17,000 teachers and students around the state - and is adding new schools as well as new tools and content every day.

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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Insulting and condescending. She almost seems to be the equivalent of a "trophy wife" - she's young and pretty, but her politics are 180 degrees opposite of Senator Clinton's.

posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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Choosing Governor Palin is a blatant, ham-handed grab at the women who support Hillary Clinton. But her candidacy does nothing to change McCain's record - especially his voting record - where he has proven himself to be anything *but* a reformer or independent.

Will the addition of Palin to the ticket change my vote? Absolutely not. A McCain presidency would be a disaster surpassed only by the disaster of the current administration.

posted 3 years, 8 months ago
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I agree it is a very interesting issue. I am not a lawyer, but I disagree that open source licenses can be used as a defense for theft. Open source licenses explicitly protect the author's intellectual property. Releasing code under an open source license does not weaken the intellectual property rights, it strengthens them. If someone steals code, they are still guilty of theft, regardless what license they use.

There are many projects out there - the most prominent one I know of is the HP-sponsored FOSSology (http://fossology.org) project - that scan source code and look at what code was used where. One of its specific goals is to identify whose code and what licenses are used. Just this week at OSCON I heard some talk about using the massive Google search power to fingerprint and identify code, no matter how deeply buried it may be in a project. There are companies whose whole business is to scan code and look for license and copyright violations.

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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I think that's not necessarily a valid concern specific to open source. The open source licenses are very clear about the intellectual property and how it can be reused and redistributed. These licenses have proven to be legally defensible, so I don't see this is any different than the defense of any other intellectual property issue. Yes, there will be misuse, yes there will be lawsuits, but I don't think this is any different than a novelist or photographer protecting their rights.

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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I absolutely agree. There are so many open source user group meetings in Portland in a given week that it's impossible to make it to them all.

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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Oregon State University's Open Source Lab is a great resource to the technology ecosystem. With the generous support of Google, IBM and our other sponsors, we at the OSL help some of the world's largest and highest profile open source projects succeed: the Linux kernel, the Apache web server, OpenOffice, the One Laptop Per child project, and hundreds of other smaller projects. As an Oregonian and a Portland resident, I am proud to help make technology freer - both free as in freedom and free as in gratis - to Oregon and the world.

Open source has great potential in the public sector. We are working with the State of Oregon Department of Education to bring affordable technology into our public schools. With the help of the open source community, teachers can - at no cost to them - bring online elements into their existing classrooms and take their classes online to reach out to students who cannot get to the classroom. With open source tools, teachers can focus on innovating in education without having to worry about paying for the software.

-Greg

posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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