NSF EdTech

Reports on reporting about what we're learning about learning (and, of course, teaching about teaching) at the Huffington Post's 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education | Aaron Dubrow

...NSF funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country.

The speakers in the lecture series, all leading cyberlearning scholars, ... represent the forces transforming what education may look like in the future.

1. Classroom as Virtual Phenomenon: RoomQuakes and WallScopes

HelioRoom simulates the orbital motion of the planets in the Solar system on a set of synchronized computer displays situated on the walls of the classroom, with planets "orbiting" around the periphery of the room. ...

... RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area. At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring....

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms .... Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging. ...

Tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna in Wallcology. ...

2. Games for Good: Learning While You Play

... in the game "Citizen Science," created by Squire and his team, players help restore Lake Mendota, a real lake in Wisconsin that, in the year 2020, has become polluted. As players explore the landscape, they take water samples, interact with a virtual, simulated watershed and talk with stakeholders....

... for a game that might reach even broader audiences, Squire and colleagues created Progenitor X, a zombie-themed tissue engineering game. In Progenitor X, players learn about the relationships between cells, tissues, and organs while trying to survive a zombie invasion. ... As a member of The Progenitor X Defense Force, you are a part of a highly trained squad of scientists who use highly advanced bio-medical technology to locate, seek out, and treat infected humans to contain the threat. ....

"These projects are not only using technologies that only recently became possible. They also build on decades of excellent research on how people learn," said Chris Hoadley, the program officer at NSF who leads the Cyberlearning program. "I believe it's only by advancing technology design and learning research together that we'll be able to imagine the future of learning."...

3. Teaching Tykes to Program: Never Too Young to Control a Robot

... Bers described her latest project, the KIWI robotic kit (subsequently renamed KIBO), which teaches programming through robotics, without screens, tablets, or keyboards. Using KIBO, students scan wooden blocks to give robots simple commands, in the process learning sequencing, one of the most important skills for early age groups. By combining a series of commands, kids make the robot move, dance, sing, sense the environment or light up....

4. Virtual role-play and robo-tutors

... Virtual role-play - where learners engage in simulated encounters with artificially intelligent agents that behave and respond in a culturally accurate manner - has been shown to be effective at teaching cross-cultural communication.

"You learn by playing a role in a simulation of some real life situation"

"We found in our military training that when soldiers use this approach, once they get into a foreign country -- let's say they're sitting down with local leaders -- they feel as if it's a familiar situation to them... Moreover, the software could address the shortage of qualified teachers able to teach Chinese, Arabic and other less popular languages... The first Web-based course was tested last year via Virtual Virginia, a statewide virtual school program, and received overwhelmingly positive ratings from the students....

5. Tools for Real-time Visual Collaboration

... "Computers have been individualistic devices," said Ramani. "But a new class of technology is emerging that allows us to engage in our individual learning process and also in a collaborative process." SkWiki ... allows many participants to collaboratively create digital multimedia projects on the web using many kinds of media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs....

6. Fusing data collection, computational modeling and data analysis

Simulation and modeling have come to be regarded as the "third pillar" of science... ... By embedding simulations and sensor data collectors in the classroom, Dorsey and Wilensky are able to aid students in gathering, visualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources. A principal innovation of InquirySpace is the integration of the Concord Consortium's CODAP data exploration software with the modeling environments. This integration enables students to plan extended investigations of models, to do sophisticated analyses of the model runs, and to engage in arguments from evidence. ...

7. Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality: Increasing ecological understanding

... Two decades ago, with funding from NSF, Dede started investigating head-mounted displays and room-sized virtual environments... At the beginning of the two to four week EcoMUVE curriculum, the students discover that all of the fish in a virtual pond have died. They then work in teams to determine the complex causal relationships that led to the die-off. The experience immerses the students as ecosystem scientists. ... At the end of the investigation, all of the students participate in a mini-scientific conference where they show their findings and the research behind it.

I don't know how well the experiments will scale up, but I would like to note that all of this seems to require ending the teaching-to-the-test that the last few posts have been about. They all seem to require teamwork, but none of them have much to do with traditional lectures. All of them have a learn-by-doing framework, where the computer facilitates the doing -- or even provides the universe for that doing to be done in.

Creation vs Current Curriculum

This is a rather more abstract level than I usually post about, but I want to link to Yong Zhao's recommendations at A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners

• Stop prescribing and imposing on children a narrow set of content through common curriculum standards and testing.
• Start personalizing education to support the development of unique, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. ... ...
• Stop constraining children to learning opportunities present in their immediate physical environments by assigning them to classes and teachers.
• Start engaging them in learning opportunities that exist in the global community, beyond their class and school walls.
• Stop forcing children to learn what adults think they may need and testing them to what degree they have mastered the required content.
• Start allowing children the opportunity to engage in creating authentic products and learn what they are interested in, just in time, not just in case.
• Stop benchmarking to measures of excellence in the past, such as international test scores.
• Start inventing the excellence of the future. You cannot fix the horse wagon to get the moon. We have to work on rocket science.

A Final Word
To implement these recommendations, the first thing we need is to abandon ... the obsolete employment-oriented educational paradigm, the very mindset that both gave birth to and has been perpetuated by A Nation at Risk. After thirty years of experiments that have brought revolutionary, destructive changes to American education, without any measureable improvement, it is time to be freed from its spirit.

As Newsweek found almost five years ago, reporting on The Creativity Crisis

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class....

Out of Basement Readiness

A note from Yong Zhao at the beginning of this month: Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » College Ready vs. Out-of-Basement Ready: Shifting the Education Paradigm

The Common Core and most education reforms around the world define the outcome of schooling as readiness for college and career readiness. But as recent statistics suggest, college-readiness, even college-graduation-readiness, does not lead to out-basement-readiness. ...
They are the “boomerang kids,” writes a New York Times magazine article last week. These were good students. They were ready for college. They paid for college (many with borrowed money). They completed all college requirements. They did not drop out. And they graduated from college. But they are back in their parents’ basement for there is no career for them, ready or not.
The reason is simpler than many would like to accept: education has been preparing our students for an economy that no longer exists. ...
The “boomerang kids” are not poorly educated, but miseducated. They were prepared to look for jobs, but not to create jobs. They were prepared to solve problems, but not to identify problems or ask questions. ...
the more successful these reform efforts become, the more “boomerang kids” we will have.... ... The Common Core wants your kids to develop career readiness, but ask the question: who is equipped to create the careers they will become ready for?
So my 4th of July suggestion: Stop the Common Core or ready your basement for your college graduates.

Well, it's not entirely an educational problem; regulatory frameworks normally (necessarily?) favor those who already have a seat at the table. so an increasingly regulated economy has less room for the innovation that creates jobs, even if the innovators are prepared to do their part. But I think he's right: it is partly an educational problem, and our reforms are moving in the wrong direction.

Or then again, maybe not.

The Opt-Out Option; Parental Protests Against Over-Testing

Bottom line: NYS wants to use "high-stakes testing" to see how well schools (and teachers) are teaching the material that can be readily tested. This is great, except that it forces schools (and teachers) to concentrate on that material to the exclusion of whatever has to be left off those tests, and sometimes the leftover material is crucial. "Teaching to the test" is inevitable -- and bad. A lot of parents choose to protest by having their children opt out of the evaluative tests.

---

Our outgoing Superintendent posts Guidance for the Upcoming State Exams - Dr. Bowers - SuperintendentHamilton CSD

Recently, we have had a number of students ask questions about the school's reaction if a parent or child "refuses" to take the 3rd - 8th grade State Assessments. Attached please find a copy of the letter that was sent home to parents to clarify the district's viewpoint.

The crucial paragraphs:

   As per prior memorandum from the New York State Education Department (NYSED), please be aware that low assessment participation rates could adversely impact a school district's funding or increased state oversight of local school functions.

   Therefore it will be our practice to provide each student with a copy of each examination that students in that grade level are required to complete. Parents that wish for the child to be released from State testing must communicate their "intent of refusal" to HCS, before the exam is given. Upon receipt of the refusal, the district will arrange an alternative activity and the student will read quietly in an alternate location, rather than complete the examination. Their exam will be coded as "not tested." Although the student will not be penalized for the refusal, the school district may experience the effects described above.

It's pretty much what I remember her saying at the BoE meeting I put here but she did say a bit about the opt-out movement being even stronger downstate. Here's a video summary from NYS Allies for Public Education: They disagree with one point in Dr. Bowers' letter: they note that the threat of impact on school funding has not been carried through yet, and they don't believe it will be. A variety of web sites have more information, such as Opt Out CNY

dedicated to informing the Central New York public about the negative negative impact that high-stakes standardized tests are having on children and public education... How to REFUSE NYS Grade 3-8 TESTS

There are forums like the Onondaga Forum to focus on opting children out of state tests, other Common Core issues | syracuse.com As that "other Common Core issues" suggests, it's a national issue; United Opt Out National has a New York section, but there's nothing that special about us.

The Defiant Parents: Opting Out of Testing : The New Yorker

Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities.

Basically I see this as a protest against a trend: US education has been increasingly test-directed, which is great from a data-guy's point of view except for the minor fact that the most important parts of education aren't readily testable, so they tend to be squeezed out by teachers and schools who are evaluated on how well their kids do on the standardized parts. If this goes on, we could end up with an education system which generates excellent PISA scores but whose graduates are unable to think for themselves; really good at solving simple word problems but unable to create, unable to innovate, not even particularly good at working together. That's scary. If you're interested in the issue, I'd suggest that you check some of my posts mentioning Yong Zhao who spoke at HCS a while ago, or just watch the (long) videos at NYC Public School Parents: Video: Yong Zhao on how high-stakes testing is damaging our schools

Check out Yong Zhao's terrific (and funny!) presentation on October 12, along with the question and answer session, co-sponsored by Class Size Matters, GEM, Time out From Testing, and Parents Across America.

Prof. Zhao is the nation's most eloquent critic of high-stakes testing and discusses how the current education reform agenda is taking our nation's schools in entirely wrong direction.

On Centralization

Larry Cuban's teacher blog, which often discusses historical trends in teaching, notes the context of the Common Core at Competing Traditions of Teaching: An Old Story Written Anew | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Since the early 1990s, however, states have embraced standards-based reforms, accountability measures, and mandated testing peaking with No Child Left Behind in 2001. How, then, in the past two accountability-driven decades have most teachers organized instruction, grouped students, and taught lessons?

For those who listen to teachers, the answer is self-evident. Classroom stories and teacher surveys have reported again and again that more lesson time is spent preparing students for high-stakes tests. And what is taught has narrowed to what appears on tests.

Such stories and surveys describe classroom instruction, particularly in largely poor and minority schools, as more teacher-centered, focused on meeting prescribed state standards and raising test scores. Teachers have felt pressured to drop student-centered activities such as small group work, discussions, learning centers, and writing portfolios because such activities take away precious classroom time from standards-based curriculum and test preparation.

I think this is in line with Yong Zhao's discussion; centralization (and the high-stakes testing which holds it together) tends to conflict with letting students develop as self-directed learners/citizens.

Or then again, maybe not.

21st Century Resources: Khan Academy

When we think about the options available to a 21st century school, the Khan Academy has to be considered. It may continue to grow or it may be replaced with something better in a few years; we don't know. We do know, as I've noted before, that it offers a model of education which has considerable research support; a model of education where we begin with supplemental and review  material and student-tracking tools for ordinary classes, but in which there is ultimately no requirement for any such thing as "class size", no requirement for any such thing as a "grade level". Many schools are making decisions such as "we can't offer class X, there aren't enough students who want it" (on the grounds suggested by the Javascript widget at the bottom of this page), and that kind of decision can become obsolete. One way or another (with Khan's vision or somebody else's improvement) it will become obsolete for those schools which want it to.

It isn't obsolete yet, but things are changing fast; on August 30th, the Academy announced that "We just launched the biggest change in the history of the Khan Academy. It’s a new learning experience that will figure out where you have gaps and help you fill them. Check it out:..." What they mean is that the software now tracks not only the specific lessons you've mastered but the relationships between lessons, so that it can say what lessons you definitely don't need (because you have the skills) and what lessons you're just ready for. A limited kind of academic counselling, but a useful one...and you don't have to get an appointment with a counsellor.

Every week or so I get emails mentioning new lessons, from Finding factors and multiples on to Late Classical: Lysippos, Apoxyomenos (Scraper), c. 330 B.C.E. (Roman copy) | Ancient Greece , on to Overview of Chinese History 1911 - 1949 and on to Fun with a Spider Bot. People thinking about educational options and costs and decisions, though, may prefer to look at teacher's perspective videos. Here are three:

First, from a fairly abstract perspective, about the tools that they make available: How I use Khan Academy data - An educator's perspective .

Teachers' views of kids, reported at Student ownership of learning in my classroom.

More concretely, here's a case study of a math classroom: Shelby Harris' classroom (Idaho, 2013) | Khan Academy in K-12 classrooms

Generalities are available at many places, e.g. Five Lessons from Salman Khan on the Future of Education | Psychology Today:

Salman Khan needs no introduction.  He was recently on the cover of FORBES and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people.  And he just published a book—The One World Schoolhouse—which is already a bestseller.
I recently interviewed Sal to get his thoughts on the future of education.....

Still, if you have 12 minutes handy, you might prefer to watch  Sal Khan on Digital and Physical Learning | Our vision , explaining the current "supplemental" use of Academy videos, and the transitional "flipped classroom" model, and the on-beyond-classrooms self-paced instruction he expects beyond that. And if you have 16 minutes in addition, you might try his Year 2060: Education Predictions | Our vision where he begins with "In ten years, this [traditional lecture-based] classroom model is going to completely go away..." (update: and 11 minutes in, says "I think the role of the teacher is going to go up dramatically.")

  I'm not sure I believe that; it might be that replacement will be blocked by institutional resistance, which is always a strong factor. But it certainly can happen, and there's a good deal of evidence (anecdotal and data) suggesting that the replacement will be a good thing.

Learning by Video Game

From UCSD via Science Daily, a self-motivating educational experience: Computer scientists develop video game that teaches how to program in Java

CodeSpells' story line is simple: the player is a wizard arriving in a land populated by gnomes.... The wizard must help them. She (or he) writes spells in Java. ...
Players can also earn badges by undertaking simple quests, which help them master the game's spells. One quest entails crossing a river. Another entails rescuing a gnome from the roof of his cottage... By the time players complete the game's first level, they have learned the main components of the Java programming language, such as parameters, for if statements, for loops and while loops, among other skills.
Researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls ages 10 to 12 in San Diego...."We were purposefully vague," they wrote, "as we hoped to encourage a largely unstructured learning environment."
The students were disappointed when they had to stop playing because the test was over.

And there ain't no maybe not about it.

Charters, Incentives, Performance

A few days ago, USA Today editorialized Charter school experiment a success: Our view

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers' unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they're siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There's little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.

And they talk quite a bit about the Knowledge Is Power Program

a KIPP school typically provides 60 percent more time in school than a regular public school.[12] By extending school days, requiring attendance on Saturdays, offering extra curricular activities, and adding three extra weeks of school in July, students have more educational opportunities. ...
Each middle school student receives a paycheck at the end of the week of KIPP dollars they have earned based on academic merit, conduct, and overall behavior.
At the end of the school year, KIPP students have the privilege of attending a week long field trip.
In June 2010, Mathematica Policy Research produced the first findings[16] from a multi-year evaluation of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)

Using a matched comparison group design, results show that for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.

I believe what they say, and I can see a value to KIPP and similar high-intensity charters as providing a somewhat better factory school, one which will outdo our really bad urban schools; it also serves as a vehicle for self-selection, which is both good and bad. It is possible that similar schools could work in a suburban or rural context, matched against really-not-that-bad-at-all schools like HCS. I've become sceptical, however, about the incentives we're using -- grades, academic awards, KIPP dollars, disciplinary action. These certainly can and do lead to enhanced performance on some kinds of tests, but I'm afraid these are precisely the kinds of tests that ought to be becoming obsolete: tests for the ability to shut up and sit down and follow orders. Here's a discussion (with video) of the kind of research I mean: How Monetary Rewards Can Demotivate Creative Works | Techdirt

once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails. Not just fails, but leads to worse performance.

When I think about this kind of research in the context of school reform, it seems to me that we as a nation have been heading in one of the wrong directions for a while now, and that the KIPP-style charter is a better dinosaur. The flexibility of charters may be necessary for finding better answers, but it also makes even worse answers available. I'll post soon about experiments in other directions.
Or then again, maybe not.

Networks of Imagination

Ken Bausch mentioned this last December; The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown | DMLcentral

In this video, which contains the highlights of his “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner” keynote at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, he introduces the fascinating notion of “a global one-room schoolhouse through networks of imagination.”

It seems to me that this is quite compatible with Sal Khan's vision (and book) that I've mentioned a few times, but it's an interestingly different point of view. I'm inclined to see it as a mix of Khan with some of Yong Zhao's World Class Learners, but that oversimplifies as usual. I do see him as detecting and approving a trend towards tools like Scoot & Doodle | Get Creative Together, which has just received fairly major support from Pearson among others.

Google+ Hangout App Scoot & Doodle Raises $2.25M Seed, From Valley Angels & Pearson, To Get More Kids Learning Through Play | TechCrunch

Well, maybe not just kids, or just play; I'll add some emphasis in a quote from the GeekDad report on Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace | GeekDad | Wired.com

essentially, it is an app that works with Google+Hangouts and lets you type, draw and engage in a visual and tactile way – as well as through video and voice. In my use of it I have found it to be really stable and offer a fluid and worthwhile experience whether with my kids or with business colleagues. Like many startups there appears to be more potential applications than you can imagine; however, kudos for both the Scoot & Doodle team and Pearson for seeing the potential of this in the education and learning space.

And I certainly approve of the idea that education works off study groups that fit in a Google+ Hangout. That works.

Or then again, maybe not.

Other School Analogies: Day Jail?

School isn't just about learning; it's also about signaling that you've learned, of course. Beyond that, it's about making society work, in such a way that parents can do what they need to do all day. Arnold Kling, in The Dark View of Schooling, notes

Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.
Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. ... That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

I do believe that technological improvements can make signaling a lot easier, in K-12 as much as in How testing could transform higher education:

having a well-calibrated measurement would put a lot more focus on learning the material and much less on how you learned it. No one will care too much which book you read, which online class you took, or what exercises you did. Those are all just ways to learn. Second, this would truly democratize education—the self taught Bangladeshi is on equal footing with the legacy Harvard admittee.

If you want to know if a kid has grasped 10th grade math, start him on the Khan Academy 11th grade sequence and see how quickly he reaches "mastery". Of course you probably need humans to rate English composition, if not reading comprehension, but you can go a long ways without adult humans involved -- let ten kids write short essays to summarize some information, each of them answers ten sets of multiple-choice questions, and they get comprehension scores based on how well they answered, but composition scores based on how well their readers answered. (Is this a bad idea? Probably; I just thought of it. There are lots of possibilities.) The testing tools for this probably won't come very quickly, and they won't come at the same pace in all subject/skill areas, but they're coming. I'm less confident that we'll get a substitute for the "day jail for kids." Many parents will want to know that their kids are somewhere being supervised -- the sort of "off in the woods, probably building a dam" that went over well enough in the late 50s (when I went along with my elder siblings) is probably gone forever.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

Flipped Classrooms -- Continuing

Progress (in some direction) continues... we see Yahoo News (from AP) on students whose Teachers flip for 'flipped learning' class model:

spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking quizzes, explaining the concept to other students, reciting equation formulas in a loud chorus, and making their own videos while teacher Crystal Kirch buzzes from desk to desk to help pupils who are having trouble.
It's a technology-driven teaching method known as "flipped fearning" because it flips the time-honored model of classroom lecture and exercises for homework — the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice.
... the online community Flipped Learning Network now has 10,000 members, up from 2,500 a year ago, and training workshops are being held all over the country...
Under the model, teachers make eight- to 10-minute videos of their lessons using laptops, often simply filming the whiteboard as the teacher makes notations and recording their voice as they explain the concept. The videos are uploaded onto a teacher or school website, or even YouTube, where they can be accessed by students on computers or smartphones as homework....
"The first year, I was able to double the number of labs my students were doing," Sams said. "That's every science teacher's dream."
In the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township,...Flipping yielded dramatic results after just a year... Green attributed the improvements to an approach that engages students more in their classes. ....
The concept has its downside. Teachers note that making the videos and coming up with project activities to fill class time is a lot of extra work up front...
Explaining to adults that homework was watching videos was a little harder, though. "My grandma thought I was using it as an excuse to mess around on the Internet," Nguyen said.

Note that "making the videos" is to some degree a one-time cost; videos are shared to similar classes. The "buzzes from desk to desk" teacher-activity should to some extent be a slightly-older-student activity, as suggested by the "explaining the concept to other students" which precedes it. And "coming up with project activities to fill class time"...well, that's also to some extent a one-time cost. Hmm.
Then again, maybe not.

Failure is Good

The international test scores are out today, and as always US kids rank fairly low in performance, high in confidence. Yong Zhao comments that Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?

So far all international test scores measure the extent to which an education system effectively transmits prescribed content.
In this regard, the U.S. education system is a failure and has been one for a long time.
But the successful transmission of prescribed content contributes little to economies that require creative and entrepreneurial individual talents and in fact can damage the creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Thus high test scores of a nation can come at the cost of entrepreneurial and creative capacity.
While the U.S. has failed to produce homogenous, compliant, and standardized employees, it has preserved a certain level of creativity and entrepreneurship. In other words, while the U.S. is still pursuing an employee-oriented education model, it is much less successful in stifling creativity and suppressing entrepreneurship.

We failed...hooray! Let's design schools that don't even try to do what we're failing at!
Or then again, maybe not. (Actually, we do need to transmit a fair amount of prescribed content; as Salman Khan puts it in One World Schoolhouse, this should take about 20% of the school day.)

Ericsson -- Future of Learning

I've mentioned TED talks by Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education and Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education; Here's a 20-minute Ericsson-funded documentary, noted by Geekdad at The Future of Learning

Talking with the likes of Sugata Mitra, Daphne Koller, and Jose Ferreira, The Future of Learning examines how the learning process can be adapted to the needs of each child and how the highest quality education is now available for any person who can connect to the internet.

They also have Seth Godin as a speaker -- I've linked in the past to Stop Stealing Dreams -- Seth Godin at Hamilton Central Options. I guess I've heard of Jose Ferreira and of Knewton, his adaptive learning/teaching software platform that will be the basis for Pearson's efforts, but didn't know much about him.
The "highest quality education" claim in the Geekdad summary is not actually what Mitra or Koller or especially Godin are saying; they don't think we can (yet?) provide an online substitute for a good teacher, but they do think that kids with good teachers can do better than they have done with these new resources, and they also think that kids with bad teachers or no teachers can do better than they have done. In the next 30 years, more kids will leave school than have left school in all of human history...
Or then again, maybe not?

TED Talk on Creativity (and Patents&Copyright)

Kirby Ferguson's TED Talk: "Embrace the Remix" - a must-see - Boing Boing

creativity comes about as the result of creative re-use of others' work. It's not just explicit remixes and samples -- everything from the iPhone to Bob Dylan's music are made out of other peoples' inventions and creations.

It's possible that there is some domain in which creativity is often, or at least sometimes, a matter of someone who stays in an attic alone until the Great Work pops out, but this is certainly not the usual case, and the creativity which education (and "intellectual property" law) should encourage is certainly not of that sort. Creativity is, in common usage, a matter of adding something to the remix. Our current laws are actually anticonstitutional in that they actively discourage the creativity, the "progress", that the Constitution says they should promote. And yet we want to encourage creativity in that context. Hmm.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exercise and ADHD

I tend to think of some level of ADHD as "normal", and I've always associated it with the need for kids to run around before sitting. I find this disturbing: Exercise may lead to better school performance for kids with ADHD

drugs have proven largely effective in treating many of the 2.5 million school-aged American children with ADHD,
In the study, Pontifex and colleagues asked 40 children aged 8 to 10, half of whom had ADHD, to spend 20 minutes either walking briskly on a treadmill or reading while seated. The children then took a brief reading comprehension and math exam similar to longer standardized tests. They also played a simple computer game in which they had to ignore visual stimuli to quickly determine which direction a cartoon fish was swimming.
The results showed all of the children performed better on both tests after exercising.
"To date there really isn't a whole lot of evidence that schools can pull from to justify why these physical education programs should be in existence," he said. "So what we're trying to do is target our research to provide that type of evidence."

Now, why would that be disturbing? Very simple: we seem to be putting a couple of million kids on medication without doing that research first. No, surely that's not what it means. This has to be a misrepresentation.
Or then again, maybe not.

Salman Khan's Ideal Classroom

As a follow-up to the previous post (now that I've read the book), I'd like to quote Khan's description of his "ideal classroom" (pp. 203 et seq):

I would group together as many as a hundred students of widely varying ages. They would seldom if ever all be doing the same thing at the same time. And while nooks and alcoves within this imagined school might be perfectly quiet for private study, other parts would be bustling with collaborative chatter.
At a given moment, perhaps one-fifth of the students would be doing computer-based lessons and exercises aimed at a deep and durable grasp of core concepts. Let me pause a moment to stress this: one-fifth of the students. This is another way of saying that only one-fifth of the school day, or one to two hours, would be spent on the Khan Academy (or some future version thereof) and any peer tutoring that it might catalyze. Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours is enough...
Twenty out of a hundred are working at computers, with one of our team teachers circulating among them, answering questions...as they occur....augmented by peer-to-peer tutoring and mentoring...
What of the other eighty students?
...learning...by way of board games... teams, building robots... creative writing projects... original music...

Hmmm... and also Well.... I find him quite convincing on the virtues of self-paced, mastery-based instruction; convincing for a larger range of topics and students than I would have expected. It's easy to agree about the deficiencies of what he calls "Swiss cheese" instruction, which sends you to the next level if you manage to pass tests with 60% or so of the right information; from tutor work in high school on up to trying to help one of my graduate students pass a Ph.D. prelim, I've been inclined to believe that each of those holes eats more time than you would have spent filling it in the first place (unless, of course, it needn't be learned in the first place.) He seems to have convincing experience, actual data with high and very-low end students, that mastery is a realistic goal for KhanAcademy-style lessons; it certainly isn't realistic for a traditional classroom. (It was arbitrarily defined as ten-right-answers-in-a-row to get to the next little lesson, with "stuck and needs help" defined as fifty questions tried without achieving mastery; he says they refined these definitions some, but doesn't say how.) And it's clear why, if they work, these lessons should be far more efficient in student-time than traditional classrooms. Or perhaps than traditional tutoring...I recently showed my daughter how to use STDEV in a Google spreadsheet, and she cut short my explanation by saying that she'd look for it on khanacademy.org and I was proud. (I did look for it myself, and commented that she should check the variance lesson right before standard deviation.)

Still, my ideal classroom would be organized differently. I think. For one thing, there would always be one or more performances going on; in fact I think that each student would at any given moment be a member of a group generating another lesson video, with their own explanation/demo. And most would be involved in some kind of drama, or some kind of music; probably most (about 70% at HCS, it seems) would be involved in sports.

But as he says, there'd be lab groups and writing groups, of course. And many groups would have mainly virtual meetings, even with current (Google Hangout, Skype, etc) technology; even more so with the kind of table I've talked about before, where you and a friend or two are at one corner of a virtual table, whose other three corners are across from you on the other side of some big screens, but are probably not in your zip code. And possibly that can grow into a Second-Life avatar meeting where you put on your goggles, step into your Kinect closet, and you can sit, stand, move a step or two without hitting the physical walls, but all the time you're in a very very very big room. (Psst, look at that galaxy! Now, pick up the black hole at its center; shift your vision into the X-ray spectrum, and watch the time dilation on your wristwatch...)

On the other hand, maybe not.

Thymio II Education Robot

Hmm..did I mention robotics lately? Your Kid Wants a Thymio II Education Robot - IEEE Spectrum

Yes, there's a trailer hook. So you can stop worrying about that. And those "mechanic fixation" points are Lego compatible. To program Thymio II, you can use a nifty graphical interface, or a simple programming language called Aseba that's similar to Matlab. And oh hey did we mention that this thing is open source from source code to hardware? 'Cause it is.
Seriously, $100 seems very cheap for a platform like this. It's cheap enough that a $1,000 grant could outfit an entire classroom with robots that are colorful, versatile, fun, and can be tackled with a GUI before graduating to writing code.

Of course there are even cheaper systems, like the rubber-band powered Walking paper Robot - YouTube.
Surely every kid should play with robots.
Or then again, maybe not.

Kids' Creativity Trending Down

It's common to focus on facts and skills, as being readily measurable. Still, there are ways to try to measure creativity, and they tell an uncomfortable story...

As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today

Kim, who is a professor of education at the College of William and Mary, analyzed scores on a battery of measures of creativity—called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)—collected from normative samples of schoolchildren in kindergarten through twelfth grade over several decades. ...

According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. ... more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984.  Yikes.... ...

the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.[6]  The correlation coefficients found between childhood TTCT scores and real-world adult creative achievements have ranged from a low of about .25 to a high of about .60, depending on which tests are included and how adult creative achievements are assessed.[6]

So, the decline in TTCT scores among school-aged children indeed does appear to be cause for concern.  Kim herself calls it the “creativity crisis,” and that term has been picked up in a number of articles in popular magazines.

Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.

Of course, maybe it's not freedom, maybe it's excessive fructose or excessive worry about fructose or too much or too little television. But it does seem like an issue worth considering, when we consider options for American schools.