Looking back over my "SuperSchool" posts, I see that I left out a lot; the most important is probably that the kind of redesign I have in mind would produce a shared (online) resource for other schools and indeed for home-schoolers and unschoolers.
Hmm.... what have I claimed? I've claimed that we can support autonomous project choice, so that any students can find and edit their own path to their own version of college-and-career-readiness, with parental and school sign-off. The path is a sequence of projects (including problem-sets). "Lectures" will almost always be on-demand explanations, answers to actual questions, usually online but always with mastery quizzes. Students switch back and forth between activities on their own schedules (supported, e.g., by Google Calendars shared with teacher and parents but not normally touched by them); they respond to failures by editing the path (routing around failure, if needed.)
So what software resources are needed to support that kind of student plan? Not much, but I believe it has to be crowd-sourced in the sense that we will never have an end to new project designs, new components of skill and knowledge, coming in from the students themselves.
It's an extension of the Khan Academy resource, and not mainly in the obvious we-need-more-lessons-with-mastery-quizzes direction although of course I described a lot of that going on. Mainly, we need to extend their badge system: every time you demonstrate mastery, you get a badge with a label indicating what you mastered, right? And your collection of badges is your current profile, and your goal profile of college-and-career-readiness is a collection of badges which you and your school and your parents agree does represent college-and-career-readiness. So... a badge is a label, with a description of the knowledge (what) or skill (how to) that has been mastered. For each badge there are the badges that it links to as being usefully-learned-before; there are the mastery quizzes which award that badge; there are the lessons (each with triggering questions to which that lesson might be a full or partial answer) which relate to those quizzes; and there are projects and subprojects for which that badge would be helpful, or which would provide experience helpful for achieving that badge.
This implies a knowledge-and-skills-and-projects map which can't be static because it wouldn't be finite, and because future projects will involve concepts not yet invented. We can't even expect to have a definitive fixed vocabulary for knowledge or for skills. I would propose the use of hashtags until something better came along. A badge is labeled with one or more compound hashtags which look like (and correspond to) nested folders of information, like #math.arithmetic.decimal.multiplication.multidigit; when a badge is proposed, which can be by anybody, it gets a no-more-than-a-paragraph description, and the links required above; and so on. Such a badge can be awarded and checked for with no centralized process at all.... of course, teachers probably won't sign off on plans which depend crucially on badges that haven't gotten on to trusted lists of certified badges. Algorithms for finding suggested plans may depend on other kinds of data, too -- but if things like "personal interests" and "aptitudes" can be subsumed into the badge system, all the better. Some difficulties are obvious, but I'll leave it at that for now....it is the main thing I was visualizing and left out.
Hmm.... what have I claimed? I've claimed that we can support autonomous project choice, so that any students can find and edit their own path to their own version of college-and-career-readiness, with parental and school sign-off. The path is a sequence of projects (including problem-sets). "Lectures" will almost always be on-demand explanations, answers to actual questions, usually online but always with mastery quizzes. Students switch back and forth between activities on their own schedules (supported, e.g., by Google Calendars shared with teacher and parents but not normally touched by them); they respond to failures by editing the path (routing around failure, if needed.)
So what software resources are needed to support that kind of student plan? Not much, but I believe it has to be crowd-sourced in the sense that we will never have an end to new project designs, new components of skill and knowledge, coming in from the students themselves.
It's an extension of the Khan Academy resource, and not mainly in the obvious we-need-more-lessons-with-mastery-quizzes direction although of course I described a lot of that going on. Mainly, we need to extend their badge system: every time you demonstrate mastery, you get a badge with a label indicating what you mastered, right? And your collection of badges is your current profile, and your goal profile of college-and-career-readiness is a collection of badges which you and your school and your parents agree does represent college-and-career-readiness. So... a badge is a label, with a description of the knowledge (what) or skill (how to) that has been mastered. For each badge there are the badges that it links to as being usefully-learned-before; there are the mastery quizzes which award that badge; there are the lessons (each with triggering questions to which that lesson might be a full or partial answer) which relate to those quizzes; and there are projects and subprojects for which that badge would be helpful, or which would provide experience helpful for achieving that badge.
This implies a knowledge-and-skills-and-projects map which can't be static because it wouldn't be finite, and because future projects will involve concepts not yet invented. We can't even expect to have a definitive fixed vocabulary for knowledge or for skills. I would propose the use of hashtags until something better came along. A badge is labeled with one or more compound hashtags which look like (and correspond to) nested folders of information, like #math.arithmetic.decimal.multiplication.multidigit; when a badge is proposed, which can be by anybody, it gets a no-more-than-a-paragraph description, and the links required above; and so on. Such a badge can be awarded and checked for with no centralized process at all.... of course, teachers probably won't sign off on plans which depend crucially on badges that haven't gotten on to trusted lists of certified badges. Algorithms for finding suggested plans may depend on other kinds of data, too -- but if things like "personal interests" and "aptitudes" can be subsumed into the badge system, all the better. Some difficulties are obvious, but I'll leave it at that for now....it is the main thing I was visualizing and left out.
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