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Books. Even in the USA, classrooms are starved of just books. Not to mention the third world. Okay, if it has to be some gee-whiz techno-thingy, then a Kindle

by neilk 18y ago

Books. Even in the USA, classrooms are starved of just books. Not to mention the third world. Okay, if it has to be some gee-whiz techno-thingy, then a Kindle which is about as cheap as an iPod shuffle. Which reads aloud and can automatically adjust to your reading level, suggesting new books as you go. I think we need to look at some new economic models for teaching. Maybe a school could simply garnish 5% of every dollar a student makes above, say, 75% of the median wage, for 10 years. That gives the school some guaranteed income and the incentive to teach students economically useful skills, quickly. Also, new reasons to learn and new ways to learn. The main problem with educational software today is that the administration buys it and it serves their purposes, not the students'. This is an exactly analogous situation with corporate IT software buying. Except it's even worse because the administration is a quasi-branch of the government. Out with the state curriculum and the bureaucrats. In with selling education to the people being educated. Education for its own sake. If that means we develop a course in rap lyrics, we'll give you rap lyrics. But we'll also discuss the history of martial poetry too, from the Greeks onwards. We're also going to discuss rhetoric, the mathematics of periodicity, rhythm, and the Nyquist theorem of sampling. If you want to learn how to read the Bible better, we'll do that too, and that way we can bring in practically everything in English literature after the King James Version. Graduating from a grade should be like getting a belt in martial arts. Something you do at your own pace and a test you take at your own initiative (with parental prompting too). The difference between slow students and fast students is usually something like 33-50%. So if someone needs two years to master algebra, let them TAKE two years. It's not a race for fuck's sake. Education should be interwoven with doing actually useful things. I think pg is right on the money that kids are mainly disconnected from society because we go to great lengths to disconnect them. Drug dealers know that at least some 14-year-olds can be trusted with limited responsibilities; so would it really be so terrible to have kids doing some jobs in a more positive working environment? Let's put education in unusual places, with the people who need it and are motivated to learn. Undocumented workers are where I would start. We already know these people are ambitious, hardworking, and habituated to risk.

jibiki 18y ago
The two ends of the spectrum are "education for education's sake" and "education for the real world." You can't insist on both.
- joeythibault 18y ago
  I agree, those things are contradictory. I'd go one step further as well. We can't evaluate how well we (US) are at meeting standards if we're not all looking at success as a consistent end product. We just list standards and say, "meet them". I think part of the issue is that we all look at success differently (and that is natural). Personally, I think of success as a product of the means that is "education" as being an active member in the economy, e.g. to go and get a job and pay it (education) forward through income tax. But others look at success as college attainment, which skews data and, in some cases, creates inefficiencies in our economy (landing students in massive debt, starving them of 4 years of wages and experience, pushing them down an alternate career path). Depending on where you stand, success is evaluated in different ways which really has an impact on what the best educational software design should be. IMHO, the internet is the ultimate educational tool (because it's the doorway to 1000s of tools). The issue is that educational software is almost always designed to limit access to that material, which I think is a bummer for students today. Sure there are areas of the net that have no educational value. But there are other areas that schools automatically shutoff (blogger, wordpress, youtube, etc.) that represent enormous collections of information.
jskopek 18y ago
Your approach to teaching a curriculum that is custom tailored to an individual's goals is one of those things that makes so much sense in retrospect, but at the same time an approach I have never seen discussed. Here we have this vast repository of most the world's knowledge, all indexable and cross-referencable, and for the first time in history we have the chance to deliver content in a highly personalized way. All we're missing is that last 10% - a way to aggregate and properly present that data.
- glen 18y ago
  Check out the book Disrupting Education or this blog post for more info on this: http://nixty.com/blog/2008/07/04/disrupting-education-the-academy-will-look-dramatically-different-in-6-years/ http://nixty.com/blog/2008/07/04/disrupting-education-the-ac...
- neilk 18y ago
  I suspect that last 10% will be as easy as writing the last 10% of a software project. Personally, I don't see any software solution here. It's going to have to be teaching by teachers, just organized differently. I'd be happy to be wrong.
glen 18y ago
neilk, thanks for the response. I think your metaphor of educational software being analogous to corporate software is right on. Often times, teachers and students are not even consulted on what is purchased and implemented. I also really like the idea of getting a belt in martial arts. Passing grades has become so expected and boring that there really isn't a differentiation there or a marker that the student has actually achieved something. If you were creating different paths for students to take, how would you organize the content/courses? Would you stay with the curriculum process that is taught in K-12 schools and just allow students to go at their own pace? or would you change it? If you'd change it, what would you use to determine the curriculum path? Your point about integrating education with real things is perfect. Something we've been thinking about is creating a type of student corp or tutor corp that would match up smart students with struggling students. Peer 2 Peer learning is going to be huge b/c it is really the only thing that scales. (As David Wiley has said, we have limited "teacher bandwidth" so we need to get creative, particularly when you look at things in the context of the entire world. There is just simply not enough educators out there and we are not exactly efficient at turning them out.) So, the question becomes: How do you create an ethos in which students want to help other students? Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient? or, do you think you'd need to be deliberate about creating this culture? If the latter, then how would you go about conscientiously creating this type of atmosphere? One thought is to incentivise it so that students and teachers are rewarded for reaching out. This could come in the form of Karma points, recommendations, a moving up (to stay with your metaphor: yellow belt--> green belt etc.). What else would you recommend?
- neilk 18y ago
  I'm not really an expert in education. I just get ranty about it. Go talk to John Taylor Gatto, or the people behind Frontier College in Canada, or Room to Read, or self-identified Edupunks... the list goes on. I offered the martial arts metaphor not because I think graduation lacks pizzazz, but because in the martial arts, students learn at their own pace. Someone who walks in the door at the age of 50 is exactly where some kid is who starts at the age of 12. It is anti-pedagogical to label some students as stupid because they just learn a bit slower than others and aren't advancing in lockstep. It's similarly wrong to label some students as "brilliant" because they happen to master some subjects more quickly. Often what you are measuring there is just greater preparation and support in the home. Schools are a reward and punishment system for trudging through certain institutional expectations of potential (not even actual work or achievement). We don't have this concept in any other human institution -- even the army acknowledges that some people will progress through the ranks at their own pace, and that some people are specialists, others are generalists, some are leaders, others are followers. The expectation of standardized results of human development is a sign that the institution is not being run with the intent to develop real skills. I have no idea what peer to peer learning would look like, but perhaps that is an interesting model. I disagree that there is limited teacher bandwidth. A society that can pay $5 for a cup of coffee could afford many teachers. A world where the most brilliant and hardworking professionals are confronting nearly 20-30 years of retirement could probably have a glut of teachers, if it wanted. Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient? I don't know what that means. Books are a pretty open platform, and students haven't managed to teach each other using those. What about your technology is going to be superior to books?

by neilk 18y ago

jibiki 18y ago

The two ends of the spectrum are "education for education's sake" and "education for the real world." You can't insist on both.

joeythibault 18y ago
I agree, those things are contradictory. I'd go one step further as well. We can't evaluate how well we (US) are at meeting standards if we're not all looking at success as a consistent end product. We just list standards and say, "meet them". I think part of the issue is that we all look at success differently (and that is natural). Personally, I think of success as a product of the means that is "education" as being an active member in the economy, e.g. to go and get a job and pay it (education) forward through income tax. But others look at success as college attainment, which skews data and, in some cases, creates inefficiencies in our economy (landing students in massive debt, starving them of 4 years of wages and experience, pushing them down an alternate career path). Depending on where you stand, success is evaluated in different ways which really has an impact on what the best educational software design should be. IMHO, the internet is the ultimate educational tool (because it's the doorway to 1000s of tools). The issue is that educational software is almost always designed to limit access to that material, which I think is a bummer for students today. Sure there are areas of the net that have no educational value. But there are other areas that schools automatically shutoff (blogger, wordpress, youtube, etc.) that represent enormous collections of information.

jskopek 18y ago

Your approach to teaching a curriculum that is custom tailored to an individual's goals is one of those things that makes so much sense in retrospect, but at the same time an approach I have never seen discussed. Here we have this vast repository of most the world's knowledge, all indexable and cross-referencable, and for the first time in history we have the chance to deliver content in a highly personalized way. All we're missing is that last 10% - a way to aggregate and properly present that data.

glen 18y ago
Check out the book Disrupting Education or this blog post for more info on this: http://nixty.com/blog/2008/07/04/disrupting-education-the-academy-will-look-dramatically-different-in-6-years/ http://nixty.com/blog/2008/07/04/disrupting-education-the-ac...
neilk 18y ago
I suspect that last 10% will be as easy as writing the last 10% of a software project. Personally, I don't see any software solution here. It's going to have to be teaching by teachers, just organized differently. I'd be happy to be wrong.

glen 18y ago

neilk, thanks for the response. I think your metaphor of educational software being analogous to corporate software is right on. Often times, teachers and students are not even consulted on what is purchased and implemented. I also really like the idea of getting a belt in martial arts. Passing grades has become so expected and boring that there really isn't a differentiation there or a marker that the student has actually achieved something. If you were creating different paths for students to take, how would you organize the content/courses? Would you stay with the curriculum process that is taught in K-12 schools and just allow students to go at their own pace? or would you change it? If you'd change it, what would you use to determine the curriculum path? Your point about integrating education with real things is perfect. Something we've been thinking about is creating a type of student corp or tutor corp that would match up smart students with struggling students. Peer 2 Peer learning is going to be huge b/c it is really the only thing that scales. (As David Wiley has said, we have limited "teacher bandwidth" so we need to get creative, particularly when you look at things in the context of the entire world. There is just simply not enough educators out there and we are not exactly efficient at turning them out.) So, the question becomes: How do you create an ethos in which students want to help other students? Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient? or, do you think you'd need to be deliberate about creating this culture? If the latter, then how would you go about conscientiously creating this type of atmosphere? One thought is to incentivise it so that students and teachers are rewarded for reaching out. This could come in the form of Karma points, recommendations, a moving up (to stay with your metaphor: yellow belt--> green belt etc.). What else would you recommend?

neilk 18y ago
I'm not really an expert in education. I just get ranty about it. Go talk to John Taylor Gatto, or the people behind Frontier College in Canada, or Room to Read, or self-identified Edupunks... the list goes on. I offered the martial arts metaphor not because I think graduation lacks pizzazz, but because in the martial arts, students learn at their own pace. Someone who walks in the door at the age of 50 is exactly where some kid is who starts at the age of 12. It is anti-pedagogical to label some students as stupid because they just learn a bit slower than others and aren't advancing in lockstep. It's similarly wrong to label some students as "brilliant" because they happen to master some subjects more quickly. Often what you are measuring there is just greater preparation and support in the home. Schools are a reward and punishment system for trudging through certain institutional expectations of potential (not even actual work or achievement). We don't have this concept in any other human institution -- even the army acknowledges that some people will progress through the ranks at their own pace, and that some people are specialists, others are generalists, some are leaders, others are followers. The expectation of standardized results of human development is a sign that the institution is not being run with the intent to develop real skills. I have no idea what peer to peer learning would look like, but perhaps that is an interesting model. I disagree that there is limited teacher bandwidth. A society that can pay $5 for a cup of coffee could afford many teachers. A world where the most brilliant and hardworking professionals are confronting nearly 20-30 years of retirement could probably have a glut of teachers, if it wanted. Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient? I don't know what that means. Books are a pretty open platform, and students haven't managed to teach each other using those. What about your technology is going to be superior to books?