The quote below by Richard Wolin in the May 21, 2012 issue of The Nation explains the relationship between education and social inclusion.
"For the first time, men and women of diverse social backgrounds were afforded the opportunity to cultivate the knowledge and self-understanding necessary to surmount the oppressive constraints of class, race and gender."
The reference is to the GI Bill that paid for WWII veterans to attend college in the U.S.
Saturday I taught a boating safety course for young children (8-13) and adults through the Coast Guard Auxilary. What I always marvel at in these classes is the enthusiasm the children bring to learning about boating. I use a lot of question and answer to develop the themes and the children actively participate. I have noticed that how one handles a wrong answer is critically important. Any negativity in my response and the child shuts down for the rest of the day and stops participating. I think that even at this young age schools have already conditioned the children not to make mistakes.
Talking to one of the parents during the lunch break provided an interesting insight. He talked about how many, many mistakes he had made when he first started boating, but that over time he had become more accomplished. In other words, he had not stopped boating because he had made mistake after mistake. Three observations:
Much of the way one learns boating mirrors Piaget's theory of how children learn. The learning is hands on, self-directed and with little input from a teacher.
I am increasingly coming to enjoy teaching young children. They are like sponges if you do not snuff out their natural enthusiasm. Maybe I should start a charter school using a boat. Wonder how expensive a marine Internet connection is?
Image credit: watersport-insight.com
Today's post was inspired by this story from Inside Higher Ed, "U. of Ottawa Profs Want Right to Ban Laptops".
Many university professors ban the use of laptops and cell phones in class. The apparent logic is to prevent the students from being distracted. Presumably the students will take notes on paper.
I use a completely different approach. I have no policies in my classroom, except that I stop conversations between students if it is disrupting the class or annoying me. Why do I have such a laissez faire attitude?
The answer is simple. It is my job to keep the students engaged with the material. If I do not engage the students I have failed as the teacher. To keep the students engaged or entertained I use videos, discuss blog posts, tell alot of stories and use humor as much as possible. I also always take a break of ten minutes in my 2 hour and 50 minute class. Most people cannot concentrate for more than 60-90 minutes without a break to refresh.
I do have certain advantages which make my "no policies" approach work:
I use to feel guilty about how much fun I had teaching. Then a friend from MIT told me that teachers have to be showmen. Showmen don't worry about laptops or cell phones.
It is well documented that new information is being created at the fastest pace in history. For much of history new information was developed at a pace where it was comparatively easy to disseminate the new ideas to students.
Today curating information is a challenge for which there are yet no really effective tools. Curators, such as text book writers, have a much greater challenge and responsibility. Abusing this responsibility has always been a problem (e.g. Japanese textbooks on WWII). As information proliferates the tendency toward abuse probably increases either purposefully or by accident. Given the power of lobbyists in Washington and at the state level, particularly in education matters, one becomes even more concerned about selective presentation of information.
The solution may be to give the students more autonomy in shaping their reading and experiences. Tools for students such as computers and Internet connectivity provide the access in real time to information. Learning to tell "truth from fiction" and critical thinking are important life skills and probably increasingly important in this age of Twitter, Google search and open access to government information. Teachers would become the guides to this student process of discovery.
This post was inspired by a quote from Seymour Papert in the Daily Papert:
“I do not suppose that all children were ever given full access to the ideas of any society. But at least in times of slower change, an equilibrium could be maintained between what society needed its members to know and the learning opportunities it offered (deliberately or mostly not) to its children. Since there is no reason to suppose that this is true today, and since, in any case, it is no longer acceptable that blind social forces be allowed to assign stations in life through differences in access to learning, deliberate effort is needed to bring to children knowledge that was not intended for them. School, even at its best, is too sluggish and timid to do this.”
Papert, S. (1993) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. NY: Basic Books. Page 180.
This quote from Friedrich Hayek's the Fatal Conceit appears to support the same point:
"Life exists only so long as it provides for its own continuance. Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order. We have become civilized by the increase of our numbers just as civilization made that increase possible: we can be few and savage, or many and civilized. If reduced to its population of ten thousand years ago, mankind could not preserve civilization. Indeed, even if knowledge already gained were preserved in libraries, men could make little use of it without numbers sufficient to fill the jobs demanded for extensive specialization and division of labour." Source: cafehayek.com
Yet another thought on the same theme comes from Harvard Business Review in the article "Are You Learning as Fast as the World is Changing?".
Education Futures advocates for an education system that trains students to be "knowmads". A Knowmads is a "creative, imaginative, and innovative person who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere".
Knowmads have nine characteristics:
This concept of the skills or traits required of students and/or future workers is very consistent with my view, as described in this post "How to Survive the End of the Industrial Age".
I have written about a technique called "relax the assumption" here and here. Several people find this technique a powerful model to solve problems and innovate. When I do workshops on this technique, I always start by asking the question "why can't we timeshare dogs?" This question makes clear that you only relax the assumption about ownership and we have dog timeshares.
In a typical workshop I then ask how many new businesses can you create by relaxing one assumption about the original Model T Ford. Everybody thinks of customizing the car color and rental cars. I end the examples by pointing out that fast food restaurants is another example. Do not change just assumptions about the car but rather about people's lifestyles.
I have always considered "relax the assumption" to be a technique that I developed. This article from Big Think shows that my technique addresses what psychologists call "functional fixedness" or ingrained limitations in your thought about the function of something, such as a Model T. Now I have a scientific basis for my technique.
Image via Wikipedia
PsychCentral has an interesting article about AutoTutor, a software application developed at the University of Notre Dame. The app use artificial intelligence to improve learning outcomes by identifying student misconceptions about a subject and proactively correcting them.
Sidney D’Mello, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame, states:
“Most of the 20th-century systems required humans to communicate with computers through windows, icons, menus, and pointing devices.”... “But humans have always communicated with each other through speech and a host of nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions, eye contact, posture, and gesture. In addition to enhancing the content of the message, the new technology provides information regarding the cognitive states, motivation levels, and social dynamics of the students.”
The riddle of educational software has perplexed educators and software developers since the advent of computers. This approach using AI is an interesting direction.
Thanks to Walter Bender for the heads up.
I have written frequently about the need to start entrepreneurship education at a much earlier age, perhaps as early as middle school. (Previous posts are here and here.) Two stories support this trend:
The related articles below talk about programs supported by the Kauffman Foundation and the University of Chicago. The quality of the people experimenting in this space and the exceptionally insightful early stage programs suggest that this trend should quickly become mainstream.
Early takeaways from these programs:
If anyone needs an advisor on such a program or an easy to read book on developing a new business concept, you might look here.
Image credit: business.wsu.edu
I am fortunate to interact with a lot of people interested in computing, software and education. A group that is actively engaged in this area is the South Kent School, a college preparatory school for boys in Connecticut. Last fall they launched an iPad program for all their students, substituted e-books for almost all required texts and invested in proper teacher training. The program has caught the attention of Apple, Inkling and the entire northeast prep school community.
Now South Kent is offering a series of two-day residential workshops to help others understand how they built a successful 1:1 computer program using the iPad. Details on the workshops are here.
Note: I am a Trustee of the South Kent School.
Interesting article by Richard Posner on the Becker-Posner blog on the effects of advanced IT on capitalism and government. Some writing should just be quoted:
"I think there may be a looming crisis of capitalism, though one that has nothing to do with banking, but rather with technological progress, and specifically with the effect of that progress on income inequality. Technological progress in recent decades has included not only the well-known advances in computerization, communications, and medical treatment, but also important advances in marketing, including political influence and manipulation, and management. The overall effects of these advances on many fronts have included a sharpening of competition, an increase in government debt to finance middle-class entitlements, particularly medical, a reduction in the demand for manual labor, and an increase in the financial returns to IQ and to higher education (which are correlated). These developments seem to be increasing the inequality of income and wealth and creating sharper class divisions than the nation had become accustomed to in the decades following the end of the 1930s depression.
There is nothing in the economic logic of capitalism, any more than in the biological logic of evolution, that drives an economy toward income equality. The basic logic of both systems is competition, and competition produces losers as well as winners. A class of workers can become extinct, just as a species can. The difference is that the combined effect of envy and democratic politics can result in policies that distort competition in order to increase the welfare of the losers in the competitive struggle. Such policies tend to be inefficient and thus to retard the smooth operation of capitalism as an economic growth engine. Evidence for this proposition is found in the sluggish economic performance of many European nations."
Sound like income inequality is a structural feature of the new economy. A change in education may be the only alternative to change this outcome. Further thoughts on these themes are here in a post titled "The End of the Industrial Age".
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Back in December I posted a new business idea about electronic portfolios for students. Turns out this idea has been around since at least 2008. Boston University started their project that year and about 10,000 students have created portfolios to date. Perhaps these numbers do not suggest a viral adoption rate but 10,000 is a significant percentage of the BU student population.
Perhaps some commercial support for the idea of e-portfolios could make it viral. There are many articles recently about how the interviewing process is going digital, with companies asking for videos, digital content libraries, etc. What could be more informative than a history of student work and intellectual development.
More on the BU project is here. The project is under the direction of Evangeline Harris Stefanakis, an associate professor.
Many have recently written on the end of the industrial age of mass production and the new economy that is emerging. Seth Godin's article is particularly good and another post from Business Insider is equally thoughtful. My first post on the subject, "A Future of Individuals", is here.
Most commentators agree that jobs in big business (and perhaps government) will be greatly reduced and that individuals will need to manage their economic survival much more aggressively. Few have offered plans for how to do this, so I share a few thoughts:
"However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays." New York Times Not just the manufacturing jobs but all the design, engineering and logistics jobs.
"In any democratic nation with the freedom of speech, information can never be as strongly regulated by the public as our food, water, and air. Yet information is just as vital to our survival as the other three things we consume. That’s why personal responsibility in an age of mostly free information is vital to individual and social health." Clay Johnson The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption from Brain Pickings
“One of my central mathetic tenets is that the construction that takes place “in the head” often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by construction of a more public son “in the world” – a sand castle or a cake, a LEGO house or a corporation, a computer program, a poem, or a theory of the universe. Part of what I mean by “in the world” is that the product can be shown, discussed, examined, probed, and admired. It is out there.” Seymour Papert The Daily Papert
This joke came from a tweet by @mbrechner. Miguel Brechner is the head of Project Ceibal, the world renown OLPC project in Uruguay. Translated version below.
"To go to an open source conference with an iPhone is like going to a Greenpeace conference in a 4x4."
The quote was attributed to Nicholas Negroponte.
Uruguay is a great country and I encourage everyone to visit.
As promised in this first post, I am going to discuss urbanization more in 2012. To refresh your memory, over 50 percent of the world's population now lives in cities. However, many cities lack the resources to provide modern infrastructure on the required scale. Such inadequate infrastructure impedes job creation, which is already imperiled by the shift from the industrial production model to a digital model. This article from Business Insider discusses the difficulty in new job creation.
Tech Crunch takes up the urbanization theme in this article, "A City is a Startup". Not surprising perhaps, they argue for entrepreneurship as a means to transform cities into viable, modern locations. They cite the recent announcement by New York City of its new Cornell Engineering campus on City Island as evidence.
Universities and particularly engineering schools are critical to the future viability of cities. (Did I mention I teach at two engineering schools?) However, it should also be pointed out that there are other requirements:
I will come back to these themes in future posts.
One of the hottest markets today is online education, part of the bigger trend to modernize education through IT technologies. One of the biggest issues in online education is certification, proof that one successfully completed a course or program. I previously discussed this topic here and all the articles on education are here.
MIT has been a leader in online education since it began its free OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001. MIT has now announced that they will offer certificates for the completion of the courses, as described in this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. A few observations:
I think it's interesting that MIT is protecting the brand value of their traditional on campus education system by using a separate foundation to issue certificates. I also wonder if people will pay for certification unless it is part of a degree program. Perhaps MIT will use the foundation to start offering online degrees.
Much speculation surrounds the new administration of President Humala in Peru. One of the early decisions by Humala was to decentralize the management of education to the regional level in Peru. This approach is in sharp contrast to the former President, Alan Garcia, who used a federal or centralized approach to education.
The regional approach in Peru is very similar to Brazil where states have managed education since the abolition of slavery in the late 19th century. This is also the approach used by the world renown education system in Finland where cities exercise most of the power.
One of the advantages of a regional approach is that it better enables the matching of the curriculum to the local culture and language. Peru has about 60 indigenous languages and ethnic groups.
This working paper from Harvard Business School may support President Humala's decision through an analysis of the better performance in education by Brazil compared with China, India and Russia.
I think smaller countries, such as Uruguay, can be very successful with a centralized management of education. Larger countries, particularly those with rugged, remote regions such as Peru, may be better off with a decentralized approach that gives more authority and resources to regional, state or city governments.
I have privately been advocating that schools help students create portfolios of their academic work. With all the digital and sharing technology available, eventually universities are going to ask students to submit a portfolio of their work with their applications. I am not talking just about creative types--designers, painters, fashionistas--but rather traditional academics such as history and physics students.
The key to a good portfolio will not be just the last paper in AP History or the senior science fair project but the ability to demonstrate intellectual growth and maturity. This would imply that students should start their portfolio in junior high school or early in high school.
I think these academic portfolios will include papers, videos, photos and perhaps diaries, blogs, websites and links to FB pages. Presentation will be in a Flipboard style with tags and full search capabilities. Everything posted would be downloadable.
Someone once told me that Sean Taylor, the late, great UM and Washington Redskins safety, was identified in junior high school as a future Pro Bowl player. The same is true for academic genius. If universities could search the portfolios of younger students, they could follow their intellectual development and perhaps begin a recruiting dialogue much earlier.
Many academics also believe that creating a portfolio benefits the student's intellectual growth. Portfolios encourage reflection on one's work and develop critical thinking abilities.
Image credit: dickblick.com
The Logic and Emotion blog has an interesting slide deck in a recent post on design thinking in business. What caught my attention was slide 37, which provides a framework for the requirements of a social network. The framework is shown below.
What I thought was interesting is that the framework may also apply to other activities, such as education and religion. In the chart below I show examples for the five C's and how they apply to education and religion.
When you consider the recent decline in the active practice of religion one could conclude that the weakness in the framework is in connectivity, the high reliance on physical spaces for connectivity. This may also explain the increase in religious TV programming.
In education the same problem exists. Physical space as a means to achieve connectivity is no longer sufficient. The challenge in changing the "connectivity" to digital may explain the difficulties in adopting computers in education successfully. Perhaps we need to approach the problem as a stand alone issue--connectivity--and not get confused by issues in context or collaboration.
I like this 5 Cs framework and plan to come back to it in future posts. I do not think it applies to all major social activities, but it does provide a simple way to think about certain social issues.
