Jason (EducationDynamics)

bob wyman

Whatever the virtues of that position, it is politically impossible.

The NEA and the Democrat party believe that the purpose of public education spending is to pay teachers. The Republicans are unwilling to die on that hill.

http://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/2009/02/05/21st-century-skills-and-the-tree-octopus-problem/

Part of what keeps the bureaucracy going is the need for certification, which forces even “alternate” approaches into the existing model. After all, students have to get jobs, and Google itself is very much an edu-snob in hiring. A self-taught programmer without hotshot grades from top-shelf universities would not make it past Googles’s HR gatekeepers – unless he was a world-level rockstar.

This will be my second degree so I’m paying a lot more attention to the education process this time. My generation has always been told by our parents that there is only one way to success and happiness. Get a 4 year degree, get a job. In this day and age, the only industries that can play by those rules effectively are healthcare and Law. Even lawyers are starting to feel the pressure of these times.

I can’t wait to see what new breakthroughs are coming to education…So I’m working on my own

Personally, I think that if Google was to build a teaching machine, they would probably treat that machine much like they do their search engine and advertising technology. i.e. the machine itself would be constantly tested and it would be expected to learn from and improve after every interaction with every student. We would assume that every student can learn all that needs to be learned, what we’d be looking for is the most effective and efficient way to enable that learning. Any student who didn’t get an A+ would be considered a failure of the machine…

Today, when we give a student a test, the question is: How did the student do? But, if we were doing this right, the question behind every test would be: How did the teacher do?

Online you can easily do this sort of “testing of the machine” since you’ve got the opportunity for large audiences. Think of a text that is supposed to teach some set of concepts… There are hundreds of ways to write that text. The mystery is in finding which way is the best way for each student and for each class of students. Given a large population of students, one can test each of the hundreds of variants in the same way that Google tests ads or search engine results. Then, the winning texts can be modified slightly in endless ways and re-tested to see if the changes improved results or hurt them and to see if there were indicative variances in responses between groups and classes of students.

If you want the students to learn, you must focus on testing the teachers, not the students…

bob wyman

Once again we are in agreement. Check out the new online learning platform at http://tweentribune.com

Then hear what teachers are saying about it here:

http://tweentribune.com/content/what-teachers-are-saying-about-tweentribune

Certainly given the uncertainties in today’s labour market (not just in the short term), I think we will have to reevaluate what we want from education – as simply accumulating knowledge in order to pass exams is not going to guarantee security

Ken Robinson has a great talk over on TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/66) about how schools should nurture creativity rather than stifle it.

There is one group that is bucking this trend and takes the opposite approach, which is to tailor the education of the student to the student’s individual tastes and capabilities. This group has built a multi-billion dollar industry of curriculum and relies heavily on best-of-breed teachers that are distributed through the web and electronic media. They do all this in spite of subsidizing the public system and in spite of societal blow back. Like all pioneers, the homeschooling movement presses on and is building out the future of our educational system. In a sense they are already putting into practice the WWGD concept. This approach is all about decentralizing education and putting the student in the driver seat, which is a scary thought for those entrenched educational bureaucrats, but just happens to align perfectly with our transition into the information age.

Without a reform of a system that moves students through in lockstep, technology won’t be much help. But my grandson who is great at reading but needs help in math attends class with everyone else, regardless of their needs and how they all relate.

Another issue is that resources are not all that’s needed for education. I was fortunate to attend school in the Golden Age of the New York Public School system. What I came out of that schooling with was not as much a set of facts as an understanding of how to learn.

Someone has to teach you how to find and evaluate the resources. You have to learn how to marshal them to meet a challenge. You have to learn how to express your judgments.

Who will do that? The private sector, the Kaplans of the world, do it well for people who can pay. What about the rest?

Believe it or not, teaching a professional skill, like doctoring or lawyering. It can be learned, and improved upon. Teachers are not “born.” They learn to do good work, both by studying and by doing. Medical students train under skilled physicians, lawyers by mock trials and then as apprentices in law firms. We ask teachers to jump into classrooms without the same kind of education about their professional work.

What would Google do about that?

Or go to Yale for free:
http://oyc.yale.edu/

tom
(Raccoon coat optional.)

The selection process often relies on the elevator sound bite … from Stanford. Or the whiz bang impact on the hirer. Decision makers lack the time or confidence to make their own decisions and rely on GPA scores despite the fact that most universities in the world have no such thing. The “You don’t get fired for buying IBM” gambit has its role in hiring too. An executive director friend in his late 40s without a university degree has found it necessary to take a part time NYU degree, not for education, but to work around this gate.

Ask an immigrant from South Asia with a university degree from an institution with an academic rather than financial selection process which has application to acceptance ratios over 100:1 (As oppose to Harvard’s 30:1) and you will find that it isn’t their education that is limiting them but the branding. The need to brand, test and certify rather than educate unfortunately drives all too much of education. And the need for simple third party assessment to filter applicants drives much of the selection process. Changes are first needed in the minds of the HR and managerial decision makers which will in good time cause the search for effective education by parents and students to reshape the role of institutions. In the current climate this is likely to be spear headed by significant numbers who can nolonger afford university fees and lifestyle but they will have much to overcome when getting hired into good organizations. The future will arrive but after the usual very long delay.