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.

Motivation, Feedback, Content

For an infovore like me, the Internet does indeed seem like a gigantic, interactive version of the libraries that took (or do I mean provided?) so much of my childhood -- and between them, they've served as basis for self-education that keeps on going. But does that provide an alternative to classroom learning for normal people? I dunno. Arnold Kling suggests in Online Self-Education: The Bigger, Closer Library | askblog that we

think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.

However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.

That's quite a claim, but it's not at all impossible. Feedback systems on phones and tables will not, of course, be similar to the feedback system provided by a teacher any more than a sewing machine's motions are similar to those of a traditional seamstress. However, the app that reacts to your input will have learned from experience with tens of millions of students, some of whom had more or less exactly the problem you're having. Dissimilar != worse.

Algorithms learning about human learning

One consequence of the online-5-minute-lecture (e.g., Khan Academy) approach is that with lessons broken into bite-size pieces, each of which has associated exercises, it's easier to test the effectiveness of any given piece. Khan Academy, Video tasks on the learning dashboard

Many of our exercises are tagged with “curated related videos”—videos that are hand-selected as related to the exercise. Using this as a starting point, we looked at all the videos that were already tagged as related to any exercise. For each of these videos, we compared the accuracy on its associated exercise both before watching the video and after watching it. From there, we selected the top fifty most effective videos, each improving the accuracy on its associated exercise by at least twenty percent, and are now highlighting them on the mission dashboard. When the system recommends an exercise with an associated video on the list of our top fifty related videos, it will automatically recommend the related video as well.

Compare with a human teacher who is trying to see which explanations are most helpful, judging class reaction and then perhaps a weekly quiz...the algorithm is of course completely incapable of what the human does, but on the other hand it has immediate access to individual data about what works for whom. In the not-terribly-long run we should be able to have videos tagged as having different styles (highly compressed v. wordy, words v. equations v. pictures, rules v. examples, humor v. straight exposition...) and automatically choose whichever works for given students based on what has improved their scores in the past. I suppose in the very long run we're moving towards a time and motion study program for small units of learning-effort.

Or then again, maybe not.

Interesting Math in Boring Math Classes

Almost all kids find math class to be boring. That included me, even though I was a completely weird kid who loved math and read math books for fun, and when I doodled in math class it was quite likely to produce a snowflake curve, as in Doodling in math: Triangle party | Doodling in math | Khan Academy. That's by Khan Academy's Recreational Mathemusician, Vi Hart, and you'll notice you can use the Khan Academy sidebar to explore her cool mathy videos which I would have loved until I grew up (irony filter applies here -- I do love them, and in my 60s it's probably too late to grow up at all.) She also maintains two YouTube channels, vihart for intricate fun and music, and vihartvihart for strange randomness. (Have you ever counted down with your microwave? I have.)

Today I happened to notice the "math class is boring" theme at 5:20 in an interview with her.
Of course math class is boring, and that is a starting point for her work, but she says it's only administrators who object to the way she's being "insulting to teachers"; she does get lots of feedback from teachers, of course, but teachers know what the problem is, and it's not them.

And what is the problem? Well, it has to do with the standards and the standardized tests...

Computers Bad? Sometimes...

I meant to post on this a while ago, after seeing articles like Why you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop - Vox. I often post things about how technology can make things better,[update: fixed typo] but technology is all about providing options and sometimes those options aren't good. Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension - Association for Psychological Science

The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”

“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.

Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.

I posted a couple of years ago about Cornell Notes, which is probably as good as any among the handwritten note-taking systems. I wonder if it works to do the Cornell Notes "step three" (writing later summaries) on a computer. Or if a "step four" involving flash cards generated from the notes might help. Could be.

Or then again, maybe not.

Chromebooks in education

Gadgets come and gadgets go. A few years ago I thought netbooks would become standard courseware; then tablets; now chromebooks? From a couple of weeks ago: Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools - Slashdot

Apple thrilled investors earlier this week when they revealed that they had sold 13 million iPads to schools and claimed 85% of the educational tablet market, but that wasn't the whole story. It turns out that Apple has only sold 5 million iPads to schools since February 2013, or an average of less than a million tablets a quarter over 6 quarters. It turns out that instead of buying iPads, schools are buying Chromebooks. Google reported that a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter, well over half of the 1.8 million units sold in the second quarter. With Android tablets getting better, Apple is losing market share in the consumer tablet market, and now it looks Apple is also losing the educational market to Google.

So, for people who haven't been following this development...I'd already heard people claiming Chromebooks and education: A perfect match | ZDNet

Chromebooks, in general, are good choices for schools. They're lightweight, durable, inexpensive, secure, and fun to use....

He makes a good point about Chromebook having "the most secure operating system," and I knew about Google's own Chrome for Education and Chromebooks for Education Overview - YouTube pages, and "Manage 10 or 10,000 Chromebooks with ease"... Also about collections like Free Technology for Teachers: 30 Ideas for Using Chromebooks in Education. However, I hadn't noticed Private school’s Chromebook program explains why Google’s laptops have captured nearly 20% of the educational market - TechRepublic:

So, the school began throwing things out there to see what would stick. They got some iPads, Android tablets, Lenovo tablets, and Chromebooks. The wow factor was high with the iPads, and the school was convinced they were going to be an iPad school, until the kids started trying to produce content on them. At this point the focus shifted to entirely to the Chromebook and Google Apps, where content was easy to produce and collaboration came naturally.

In public schools, Google In Education: Chromebooks A 'Right Time Technology' For Passaic, New Jersey School District

Google‘s Chromebook — and by extension Chrome OS — is being adopted by our education system at a brisk pace. As of February 2013 more than 2000 districts in the United States have deployed Chromebooks to their students and faculty. I’ve reported on Chromebooks before, but I wanted to take a deeper dive and explore the benefits as perceived by superintendents and IT directors.

And I also hadn't realized how well you can Use your Chromebook offline - Chromebook Help. It really does look good. So maybe we're actually moving towards the One True Technology which won't be forgotten five years from now.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

Independent (online) learning

A freshman survey from UCLA found High School Students Not Waiting For Schools To Go Online

"Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning."

So, never mind what the school does -- make sure your kids check out Coursera and Khan Academy and CrashCourse - YouTube (with the individual "courses" like Biology (That's Why Carbon Is A Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1) and World History and so on), not to mention random excellence like SciShow Space and MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth, individual user channels like Vi Hart (a recreational mathemusician who works for Khan Academy) and SmarterEveryDay, and ...
There's a lot of cool stuff out there. Learning it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with grades. On the other hand, learning it helps a lot with later "academic success and lifelong learning."

Fractions

Every now and then, when we consider where education should go, it behooves us to pause and reflect on where we're coming from. The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: Why the Third Pounder hamburger failed

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, ... the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. ... instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
--Elizabeth Green, NYT Magazine, on losing money by overestimating the American public's intelligence

Her source for the story is mentioned by Kevin Drum in The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff. I'm skeptical of the moral drawn by Green -- in fact I've tried to teach computer science to bright Colgate students who had major difficulty with fractions or even with "You know how many feet and inches tall you are; you know how many inches there are in a foot; what is your total height in inches?" I ended up attributing this to "Math Anxiety" as described by the books of Sheila Tobias, and I don't think that's what Green is talking about counteracting... Still it's a good story, and it might very well be true.

Disruption

I strongly doubt the "2015" here, but I think "The Futurist" is right to think that the education industry is headed for a multi-faceted disruption of the general sort that he describes: the jobs and careers that will best survive in the 21st century will require skills that we now associate with a college degree, and personality traits which we often signal with a college degree, but they don't actually require a degree of any kind. And that opens us up to changes in education. The Futurist: The Education Disruption : 2015

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them. If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college. If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree. As change happens on the margins, it will only take a small percentage of the workforce to be hired by prestigious employers.

...  the ever-increasing variety of technological disruption means that the foremost career of the modern era is that of the serial entrepreneur. If universities are not the place where the foremost career can be learned, then how important are formal degrees from these universities? Since each entrepreneurial venture is different, the individual will have to synthesize a custom solution from available components.

... Udacity, Coursera, MITx, Khan Academy, and Udemy are just a few of the entities enabling low-cost education at all levels. Some are for-profit, some are non-profit. Some address higher education, and some address K-12 education. Some count as credit towards degrees, and some are not intended for degree-granting, but rather for remedial learning. But among all these websites, an innovative pupil can learn a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects and craft an interlocking, holistic education that is specific to his or her goals. ....
(Moody's has already downgraded the outlook of the entire US higher education industry). But most importantly, the most valuable knowledge will become increasingly self-taught from content available to all, and the entire economy will begin the process of adjusting to this new reality.

Parts of this are certainly true.

(Virtual) Flash Cards

Flash cards help in the memorization part of almost anything you might want to learn, in school or out of it; virtual flash cards can be organized and presented in ways that physical flash cards can't. (They can also support audio and video components.) Consider Cool Tools – SuperMemo + Anki

In high school, I tried to learn Spanish, and failed. In college, I tried again, and failed again. Then, in my thirties, I discovered SuperMemo, and within a year I had memorized thousands of Spanish words and phrases and was finally on my way to speaking Spanish.

SuperMemo is software premised on the idea that there is an ideal time to practice any item you are trying to remember. You want to practice when you have almost forgotten it. Too soon, and you waste your time, and even interfere with long term memory formation. Too late, and you’ve lost the trace, and have struggle to learn it again....your ideal time to practice can be predicted from your history of attempted recall. ... None of them are perfect from a usability point of view. But any of them will work far, far better than random study of flashcards. These tools will not give you all the pieces of the learning puzzle, obviously. Memorization is only one step. But it is a crucial, difficult, first step, and it is wonderful to get a boost.

So....imagine a school where one part of course preparation is the preparation of flash card sets, building up year by year; better yet, imagine a Khan-style "One World Schoolhouse" where part of the preparation for each five-minute video is a flash card review set (to go along with, and become part of, the list of quiz questions).

Meanwhile, of course, you can use flashcards on computer, tablet, or smartphone (the open-source AnkiDroid Flashcards - Android Apps on Google Play, or the $24.99 AnkiMobile Flashcards on the App Store on iTunes for iPhone/iPad, or the open-source Windows/Mac/Linux Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards for your desktop or laptop) for the memorization part of anything you'd like to learn. Isn't there something you'd like to learn?

Flipped Classrooms and Class Size

The flipped classroom (Amazon link to cited book) doesn't depend on the Khan Academy. I note a New York Times op-ed on Turning Education Upside Down

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates....
Like everything disruptive, online education is highly controversial. But the flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. ... many people are holding it up as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom.

It is a strategy to maximize human contact by teachers. Interestingly, once we learn to use it effectively, there is really no such thing as "class size". Teachers spend their time interacting with small groups and individuals, no matter whether there are 20 students per grade or 2000.

Rethinking School Motivations

Radio Free Hamilton notes that Educator Speaks at HCS Thursday

Educator and author Dr. Yong Zhao, who wrote World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, will speak in the HCS auditorium at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. ... ... He also talks about “Black Collar,” or REAL (rigorous, entrepreneurial, authentic, life-long) learning and the need to create the entrepreneurial spirit in our students, as the learners of the new millennium.

The "entrepreneurial" theme is also visible this morning in Salon.com; psychologist Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, says that School is a prison — and damaging our kids - Salon.com

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.
When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein)....
I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education....
This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.
The focus of my own research has been on learning in children who are of “school age,” but who aren’t sent to school, or not to school as conventionally understood. ... In these settings, children’s natural curiosity and zest for learning persist all the way through childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood.

What I'd like to focus on is the "Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose" motivational research suggesting that the top-down rewards we use are not just non-optimal, they are specifically known to be counter-productive in cognitive tasks. There's a cute RSA Animate summary by Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which I'll embed here: He's not talking about school, but about motivation for cognitive tasks generally. I think he's probably right. In fact I think all three of these are talking about the same thing.
Or then again, maybe not.
Update: Yong Zhao's blog, just last week, reported on Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » China Enters “Testing-free” Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform

No standardized tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new actions China is taking...

So we become China and China becomes us? Maybe as the NSA gets more intrusive, they'll turn libertarian? (Or then again, maybe not.)
Also this morning... Economics Nobelist Vernon Smith says Discovery gives learning that touch of magic | learning, know, learn - Life - The Orange County Register

What has endured from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning, a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less important in proportion to scores on achievement tests. ... What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering.

It's all about motivation vs. control? Maybe.
Update 8/28 On the subject of Yong Zhao, I should probably have also mentioned HamiltonCentralOptions: The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately which links to earlier posts mentioning him.

Standard Schooling v. Human Diversity

Psychology professor and "quantified self" proponent Seth Roberts says of Occupational Specialization as Far Back as the Bronze Age that

The more you see the centrality of occupational specialization to human nature, the more you will see how modern schooling malnourishes almost everyone who undergoes it — which is almost everyone. Human nature takes people at one place and time — such as Mycenaean Greece — and pushes them to become adults who do all sorts of different things (woodcutter, herald, beekeeper . . . ). It takes people who start off the same or almost the same — same place, same food, same weather, similar genes — and creates diversity among them.

Modern education tries to do the opposite: Take a diverse set of students and make them the same. One example is No Child Left Behind. Another is that in almost every college class, all students are given the same material, the same assignments, and graded on the same one-dimensional scale. We don’t need everyone to be the same; in fact, we need exactly the opposite. The more diverse we are, the sooner we will find solutions to pressing problems, because they will be attacked in many different ways.

He has written occasionally about educational methods at the university level, and of course as a champion of self-experimentation he's focused on results that vary from one individual to the next. It happens to be Father's Day; if I were a father (rather than grandfather) of young children now, I do believe I'd start a notebook for each, each notebook titled What Works For Me And How I Know It, with a major section on How I Learn Best and How I Learned That It's True, with subsections about...well, never mind.

Or then again, maybe not.

Augmented Reality & Education

The Most Powerful App for Education

Bill Shribman is a photographer and a Senior Executive Producer at WGBH Public Television where he and his team create websites, games and apps for popular kids shows such as Arthur, Martha Speaks and Curious George. .... Take a tour of gesture-based games, augmented reality apps, and an app that helps kids with autism infer emotions through photos, and you may agree with Shribman that the most powerful app for education may be the camera.

The station is WGBH-TV and they blog their apps at Apps | WGBH Kids Interactive Group; I don't know that I'd say that the app is the camera, but I would say that apps using cameras (and today's tilt/acceleration/location/etc sensors along with tomorrow's everything-we-know-how-to-sense sensors) can become part of reality in a way that apps stuck with pre-defined data never could have done, and not only for the smaller kids.


Or then again, maybe not.

All that Jazz -- Education Analogy

Alex Tabarrok, economics professor and co-founder of the online Marginal Revolution University, comments on Online Education and Jazz

there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience...It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience... and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.

Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.

I think that's true, but I think that maybe he's missing part of the point of his own work and that of other online services: online teaching environments and live teaching environments both offer opportunities for interaction, and for student improvisation. Online teaching can (and probably will) get better with time, the techniques are reasonably cumulative. The approach of, say, the Berlitz LP records that helped me learn Spanish fifty years ago is still available online -- it is now supplemented, not entirely replaced, with the game-like approach of Rosetta Stone which one of my sons used recently, to help get ready to go to Nicaragua with some old friends from HCS. Live teaching from a great teacher is not cumulative in the same way (I was a worse teacher than most of my teachers, no matter how hard I tried.)

If MOOCs were going to be "everybody watch the same lecture and then take the same exam", that would be of some value, and the use of a great teacher could increase that value greatly...but that's not what's happening. On places like CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings you can learn who is teaching what and how, and how well it worked...you can learn about online courses, yes. But at the same time, when you interact with software like that of the Khan Academy, that software is learning about you. In fact it can pay more individual attention to you than any human teacher can, outside of the traditional 1-1 ideal, and it can eventually improve on that 1-1 ideal because it can try out different approaches on millions of students -- different explanations, different experiences suggested by thousands of different teachers and students. It can note which works for whom -- and it can compare you to more somewhat-similar students than any 1-1 human teacher can ever make notes on.

Will it ever outdo human teaching in every respect? Gee, I dunno. But it can certainly outdo human teaching in many respects.

Or then again, maybe not.

Why Girls Do Better At School - Slashdot

A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.'

Actually (after three boys and two girls) I see what they mean but I'm not sure how to put it together...I suspect that a large fraction of each of those, including "learning independence", has to do with boys' greater, umm, rebelliousness -- unwillingness to do stuff that doesn't make sense to them, lesser respect for authority, stuff like that. It's a question of incentives, which will have to be addressed by 21st century school design.
Or then again, maybe not.

Asimov on the Khan Academy, Wikipedia, etc

From before the internet (1988) a video interview Isaac Asimov on Bill Moyers World of Ideas; Asimov is arguing that if you let kids loose with their own computers and the ability to access on-line info relating to their own interests, (as well as a certain amount of required learning and interactions with other kids), then learning can lose the stigma of being kid stuff. As Moyers puts it, the reward of school is like the reward of prison, that when you're educated they let you out and you don't need to go back. (And you're all grown up.)

Of course, we'd probably want a rather drastic reduction in the list of things that kids are required to study.
Maybe.

To Be Educated...

A note from slightly longer ago than most of my notes:

Every systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgement as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this...

On the Parts of Animals, Book I Ch. 1; Aristotle

And I was thinking of this in the context of a Washington Post argument about chemistry requirements -- "Why Are You Forcing My Son to Take Chemistry?". In the Pipeline:

It's short, but it can be summarized as My son will not be a chemist. He will not be a scientist. A year of chemistry class will do nothing for him but make him miserable. He could be taking something else that would be doing him more good. And this father is probably right about his son, who's 15, not becoming any sort of scientist....

And today I see -- You Should Take Chemistry: A Response. In the Pipeline:

Should your son be forced to take chemistry? Absolutely. But the curriculum needs to be rethought in a way that would instill practical knowledge, curiosity about the world, and an appetite for at least understanding scientific achievement and its necessity/implications.
People don’t have to become scientists if they don’t want to, but they should have a fundamental understanding of scientific concepts. That way, people like myself need not be terrified that an ignorant public will vote to slash funding for scientific research and understanding...

So I wonder...it seems to me that the guy being quoted is going further than he should. It would be great to instill curiosity about the world and appetites for healthy things, it would be great if those who buy fish (or grow gardens) knew about elementary chemical concepts like pH, but what we need is for future voters to be educated in the Aristotelian sense. They need to be able to tell who to trust, in a world in which they cannot trust the authority of government because those who hold that authority frequently don't know what they're talking about, or possibly don't dare admit what they know because this would offend their core supporters.
Or then again, maybe not.

Open-Source Learning

This morning's TED talk was Richard Baraniuk's 2006 Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning lecture. He wants to take a large number of books, break them down into small chunks, package each chunk in XML to make it easy to combine with other chunks (not necessarily the ones it originally came near) and replace the idea of a textbook with the idea of a collection of such chunks. Okay by me.
Actually, I'd like to see chunks, video or audio or text or all of the above, labeled with pre-requisites and objectives; these labels would also appear on knowledge maps like the Khan Academy's. Then you place yourself (or your teacher/tutor/advisor places you) on the knowledge map, perhaps by taking quizzes, and you identify your final objectives, and we identify lessons which are claimed to get you in the right direction....
Or then again, maybe not. The Connexions website did seem both clunky and underpowered, but maybe that's just me.

Cornell Notes

On being systematic: I wonder how many variations on Cornell notes there are, and how to identify which students should use which method...What We Learned Today: Cornell Notes

the note-taking page is set up in a specific way. There is a wide left column for questions, keywords, or cues. The wider right column is where the main notes are taken. At the bottom of the page, there is an area to summarize the notes taken on that page.
Step One: When you’re taking notes in class or from another source, take notes on the right side of the page. Don’t use complete sentences, and abbreviate what you can. Write down the key ideas, and pay special attention to things written on the blackboard, if you are using this for school.
Step Two: Soon after you are finished taking notes, on the left side of the page write questions, keywords, main ideas, or cues to remind you about the notes. This will reinforce the learning in your mind, and help you make it all clear, connecting related bits of information. It is also a good opportunity to see if you have any questions about the material yourself.
Step Three: Within the next day, on the bottom of the page summarize the material in the notes column.

Maybe everybody should do things that way, or in some other specific way. I am more inclined to suspect that everybody (including me, at age 60) should spend part of each year trying to look for (and measure) a better way, even if it's a way that wasn't better before.
Or then again, maybe not.

Update 2014: Noticed that the wired.com link had succumbed to linkrot, asked Google to find the article on wired.com, and replaced the link target with the "archive.wired.com" value.