Social Good Videos

I mainly watched the videos “Democratizing Knowledge in Higher Education” and “Cracking the Textbook”. I was intrigued by the idea of democratizing knowledge. It makes most sense that knowledge should be free since it is the truths of our universe and belongs to everyone. Before watching the video, I was curious how one would attempt to democratize knowledge especially in higher education where prices are high and less subsidized. The video tackled this issue by focusing on the high cost of college textbook, which affects many students.

I was surprised and impressed by the opensource textbook nonprofit organization, OpenStax. Their objective to provide peer-reviewed, open-source, textbooks at a low or no cost is very noble. One impressive feat of OpenStax is their ability to modify their textbook and distribute forked versions to better fit an educator’s needs. I think OpenStax is an amazing step towards democratizing knowledge and I think that computer scientists can help further this movement. I think that the biggest challenge to open-source textbook and democratic knowledge is the fear that it is not as good as proprietary works. Building a platform that combines OpenStax’s textbooks with open-source lesson plans and videos that could also be peer-reviewed would legitimize free and open education.

My Contributions

For my small contributions I have a mix of contributions to OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. I made two edits to OpenStreetMap and one edit to a Wikipedia page. I found OpenStreetMap to be very user-friendly for editing and I spent way too long looking around the places I frequently visit. The tutorial was very in-depth and helpful to go through before making my first contirbution. I found that many parts of the Queens neighborhood that I am from has not been updated. There were plenty of options for contributing to OpenStreetMap. Finding a wikipedia page that I felt knowledgeable enough to contribute was much more difficult. I did much more research in tutorials and browsing various wiki pages before editing my first page. I am most proud of my contribution to a New York Education program wikipedia page that I am involved in as I added important details and provided a working citation reference which the page lacked.