The commons is an important concept and perhaps has no more vital place than in public education. Free education is a basic human right, and yet throughout the world, it remains a challenge. Even in the “developed” world, where free education is largely available, commercial textbook publishers and the politically-driven bureaucracy of education dominates the agenda.
Open education is a potential solution to these complex problems.
As a part of our commitment to open education, K12 Open Ed has recently launched the first completely open kids dictionary (http://dictionary.k12opened.com). We think this is an important building block for many open education projects and invite everyone to join us in collaborating on it.
This dictionary is intended for kids, though it can certainly be used for adult learners as well. As words are completed, they will be reviewed for quality and appropriateness and ultimately “frozen” for export into a variety of formats, including text, PDF, ebooks, wikis, web, etc., for use on a variety of devices.
This work is being licensed as a public domain resource that anyone can use for any purpose. We see this as a fundamental building block for many OER projects and hope that it will be used by teachers, students, publishers, hardware manufacturers, VARs, and others.
The site includes a build-your-own-glossary tool that allows users to construct glossaries for their own books, units, courses, or web sites and export them to text, html, rtf, pdf, or wikitext. Over time, we will be adding other new features, such as audio pronunciations, pictures, support for additional languages, and a wide variety of export functions.
This is a mass collaboration project, and we hope that many people around the world will jump in and add a definition or two.
We would love to see you at the” dictionary”:http://dictionary.k12opened.com and hope that you will also spread the word to others.
