Good idea to take a moment and watch and listen to the video … feels like they sent a camera into a time machine and came back with this report. If you want to move forward you’ll pay attention to where education (aka learning) is headed.
Another sign that the college lecture might be dying: Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur is championing the “flipped classroom,” a model where information traditionally transferred during lectures is learned on a student’s own time, and classroom time is spent discussing and applying knowledge to real-world situations. To make it easy for professors to transition out of lecture mode, Mazur has developed Learning Catalytics, an interactive software that enables them to make the most of student interactions and maximize the retention of knowledge.
Mazur sold attendees at the recent Building Learning Communities conference on this new approach by first asking them to identify something they’re good at, and then having them explain how they mastered it. After the crowd shared, Mazur pointed out that no one said they’d learned by listening to lectures. Similarly, Mazur said, college students don’t learn by taking notes during a lecture and then regurgitating information. They need to be able to discuss concepts, apply them to problems and get real-time feedback. Mazur says Learning Catalytics enables this process to take place.
The way the software works is that first the instructor inputs the concept she wants students to discuss. The program then helps create either multiple choice or “open-ended questions that ask for numerical, algebraic, textual, or graphical responses.” Students then respond to these questions using electronic devices they’re already bringing to class, like a laptop or smartphone.
The instructor can see a snapshot of who “gets” a concept and who still needs extra help, and then pair up students accordingly. The students even receive personalized messages on their devices telling them who to talk to in class, like “turn to your right and talk to Bob,” until they master the concept. And, when it’s time to study, they can access questions and answers from the class discussions.
Learning Catalytics was so successful in Mazur’s physics classroom that it’s being rolled out across Harvard, but it’s also open to other users on an invitation-only basis. If this tech-based flipped classroom approach takes off, maybe we’ll end up with a generation of students that retain what they’ve learned, long after the final is over.
By Anu Partanen
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.
The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known — if it was known for anything at all — as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life — Newsweek ranked it number one last year — and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.
Finland’s schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.
Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation’s education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.
So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.
And yet it wasn’t clear that Sahlberg’s message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.
* * *
During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather’s TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an “intriguing school-reform model.”
Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. “Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”
This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it’s true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
The irony of Sahlberg’s making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America’s best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend — not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg’s statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.
Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he’s become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.
Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland’s success. Sahlberg’s new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.
From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students’ performance if you don’t test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?
The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do.
For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.
Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.
As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master’s degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal’s responsibility to notice and deal with it.
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: “Real winners do not compete.” It’s hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland’s success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg’s comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don’t exist in Finland.
“Here in America,” Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, “parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It’s the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.”
Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.
Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
* * *
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
In fact, since academic excellence wasn’t a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland’s students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland — unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway — was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.
That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year — or even just the price of a house in a good public school district — and the other “99 percent” is painfully plain to see.
* * *
Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.
Yet Sahlberg doesn’t think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country — as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn’t lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.
Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation’s education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country’s school system than the nation’s size or ethnic makeup.
Indeed, Finland’s population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state — after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.
What’s more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country’s education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn’t rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.
With America’s manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. — as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down — is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland’s experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.
Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn’t meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a “pamphlet of hope.”
“When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960’s, many said it couldn’t be done,” Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. “But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland’s dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn’t be done.”
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important — as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform — Finland’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
More information
Professor Pasi Sahlberg’s website
“Finnish Lessons”, by Pasi Sahlbert
The OECD’s Better Life Index for Education
Nick Clegg speech on Social Mobility
Roy Hattersley’s New Statesman review of “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Professor John Seddon addressing California Faculty Association
“Yes, we are all in this together”, New Statesman
MORNING MEETING School is in.
New York Times By JENNY ANDERSON Published: April 13, 2012
LAST month, two kindergarten classes at the Blue School were hard at work doing what many kindergartners do: drawing. One group pursued a variation on the self-portrait. “That’s me thinking about my brain,” one 5-year-old-girl said of her picture. Down the hall, children with oil pastels in hand were illustrating their emotions, mapping where they started and where they ended. For one girl, sadness ended at home with a yummy drink and her teddy bear.
REFLECTION David Kelly, director of curriculum at the Blue School, meets weekly with the kindergarten teachers.
Grappling so directly with thoughts and emotions may seem odd for such young brains, but it is part of the DNA of the Blue School, a downtown Manhattan private school that began six years ago as a play group. From the beginning, the founders wanted to incorporate scientific research about childhood development into the classroom. Having rapidly grown to more than 200 students in preschool through third grade, the school has become a kind of national laboratory for integrating cognitive neuroscience and cutting-edge educational theory into curriculum, professional development and school design.
“Schools were not applying this new neurological science out there to how we teach children,” said Lindsey Russo, whose unusual title, director of curriculum documentation and research, hints at how seriously the Blue School takes this mission. “Our aim is to take those research tools and adapt them to what we do in the school.”
So young children at the Blue School learn about what has been called “the amygdala hijack” — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a “toward state,” in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control. Last year, the curriculum guide was amended to include the term “meta-cognition”: the ability to think about thinking.
“Having language for these mental experiences gives children more chances to regulate their emotions,” said David Rock, who is a member of the Blue School’s board and a founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, a global research group dedicated to understanding the brain science of leadership.
That language is then filtered through a 6-year-old’s brain.
Miles, one of the kindergartners drawing their emotions, showed off his picture and described the battle it depicted between happiness and anger this way: “The happy fights angry, but angry gets blocked by the force field and can’t get out.” Happiness could escape through his mouth, Miles explained. But anger got trapped, turning into sadness.
With ample research showing that negative emotions impede learning while positive emotions broaden children’s attention and their ability to acquire and retain information, strategies for regulating emotions are getting more emphasis in progressive schools across the country.
“The science of learning is something teachers are paying more and more attention to,” said Mariale Hardiman, director of the Neuro-Education Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. She was not familiar with the Blue School but said she would endorse any school trying to integrate academic and emotional education.
“We can no longer think that the two systems are separate,” Dr. Hardiman said, “and that children should leave their emotions at the door.”
For all the attention brain science is receiving in schools, experts say it is too soon to know whether its application will lead to improved academic outcomes. And some researchers say that while they embrace new ideas — especially around self-control — they personally prefer a more traditional approach to pedagogy.
“The older approach has led to some very good outcomes,” said Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University and co-author of “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain,” a child development primer for parents.
But the Blue School clearly has its appeal. This year, it had eight applications for each spot in its program for 3-year-olds, making it a typically hypercompetitive Manhattan private school. Tuition for students in kindergarten through third grade is $31,910 a year.
“I’m never anxious about academics,” said Thomas Bierer, the father of first-grade twins who have been at the school for two years. “My main thing is how they will interact with others and what kind of people will they be.”
TRIP PLANNING Shanon Greenfield and her first-grade class carefully plotted a visit to the New York Aquarium in Coney Island.
Teachers ask questions but rarely offer answers, instead helping students learn from one another. “Learning is not an individual act,” David Kelly, the school’s director of curriculum, said. “It’s a social act.”
In November, Shanon Greenfield asked her first graders what they wanted to study. Sharks and leaves each developed a strong following. Over weeks of discussion, the students decided they should go to an aquarium to learn more about one of the topics they had picked. Ms. Greenfield posted a road map for their research. What do they know? What do they want to know? How will they find it out?
The students set goals: Pick an aquarium, figure out how to get there, plan what to do while there and afterward. By mid-January, they were pondering transportation options: school bus (free) or ferry (one student thought it was most direct). They set a deadline for the trip, and in February visited the New York Aquarium in Coney Island — by bus.
“The end goal is not facts about sharks,” Ms. Greenfield said. “It’s not to recreate anything. The end goal is the process.”
Other progressive schools in Manhattan and across the country take a child-centered approach to education, with a heavy dose of social and emotional learning. But many of them turn toward a traditional academic curriculum by second or third grade. Testing, with all of its anxiety, kicks in, and content, not process, becomes paramount.
This being New York, even Blue School parents are not immune. Starting last year, when the oldest children in the school became second graders, parents began voicing increasing concern about the school’s lack of traditional assessments. The school had been preoccupied with moving almost every previous year. But with a permanent home established on Water Street, the parents, in town hall-style meetings and group discussions, asked the school to do more testing.
One parent who supported the push was David Beal, an adviser to the president of National Geographic, who noted that the school will end at fifth grade and that the children will be thrust into a test-happy world. “We don’t want to find out after we’ve left that we’ve missed some important chunk of learning,” he said.
The school responded. Four-year-olds are now being given a standard private school assessment, and this year for the first time, third graders will take the E.R.B., a widely used test.
Even with the changes, the Blue School is not for everyone. Emily Glickman, founder of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, said her clients found it a “little too artsy and alternative.”
“I find more and more, for their tuition dollars, families want tradition, structure and the three R’s,” she said.
Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist and co-author of the parenting guide “The Whole-Brain Child,” who is also an adviser to the school, said there were three others R’s: reflection, relationships and resilience — and schools should teach those, too.
He spent three days at the school in late March working with students, teachers and parents on topics ranging from what learning is to why multitasking was not good for the brain (concentration is better at creating neural connections, which result in long-term synaptic change, otherwise known as learning). “Kids who learn social and emotional skills do better academically,” Dr. Siegel said. “They are happier, and their emotions are more rewarding.”
So what happens when you do too much multitasking, he asked some third graders. “Your brain explodes,” said one girl, squirming. “Ew.”
This would be funny if it was not really happening.
The responsibility for knowledge and know-how is being placed on the learner and not necessarily on the company anymore. I believe there are some huge implications to this trend:
When you cross-reference these system failures with other countries you discover a startling fact. The countries that are ahead of us are the ones with the best on-your-own education systems. It’s not the formal school system that is giving them the lead but the system that enables their citizens to learn and continue learning on their own.
So the upshot is pretty simple. We need to revamp the educational system to produce great learners. It’s totally possible for several compelling reasons:
No reason that is except for a mountain of resistance: entrenched stakeholders in the old system; the politics of hold-the-line; stubborn inertia; “teachers” unions; teachers themselves; bureaucrats and their selfish bureaucracies; Boreds of Education; lots of people who hold the old dear and the fear the new; well-intentioned people without a desire to really see the system change … and more.
But despair not, change will come to the educational system, it will just take time. Planks Principle about the way science changes is worth repeating here. In his autobiography, Planck remarks that a “new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
It’s no wonder that a visionary like Sal Kahn literally started his brilliant game-changing program in a closet …
I’ve written several posts about the evolution of education, especially from the analog past to the digital present and future.
My own experience between the two was real a wake-up call. I bought a new car a many thousands of miles ago and had a lot of music I wanted to hear from my cassette tapes (analog). The new car could only play cassettes and not discs. That was okay until I went over to Borders (remember them?) to buy some new cassettes (remember them?).
Surprise! No more cassettes only discs … Bill Gates was right, the pace of change is changing.
Longer story shortened, I was listening to the old cassettes until I found a way to transmit the music from my iPod (digital) through my car’s stereo speakers.
Back to Crossfy. I’ve been wondering since then who was going to be smart enough to build a bridge from the ‘old’ analog – which will be around for quite awhile yet – to the new digital.
And here it is …
“Think of all the possibilities” … Crossfy is an Brazilian company that has figured out how to connect the offline and online worlds, build a bridge between space and cyberspace. Well known in the Brazilian startup community, its CEO Amure Pinho is also the founder of Sync Mobile Based in Rio de Janeiro, a startup initially focused on developing apps and other mobile solutions.
The Crossfy technology identifies printed ads and images to give access to associated digital content, from text and audio to video. It connects the offline to the online world, via a mobile phone.
As Amure Pinho explains:
“The integration between print and digital media will revolutionize the way we consume newspaper content. For instance, think of all the possibilities around the upcoming Olympic Games in London. For the first time, Brazil’s main TV channel won’t broadcast the largest sports event of the year. This gives us space to deliver a new experience on top of print media. Who knows, this could even help print media to be stronger than TV over that period.”
Imagine you’re reading a textbook, and there’s a great piece about [ fill in the blank ], and you hold your phone (or iPad) over the book and SHAZAM you get your choice of
… and more.
I know it would be a curated link, and not as much fun as surfing around, then again how many textbooks make you want to learn all there is to learn about a subject? I don’t know about you, but anything that brings the printed page ‘alive’ for many students is a great option for people trying to transfer information to others, not to mention their instructors (facilitators … more on that later).
For starters, since it always helps to know where you are before you decide where you’re going, let’s first take a quick 30,000 foot look at the three economic paradigms, from the Agricultural to the Idea Economy.
Once you see where we’ve been, and understand the business models, methods, theories and approaches that were designed for the Agricultural and Industrial Economies, you will hopefully see why business models everywhere needs to change, why learning experiences need to change, and why the decentralized learning experience is so crucial to success in the this type of economy.
Economic paradigms are at the very heart of the way we live and have lived. They are a critical part of the Social Contract. They directly – albeit usually unnoticed – affect your life in every imaginable way. And the educational systems and programs are either in concert with the current economic paradigm, or they quickly become irrelevant.
The Agricultural Economy
Economists usually separate the last 300 or so years into three economic paradigms. They started when there was a break from things made on a small scale, when the things made and sold by artists, craftsmen, masters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, family farmers, merchants of handmade goods, etc. were replaced by things that were mass produced and mass consumed. The key point is that mass production is the cornerstone of all modern economic paradigms.
First it was food that was mass produced. So the first economic paradigm was the Agricultural Revolution.
For the first time in history, many people had enough to eat. They stopped worrying about food, did not farm their own crops nor raise and slaughter their own livestock. The mass production of food marks a turning point in history. It gave people something they never had as hunter-gatherers: free time. The ability to move about and travel, even live in new places. Leave the farms and come to what became the first cities.
Owning land became the key to wealth, since land used to grow food was the key to the Agricultural Economy. Land Barons were born. The landed gentry were created. Kings gave land as the highest boon for services rendered. Kings were kings because they owned all the land which is why they could give some of it away. Private property was born. My land was fenced off from your land. New nations opened up huge tracts of land because they knew that making that land productive was the key to prosperity. Rich agricultural lands were fought over and conquered, farmed and fought over again.
We managed muscles because farming was a hard, back breaking job, even for the oxen and horses.
The few existing and emerging educational models was still carefully controlled, managed and centralized. Very few people knew a little and most people knew only what they needed for survival. Reading and writing farmed no land and produced no food. Men were trained to be manly and women to be womanly according to the mores of the time. There was no need for mass education.
The Industrial Economy
Next up was the Industrial Economy. I believe it started with the printing press in the mid-15th century. I also believe it created a period of transition – much like the Incunabula – that has occurred every time there is a new economic paradigm.
The incunabula was a period in which the church still controlled the written word and, until the printing press was invented, ‘books’ were in limited supply. The idea of providing the masses with unfiltered ideas was heretical. So the church decided that it would use the printing press for God’s work, and take the illuminated manuscripts from the scriptorium in the monasteries, where all bibles were created, and print out the words and send these first ‘forms’ back to the scriptorium for illumination.
So the monks took the forms and added colorful pictures of devils and angels, ivy and floral scroll-work, visual ‘job aids’ for learning about right and wrong and what happened to you if you strayed from the path of righteousness. The pictures were important because most people alive then could not read. These first printing press books are called incunabula. They represent a paradigm shift that ultimately affected everything – your work, your play, your family, your thoughts, your life.
Once the Industrial Economy really started to steam ahead, again it was all about mass production, only this time it was the mass production of things. We managed hands.
The first things to become ‘industrialized’ were farming tools – cotton gin, land tillers, tractors, and more. A clean bridge from one economy to the next. Other things began to become mass produced as well. Cars. Trains. Ships. Typewriters, a personal printing press when you added carbon copies (the origin of cc). Stuff people believed they needed and bought out of the Sears catalog. You didn’t need to read just look at the pictures and send in the money. We not only became consumers of food but simply consumers.
The capitalist world was all about moving capital around to further the production of things (including the industrialized production of food) in order to create wealth. The wealth of nations, as recorded by Adam Smith, was built upon an educational system that led to a culture and political system supporting the mass production and mass consumption of things.
Owning the means of production was the key to wealth. The great wealthy dynasties of the industrialized world were created at this point in time. If you look at America, you see Ford, DuPont, Getty, Rockefeller, and Kennedy ad infinitum, owning the means of production and becoming the kings of this era.
It also meant we needed to make sure the culture of mass consumers was healthy and working. According to John Taylor Gatto, public schools were created for this very purpose. We did not want a critically thinking, independent population focused on anything other than acquiring things. Work to spend. Spend more and work harder. Make the rich richer while you enrich your life with things. Towards the end of this economic paradigm, we invented the credit card, one of the greatest boons to mass consumption imaginable.
Since we had all the food we could want, and all the things we ever hoped for and couldn’t really afford, most Western countries were ready to move on into the next economic paradigm. But not everyone around the world was in lockstep. Many countries were slower to adopt and adapt and it turned out to be a good thing. Those countries has the disadvantage (?) of being stuck in the Agricultural Economy as we, for example, industrialized. We used to call them names. Third World, Underdeveloped, Developing, etc.. Until they realized that they could skip over 100 years of expensive, sweaty and generally nasty industrialization, and go right to the Idea Economy. To automate their new factories. To use cellphones and skip all the wires and poles. And most importantly to drive their new educational models.
The Idea Economy
The Idea Economy was born sometime in the late 20th century since economic paradigms are not given birth on a specific time or in a specific place. In 1959 Peter Drucker was prescient enough to see what was coming and named the people who labored in this new economic paradigm Knowledge Workers. What they mass produced was Knowledge. New ideas. Innovations. Know-how. They spent their days thinking, writing, communicating, meeting, disseminating, rethinking, researching, creating, innovating, designing, reading, listening to the ideas of others, sharing, collaborating. Later they added emailing, instant messaging, tweeting, texting, wikiing, blogging, commenting, tweeting, etc. We managed minds.
Read More
Part One: Bringing Order Out of Chaos …
What you are reading was born as a simple post about elearning, and ended up taking on a life of its own…
I wanted to write about why it is of critical importance at this point in the history of human evolution that learning is becoming available to almost anyone, anytime and anywhere.
I actually had a philosophical “chicken-and- egg” debate with my self late last night about whether history somehow consciously provides what is needed to take the next step, or do we rummage about in the attic of history and find what we need to keep evolving? I’ll leave the question for my two favorite Radiolab philosophers Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.
Here’s the point. If we are to continue to evolve from the treetops to the Savannah to wherever we are headed in the futures, we need to find a creative and innovative way to transfer knowledge and know-how. There’s just too many of us who need learning, and not enough people to do the teaching.
Here’s great story that illustrates the point. It’s from one of my earlier posts.
Daphne Koller is a computer science professor at Stanford, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She has been working for years to make online education more engaging and interactive.
“On the long term, I think the potential for this to revolutionize education is just tremendous,” Koller says. “There are millions of people around the world that have access only to the poorest quality of education or sometimes nothing at all.”
Technology could change that by making it possible to teach classes with 100,000 students as easily and as cheaply as a class with just 100. And if you look around the world, demand for education in places like South Africa is enormous.
Almost two weeks ago, at the University of Johannesburg, more than 20 people were injured and one woman was killed trying register for a limited number of openings. Thousands had camped out overnight hoping to snag one of the few available places and when the gates opened, there was a stampede.
Koller hopes that in the future, technology will help prevent these kinds of tragedies.
Up until this writing I was overwhelmed by the number of choices for learning technology in particular, and technology repurposed for learning in general. Chaos makes me nervous. So I have this need to find a pattern that provides order.
As often happens in my mind the pattern emerged while I was dreaming.
I saw my hand write the word “Decentralization” with white chalk on a blackboard. When I awoke, I wrote the word at the top of this post, realizing that everything was being driven by decentralization.
So before I take on writing about the decentralization of education I thought it would be a good idea to write a Part One about decentralization itself.
The following is from NPR and I wanted to share it to make a point. Learning is becoming decentralized. Instead of going to Stanford, Stanford came to over 160,000 students worldwide and they learned about Artificial Intelligence. Really learned it in a way that allowed for knowledge and know-how to be transferred, tested and even provide feedback to the professors to improve their course.
It’s no longer a brave new world of learning. It’s just the way it is and will be.
Stanford Engineering’s Online Introduction To Artificial Intelligence is made up of videos that teach lessons by drawing them out with pen and paper.
Last year, Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun — also known as the fellow who helped build Google’s self-driving car — got together with a small group of Stanford colleagues and they impulsively decided to open their classes to the world.
They would allow anyone, anywhere to attend online, take quizzes, ask questions and even get grades for free. They made the announcement with almost no fanfare by sending out a single email to a professional group.
“Within hours, we had 5,000 students signed up,” Thrun says. “That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had 10,000 students. And Monday morning, Stanford — who we didn’t really inform — learned about this and we had a number of meetings.”
You can only imagine what those meetings must have been like, with professors telling the school they wanted to teach free, graded online classes for which students could receive a certificate of completion. And, oh by the way, tens of thousands have already signed up to participate.
For decades, technology has promised to remake education — and it may finally be about to deliver. Apple’s moving into the textbook market, startups and nonprofits are re-imaging what K-12 education could look like, and now some in Silicon Valley are eager for technology and the Internet to transform education’s more elite institutions.
Thrun’s colleague Andrew Ng taught a free, online machine learning class that ultimately attracted more than 100,000 students. When I ask Ng how Stanford’s administration reacted to their proposition, he’s silent for a second. “Oh boy,” he says, “I think there was a strong sense that we were all suddenly in a brave new world.”
Ng says there were long conversations about whether or not to give online students a certificate bearing the university’s name. But Stanford balked and ultimately the school settled on giving students a letter of accomplishment from the professors that did not mention the university’s name.
“We are still having conversations about that,” says James Plummer, dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering. “I think it will actually be a long time — maybe never — when actual Stanford degrees would be given for fully online work by anyone who wishes to register for the courses.”
‘Uncharted Territory’
Thrun’s online class on artificial intelligence or A.I., which he co-taught with Google’s Peter Norvig, eventually drew more than 160,000 students who received detailed grades and a class ranking.
“We reached many more students, Peter and I, with this one class than all other A.I. professors combined reached in the last year,” Thrun says.
Thrun believes a class that size creates a valuable credential — even if Stanford doesn’t recognize it. Students hailed from 190 different countries, including Australia, China, Ukraine and the U.S. They included high school students, women with disabilities, teachers and retirees — and they were all taking the same class Stanford students took, grades and all. But the online participants didn’t get credit.
“I think we all realized we were in uncharted territory,” Thrun says. “As we move forward, it is my real goal to invent an education platform that has high quality to it, [that] prevents cheating, that really enables students to go through it to be empowered to find better jobs.”
Widespread Impact
Stanford does award degrees for online work, but only to students who get through the admissions process and pay sometimes $40,000 or $50,000 for a master’s degree. Technology could push prices down.
Dean Plummer believes low-cost, high-quality online education will have a profound impact in high education, even at institutions as august as Stanford. He doesn’t think it will diminish demand for undergraduate degrees or Ph.D.s, but he says the impact on master’s programs could be profound.
“What it will look like in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years — your guess is as good as mine,” he says. “But I think the impact will be large and it will be widespread.”
Online education and distance learning have been going on at Stanford and other schools for years, but Plummer believes the technology has reached an inflection point.
Videos stored online let students build course work into their schedules anywhere in the world. Embedded quizzes let students monitor their own progress and give professors much richer data to improve their teaching.
Ng noticed that 5,000 students made the identical mistake in an online quiz. Within minutes, teachers were able to respond and clarify the issue that had led a large fraction of the class down a dead-end path.
Global Benefits
Daphne Koller is a computer science professor at Stanford, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She has been working for years to make online education more engaging and interactive.
“On the long term, I think the potential for this to revolutionize education is just tremendous,” Koller says. “There are millions of people around the world that have access only to the poorest quality of education or sometimes nothing at all.”
Technology could change that by making it possible to teach classes with 100,000 students as easily and as cheaply as a class with just 100. And if you look around the world, demand for education in places like South Africa is enormous.
Almost two weeks ago, at the University of Johannesburg, more than 20 people were injured and one woman was killed trying register for a limited number of openings. Thousands had camped out overnight hoping to snag one of the few available places and when the gates opened, there was a stampede.
Koller hopes that in the future, technology will help prevent these kinds of tragedies.
Trying ‘Bold New Things’
Over the past six months, Thrun has spent roughly $200,000 of his own money and lined up venture capital to create Udacity, a new online institution of higher learning independent of Stanford. “We are committed to free online education for everybody.”
Udacity is announcing two new classes on Monday. One will teach students to build their own search engine and the other how to program a self-driving car. Eventually, the founders hope to offer a full slate of classes in computer science.
Thrun says Stanford’s mission is to attract the top 1 percent of students from all over in the world and bring them to campus, but Udacity’s mission is different. He’s striving for free, quality education for all, anywhere.
Koller agrees, but she says Stanford and its professors will adapt.
“How it all is going to pan out is something that I don’t think anyone has a very clear idea of,” she says. “But what I think is clear is that this change is coming and it’s coming whether we like it or not. So I think the right strategy is to embrace that change.”
Over the years, Stanford has launched dozens of disruptive technologies into the world, but now administrators and professors seem to agree that the school may be about to disrupt itself. This semester Stanford will put 17 interactive courses online for free.
“Stanford has always been a place where we were will to try bold new things,” Plummer says. “Even if we don’t know what the consequences would be.”
David Grebow KnowledgeStar 