Granny Cloud

Sugata Mitra is mainly known for his kids'-self-education TED talks in 2007: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves and 2010: The child-driven education. He continues, with the 2013 TED Prize, to develop A School in the Cloud and the Future of Learning

Mitra recruited an army of retired teachers, all women, whom he dubbed the “granny cloud.” The grannies connected to Mitra’s schools via Skype, and when the kids were assembled in groups of four to six they asked questions like “Can anything be less than zero?” “Will robots be conscious one day?” and “How do my eyes know to cry when I am sad?”
Then they sat back and let the kids do the learning, injecting themselves only to offer the kind of encouragement that only grannies can. “If there is a child in trouble we beam in a Gran,” Mitra jokes. What Mitra saw was that the Granny cloud kids’ English improved, their science scores soared. By most measures they were learning more and more quickly, and doing it mostly on their own. “It just requires broadband, collaboration and encouragement,” Mitra says.
... What Mitra proposes is the dismantling of an educational machine created by the British over centuries of Empire building.... “I am not saying its bad, it’s brilliantly constructed, but it’s not needed.”
What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud. For now Mitra envisions these cloud schools will function as a supplement...

If Mitra's vision (in many countries) seems to be working, it's likely that we'll see volunteer+paid organizations of grannies, grandpas, and others, trying to make small schools work better by a mix of "child-driven" online and offline experience. It might be effective, too.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exploration (v.?) Explanation

Khan-Academy style videos are sometimes criticized because they are lecture-based explanations rather than student-centered explorations; of course they're student controlled, but that sounds bad and contrary to Good Modern Pedagogy. The Khan Academy lead developer answers questions on Slashdot: Interviews: Khan Academy Lead Developer Ben Kamens Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

The fundamental belief of Khan Academy is that students should engage with content they need on-demand, at their own pace. We agree that any curriculum that forces all students in a class to follow the same, preordained "watch this video, do this exercise, watch this other video" path isn't using technology in a meaningful way. ...
Our classrooms see varying implementations, but the best of them try hard to help students move at their own pace. Some students might never need to listen to Sal say a word. They can master content by experimenting on their own. Absolutely. Fine. By. Us.
Khan Academy exists to give students the freedom to engage with the content they need while giving teachers immediate feedback about who's working on what and where they need help. We think we can help teachers by making this acquisition of core skills a more personalized, efficient process.
In doing so, we hope to move teachers _up_ the value chain so they can focus on exploration-based learning and targeted coaching with the rest of their class time.
I personally think that'd be a significant advance in learning. And FWIW, we consider anybody who fights for exploration-based learning to be an ally of Khan Academy.

That certainly fits the One World Classroom vision...and it really Just Might Work.


Or then again, maybe not.

Telepresence Now

Consumer and Education: Student Attends School Via Robot | Robotics Trends

What's most remarkable is how unremarkable this technology is viewed by his classmates. In a class of 7-year-olds raised on video games, avatars and remote-controlled toys, they don't see a robot. They just see Devon.
Just before class one recent day, a girl leaned toward the robot to tell Devon the joke making the rounds at school: Why did the boy eat his homework? The teacher told him it was a piece of cake.
While making get-well cards for him during a hospital stay last year, his classmates all drew him as a boy, not a bot.

Maybe it's the New Normal, or will be in another decade...

Or then again...

On Learning to Think

I wonder if it's possible for an educational system to encourage actual thought (systematically). I'm thinking about partisanship, here; the way that so many members of a group interpret whatever they see in terms of, well, Who Represents?

most people can't even remember the idiotic things said by people they identify with. Liberals can instantly call to mind this infamous exchange between a Fox News host and Bill Nye, the science guy, about global warming and volcanoes. But how many of them remember the CNN host who asked whether the Russian meteorite had been caused by global warming? Conservatives, meanwhile, all know about the global warming meteorite, but have a much less encyclopedic command of stupid utterances by conservative types.
It isn't, I think, that they don't encounter these stupidities; in fact, whenever one of these stories goes viral, the folks who share a party ID with the speaker generally spend a couple of days getting mad at the other side for blowing this up all out of proportion to its actual relevance.
Rather, it's that we take the stupidity from the other side as representative, and the stupidities from our own side as sui generis.

Maybe education as such has nothing to do with it, or is even counter-productive in that it tends to reward the ability to echo.


Or then again, maybe not.

Incentives v. Grading

Academic grading is usually not questioned; it's the way we do things. When it is questioned, there are two common answers: grades as credentials for future work, and grades as incentives. A psychology professor (best known for self-experimentation) thinks about the way we depend on others in our groups to develop whatever expertise we lack, and asks What Happens If I Stop Grading?

My theory of human evolution says we changed in many ways to facilitate trading. ... The more diverse the expertise within a group, the more members of the group can benefit from trade. Following this logic, mechanisms evolved to increase diversity of expertise among people living in the same place with the same genes. ... The theory implies that there is something inside every student that pushes them toward expertise — they want to learn — but they are being pushed in many different directions — what they want to learn varies greatly. If you accommodate the latter (diversity in what students want to learn), you can take advantage of the former (an inner drive to learn).
... Human nature: People who are the same want to be different. Formal education: People who are different should be the same. At Berkeley, most professors appeared to have little idea of the diversity of their students. (At least I didn’t, until I gave assignments that revealed it.) Almost all classes treated all students in a class the same: same lectures, same assignments, same tests, same grading scheme. ... The more freedom I gave them, the more they learned. ...
The more freedom I gave my students, the more difficult it became to grade them.... I had an idea: no grading. Maybe other sources of motivation, would be enough.
... The students’s work was the highest quality I have ever seen...
I think several things caused students to learn a lot:

• 1. The material was interesting.
• 2. To some extent — far more than in other classes — they could choose what they wanted to learn, especially during the second half of the class.
• 3. Peer pressure. They wanted to look good in front of their peers. It would have been embarrassing to not be able to do a presentation when called upon.
• 4. The instinct of workmanship. Thorstein Veblen wrote a book called The Instinct of Workmanship. People inherently want to do a good job, said Veblen. I agree.
• 5. Doing is fun.

What did I learn? I learned that I can stop grading and things get much better, not worse. I learned that motivations other than grades are plenty powerful.

I'm inclined to focus on 3, peer pressure, but I'm not going to deny the value of the others. And my own experience tends to support his; I went to the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

While traditional (A through F) grades are given, the culture of the school de-emphasizes their importance and grades are released only at the request of the student.

It seemed to me that we were working harder than any of the conventional classes I'd been in, or those I taught later, but I learned my grades when I needed them for graduate-school applications -- in effect, as credentials of my ability to do well with an academic workload. Incentives? We had plenty. I suspect that an online experience with student group structure, one which let peer pressure work (to a schedule), would also be fine in this particular regard.


Or then again, maybe not.

update: Of course K-12 is different in many ways, and some may think that younger-than-college kids are immune to peer pressure, don't feel any urge to please the teacher (or other adults), don't think "doing is fun", don't want to learn interesting stuff for its own sake... Hmm. Well, experiences vary.

Social Network and GPA

Science Daily reports that GPA may be contagious in high-school social networks

The researchers then mapped how students performed in school relative to their peer group, and correlated their social network with the change of their academic performance over time.
They found that students' whose friends were performing better academically were more likely to improve their own scores over time. The opposite effect was also seen: When their friends' GPA were lower, a given student's GPA was more likely to decrease as well.

Okay, so being exposed to success has a tendency to push you towards success. Sure. Common sense, in a way. More specifically it fits into the general framework of Harris' findings which I hereby oversimplify: peers are more important to kids than parents or teachers. It's an obvious support to all the parents who try to get their kids to disengage from bad influences, I suppose. It's not obvious that it can be used in a conventional school setting to raise academic performance: it tends to pull people towards the mean of some group, which may not be the whole school but each one who is pulled up is presumably exerting some slight downwards influence on the rest.

Still, I think that in the world of the Khan Academy and Salman Khan's Ideal Classroom, there may be a way to use this. Khan doesn't really have a notion of GPA: there are topics you've mastered, and others which you haven't. If each kid sees what his friends (online and offline, just nodes in his social network) have mastered, then he is being exposed to their successes. Accenting the positive, so to speak, is automatic; the negative is what isn't there. I don't know that this could be as simple as I'm now thinking, but it seems that it could help a lot.


(Or then again, maybe not.)

Spray Paint

A drug-design chemist looks at quackery and concludes that Scamorama. In the Pipeline:

the process of separating the gullible from their money is timeless. There are gloomy thoughts to be had about the state of science education, that such things are believed, but education is a thin spray-painted layer on the surface of a brain that wants miracles and wants to believe.

Indeed Phuddy-Duds like me are prone to use our fact-collection and theory-building skills to support the beliefs we want to hold. And the belief I most want to hold is that education, indeed publicly-funded formal education despite its manifold factory-flaws, is worthwhile anyway -- some of the time, it turns out we've learned to notice facts that conflict with our beliefs, instead. Some of the time we actually learn something new, especially in the STEM fields (STEAM fields? Maybe the arts are included) where what teacher says is not the touchstone. Sometimes. Enough of the time.


Or then again, maybe not.

Head Start Research

A week or so back I encountered a Science Daily report with Happy News about Academic gains, improved teacher relationships found among high risk kids in Head Start

A new study by Oregon State University researchers finds that Head Start can make a positive impact in the lives of some of its highest risk children, both academically and behaviorally.

That startled me; it sounded great, but I had already seen Timothy Taylor, the Conversable Economist, saying (I think about the same study) that Head Start is Failing Its Test

I am predisposed to favor programs that would help disadvantaged children early in life. Thus, I was delighted when Head Start announced some years back that it was going to carry out a randomized control trial--that is, to assign some preschool children randomly to Head Start and others not--so that it would be possible to do a statistically meaningful test of how well Head Start worked. I presumed that the test would provide ammunition for my pre-existing views.
But as the evidence has built up, Head Start is failing its test. The latest evidence appears in the "Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study: Final Report," which was released in December... Basically, the report shows that Head Start provides short-term gains to preschool children, but those gains have faded to essentially nothing by third grade.
To appreciate how depressing this conclusion is, you need to appreciate the high quality of the study....

So I went down the Science Daily report, and five paragraphs inwards found in summary that:

Analyzing the data on 253 children in non-parental care, they found the program had short-term positive impacts on school readiness, particularly in regards to early academic skills, positive teacher-child relationships, and a reduction in behavior problems.... "The impact we saw was modest, not huge, but statistically significant...

Okay, so there were modest short-term gains to preschool children, and that's that. The way I'll remember this is simple and doubly depressing: Head Start is failing its test, and Science Daily was minimally honest in presenting that.


Or then again, maybe not.

Smartphone education

Alex Tabarrok, co-creator of online Marginal Revolution University, reports on something that offline courses might consider using. New Teaching Tools

Instead of prohibiting smart phones in class, we require them …We then automatically deliver to their device a difficult conceptual question. We then give students a few minutes without discussion to reflect on the question and to indicate their answer on their device.
…Next, our system automatically puts students into groups of 2–5 [the system tells the students which other students to talk with and where to move in the classroom to find their group...

It's easy to think of lots of variations on the idea, but this is a version that does seem to be working. It appeals to me in part because it works via using new tech to facilitate a very very old tech: the study group, and I suspect that this is crucial; the teach-yourself books and teaching machines of decades past might have done much better if they hadn't focused so much on the (already) independent learner.
Or then again, maybe not.

Federal yes-and-no

The American Enterprise Institute has interesting opinions and lengthy arguments on What Uncle Sam can (and cannot) do to improve K–12 schooling: Lessons for the next four years

We believe that federal policymakers are uniquely well-suited to put particular education issues on the national agenda, tackle discriminatory practices that violate constitutional protections, push states to adopt cut-and-dried policies like annual assessment or data disaggregation, and promote transparency by collecting data and requiring states to report on student achievement. At the same time, Washington is ill-suited to change what happens in schools or classrooms and to compel state and local officials to conscientiously do things they are not inclined to do. Attempts to mandate school improvement models, teacher evaluation frameworks, professional development, or other interventions that depend on the skill and commitment with which they are implemented are likely to disappoint for the same reasons that have hampered even the best-laid federal plans for “fixing” schools.

I'm not convinced by much of it -- in fact it's not at all the infrastructure focus I'd choose for Federal policy, but it's worth reading.