education
Recently, Apple signed a deal with textbook publishers to get textbooks delivered electronically via iPads. As with the App store, Apple will take a cut of everything sold through the iBooks interface. Many people are excited about the possibility of having new "interactive" textbooks that use the capabilities of the new interface. I am not.
Almost all of the "interactive" features designed by textbook publishers encourage students to engage in tasks individually, working by themselves. This is the wrong direction. We need ways to stimulate people to work together. Students should be challenged with questions that are too hard to solve by themselves, on their own. More importantly, students should be put in the position of figuring out for themselves what they need to know and then given access to all the information in the world to solve it, not just a book. In short, I question that we need textbooks filled with answers. Instead, we need to help the students ask the right questions.
This is antithetical to the current educational paradigm, where content is doled out to students in bite-sized chunks. Real learning isn't like that at all. Real learning is when you discover that half of what you've been told is wrong. Or that there's another side to the issue. Or that the world doesn't neatly fit into categories. Real learning is when you set out to learn one thing and you discover something else. Real learning is when it matters to you. Apple's new plan won't move us in this direction at all -- it's just the same old dogfood in a new can.
Apple, of course, is doing this mostly to make money. At the same time, they are working hard to put the genie of the Internet back into the bottle. People see it as ironic that the the company that did the infamous 1984 advertisement has become such a force for platform domination and compliance. If they have their way, you won't need a web browser: there will be an app for that. Which you had to pay for. And they'll get their cut.
Eight years ago, I set up a text-based adventure game with my older son called "Muppyville". He was in fourth grade. We showed it to all the kids in his class for one class session and then he and a handful of his friends played it for months.
There was a little boy who was fascinated by the potential of Muppyville to exert power over the other children. He created places in the game that he could lead unwary people into where they would be trapped and he could taunt them and then leave them stuck there. He eventually figured out that he could change his "name" to "1imako", which looked a lot like the username name I used "limako" (the first character is a a one instead of an "L"). And then he would pretend to be me to other kids but then insult them and use obscenities -- among other things. I gave him a couple of chances to straighten up, but eventually I had to block his access and tell him he would have to have his parents contact me if he wanted access again. He was understandably reluctant to do that.
Fast forward to 2011: According to my son, this boy got an administrative password to "Powerschool" -- the database that the school uses to maintain records -- and subtly adjusted a few of his own test grades to change his grade from a B+ to an A. And he got caught! Reportedly, he was suspended and all of the colleges and universities he had applied to were notified of his academic dishonesty.
Some people just never learn...
When I heard about ContactCon, I signed up almost immediately. The issues being raised have been of interest to me since I started using the Internet: how to make sure the net can be used for empowerment rather than oppression. The net is clearly useful for both, but the trend has been shifting in the wrong direction for years.
A corporation would have never made something like the Internet in the first place. When I was a kid, we still had The old AT&T and Bell Telephone network. You weren't allowed to own a telephone: you were required to rent one from the phone company. And everything was monetized. Now, I suspect that the most expensive thing about current cell-phone operations is the overhead necessary for administration, metering, and billing. And that's the direction we've been going: give users a dumbed-down box that only enables what the monetizers want you to be able to do.
There were a lot of interesting people at ContactCon most of whom I'd never met before. The demographic was mostly white, largely male, and somewhat younger than me. There were some folks my age or older, but we were the exception. Many were young entrepreneurs and freelancers looking to network to support their project. It reminded me of the luxury of my current circumstances: I have a steady job and don't need to spend half my time trying to market myself or bill people. I don't have to work on spec or limit what I do to what people are willing to pay for. I get to spend most of my time actually just working and being creative. I lament for this generation that is so circumscribed and limited in their choices -- and will probably end up permanently stunted by the economic conditions that have been imposed on us by the 1%. Or, if you prefer, that through my generation's lack of engagement, we have allowed ourselves to be disempowered.
I wore my "Official Red Hat" red hat and took my ubuntu netbook to demonstrate my free software street cred. I actually met the guy who'd ordered the stock of red hats when he worked at Red Hat in that time period. I had completely borked my install of Ubuntu a few days ago (or maybe the update from Easy Peasy never really worked right). In the event, I completely wiped the netbook the night before and re-installed everything. I've started using Dropbox to maintain the rough drafts of my writing, so it was easy to get my data back. I could have just taken my macbook, but it wouldn't have been as fun. In point of fact, I hardly used it, but it was nice to know it was there.
I met dozens of people, learned about many new projects, and also touched base with projects I've known about but haven't had time to explore. I've been interested in the Freedom Box since I first heard about it: it's consistent with my vision for people having their own server. And it's also the only way to have any assurance of privacy: you can't trust third parties not to reveal all of your private information to the government or corporations.
I organized a discussion about education and unschooling. It was a very receptive audience to the ideas and there were a number of people working on interesting things. The most interesting was probably Be You, but there were many, many others. ContactCon reminded me of what John Jungck used to say about the goals of BioQUEST: to begin conversations worth continuing. I suspect I will continue to interact with some of these people going forward.
I first saw Science Scouts a couple of years ago. At first, I thought the badges were just silly, but after I'd thought about it a little, I realized they had real potential to help students see faculty from a different perspective. I think students often have a hard time understanding what faculty do and that the badges could humanize faculty -- and help students appreciate their accomplishments. Especially the badges about publication, funding, etc. And they could show that faculty can have a sense of humor too -- something students are all too frequently in doubt about.
There is a module in Drupal called user_badges that allows people to associate badges with their user account. Today, I installed it at the Biology development website, configured it to use the Science Scouts badges, and modified the template for the Faculty page so faculty who want to show Science Scout badges could easily do so. I've set up my page on the Biology development site to show my badges. It's just on the development site, but I could easily migrate it to the production site.
The badges are at the bottom of the page -- mouse over them to see the titles. If you click on a badge, it will take you to the appropriate Science Scouts page.
It was easy to do. I had to make a handful of changes to the user_badges module to make it work: I had to increase the size of the name field in the database, because some of the badges have absurdly long names. I also decided to double the width of the field where you select user badges -- it seemed too small before. I also resized the graphics so that a bunch more badges can fit on a single row (although it looks fine to have them wrap.) If anyone wants my modified user_badges code and the file to import all the badges, I'm happy to provide it.
I've sent a note to the chair. I'm not sure if faculty will be willing to have this available on the actual Biology Department website. I think it's cool and it would be great to have it available for those who are willing. Not everyone will want to do it, but it would be neat to have it there.
We could also make them available to grad students too.
I noted with interest this blog which is mainly about shaming places that advertise for unpaid internships. It's an issue that comes up every time the economy is weak. There are at least three sides to the issue: first, it's just supply and demand: if you can get people to work for free, why would you pay someone? The second side is whether it is in our interest to let companies bid the price of labor so low. Volunteer labor depresses everyone's wages. The most important issue, however, is related to social justice because only a small segment of the population has access to these opportunities: people that have to support themselves are excluded because they can't afford to work for free.
We need to insist that the US economy gets run to create full employment. We could do that -- the money is there -- The Rich just have all the money, mainly due to globalization and the destruction of the labor movement. If we had full employment and a strong labor movement, you wouldn't see many free internships and, if you did, you probably wouldn't care.
On Friday, Nolan Bushnell gave a talk at UMass and participated in an extended discussion with people from the Information Technology program. He's an interesting guy. His current project is to create a model to replace public schools with for-profit high schools using a strongly behaviorist model of programmed instruction. Unfortunately, he doesn't really know anything about pedagogy or behaviorism. I found it rather sickening to watch someone with more money than sense set about ignoring history for the sake of repeating it. What's worse is that with the current measures being used for education, a behaviorist model might actually get you farther: like an amputation weight-loss program.
He began with a critique of existing public education, which was entirely reasonable. He talked about the competing demands for children's interest and how children find schoolwork unworthy of their attention. But then he sailed off into crazy land, laying out the framework for a reductive, behaviorist cubefarm, with children isolated and slaved to computers.
One of his most absurd ideas is a "mind inventory". Instead of just "testing" a subset of knowledge that children are supposed to know, he wants to create a full list of everything that people know. Then, he argues, you can tell exactly what children have learned and what they haven't. Anyone who's read much knows that this is a failed philosophical endeavor: people have tried to do this since Aristotle and have run into what a tangled web human knowledge is.
Underlying the entire structure is a set of rewards and punishments for children and a network of surveillance to monitor student behavior truly Orwellian in scope. Children that play along will receive "zetas" that they can use to buy treats from vending machines or receive other privileges in the school. If you wonder whether he recognizes the punitive nature of this regime, one such treat would be temporary freedom from surveillance.
His solution for curriculum is to create an "app store" for teaching modules that could be assessed to see how well students "learn". His goal is to create a market where curriculum developers would compete to sell teaching software modules.
He has no theory of learning, beyond accretion of facts, no theory of teaching beyond communication of facts, and no model of student behavior beyond rewards and punishments.
Unfortunately, most of his listeners were unable to see his program for what it would be. They heard and agreed with the critique and then uncritically accepted his flimflam as a serious educational program.
I tried to think of questions I could ask that wouldn't be mere insults regarding the entire enterprise. I asked if he saw learning as anything beyond accumulation of facts. Well, maybe, but you still had to learn all those facts first. I asked how he hoped to foster any kind of creativity with a curriculum based on canned questions. He said there would be other parts of the curriculum that weren't canned. I finally lost it and asked if wives and subordinates should also be subject to the same kind of Orwellian surveillance he pictured for children.
He is willing to admit that he's wrong about half of the things he thinks. I think he's wrong about way more than half. Regardless, he still thinks he can make a lot of money doing this, which he defends as a good thing. During his talk, I realized that I mostly don't agree with making money: I think that the primary way that people make money is dishonest: it comes about when someone recognizes that people are ignorant about the relative value of something. Someone who was honest would help people learn what the value actually was, rather than exploiting their ignorance to make a lot of money.
I read this extremely discouraging article about How to Build a Better Teacher today and was struck, again, by what seems like a commonsense difference between what education reform is trying to do and what we actually need. The focus is on teaching tips about who can make kids perform better on measures rather than looking systemically at why kids think school learning isn't worth doing. The failure of education is about kids being unpersuaded that work in school is worth doing. Someone who can fix *that* will actually transform a kid's outlook about learning for the rest of their life. Someone who uses teaching tips and tricks to get kids to pay attention to the teacher or pass a test has not done anyone any favors. We need students to become self-motivated learners and to develop their own self-regulatory strategies. Nothing in this article shows that anyone is thinking about that at all.
When I was hired at UMass, I was largely given carte blanche to do whatever I thought needed to be done to improve how technology and education were implemented in the department. It was very uncomfortable for the first couple of years to be so unaccountable. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: for someone to tell me I wasn't doing the right things. I did have a steering committee that I could go to for direction, but they ended up seeming more like a "pep squad" than something to be accountable to. My goal has always been to maximize the utility of technology for users: to reduce obstacles and make it easier for people to do what they need to do.
Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, the pressure has been to demonstrate accountability and reduce costs. So, for the past year, I've been putting in place infrastructure that makes the facilities harder to use: you can't just log in and print anymore. Now people have to jump through a series of hoops to see if they have an account and then more hoops every time they want to print. By implementing page quotas on printing and requiring an account to log in, we get much more information about who is using the facility -- and it does provide better service in the sense that we can exclude the freeloading non-biology students that didn't really belong there in the first place. There are fewer lines now and much less wasted printing: people don't print unless they're pretty sure they want it.
There are just two or three more technical hurdles to overcome and almost our whole infrastructure will be able to use the authentication system we've been building. I think it's going to make a huge difference in efficiency in setting up and providing services. But it's a big distraction from the kind of development that I'd really rather being doing.
Toward that end, I'm getting an iPod Touch to start thinking about building cool new educational apps. The Apple guy had me look at the "cool new educational apps" he liked, which were just the typical transmissionist bullshit: transmit some "facts" about a topic and give people a quiz to see if they "got it". Or watch a lecture on your iPod! Sigh... We've had this conversation enough times that he knows I don't like that kind of thing, but he doesn't really get why.
I think the first thing I'll build is my simplified take on the "knowledge broker" idea the physics guys had a couple of years ago. They wanted to be able to ask open-ended questions about reasoning in large classes and have some intelligent system to winnow down the answers into something manageable. I don't want an intelligent system -- I want the intelligence to be in people. I had the idea of letting people enter answers, but also to see a ranked list of answers submitted by other people and to vote for them. Most people would probably not enter anything, but would just vote. In a large class, you'd see enough answers to have an interesting sense of the diversity and the top 5 or 6 would probably capture the sense of the class. (Maybe only let people start voting after you have 5 answers?) Furthermore, you could leave the voting open while you discussed the question and, as various options got eliminated, you could eventually come to consensus on the best answer. I think I could build something like that based on Duck given a long weekend. But it would be coolest to have it on some portable device, like an iphone or ipod touch. Once I get the device, I'll start looking in to building it. It should be fun.
I've been trying for a long time to capture what the use of standardized testing does to education. This is the best I've been able to do so far:
Rather than providing a well-rounded education, it asks educators to quit doing what makes sense and, instead, steal whatever time they might have otherwise used to engage in well-rounded learning to instead improve scores on the things that get measured. Making decisions based on standardized testing results pushes schools to do whatever will most cheaply cause those measures to respond.
It still falls short because we aren't really necessarily improving reading or math -- just the scores on the tests. Who cares if kids *can* read, if they don't (for example). What we really want, are well-functioning kids who are prepared to become life-long learners.
Educational measurement doesn't work and shouldn't be called measurement. The reductionism and worship of quantification in our society is twisting education as a mantra of "improving scores" drives every decision in the schools. We should make decisions about education based on what makes sense, not merely on what improves test scores.
The premise of educational measurement is that, if you can't measure things directly, you can find indicators that vary in the same direction as as what you want to measure and you can aggregate those together in a "construct". In other words, we can't measure how good something is, but we can measure other things that contribute to what make it good and use those together as a measure of quality. The problem is that while these so-called measurements may work reasonably well with a natural population, they don't substitute for a prescription. Let me give you an example.
Let's develop a measure for how good cookies are. Let's say we look at a hundred different kinds of cookies and decide that the biggest and sweetest cookies are the best. We could develop a measure that uses the weight and percent sugar as indicators and aggregate those as our construct. Our construct is simple to apply. It might work great with real cookies. But you could also make cookies with mud and sugar -- they might score really high, but I'll bet they wouldn't taste very good.
What do you do? Well, the standard approach is to try to add more dimensions as part of the index. You can measure fat, starch, hardness, etc, etc. Your measure gets more and more complex to apply. But no matter what you do, you're still not going to have a measure of how good cookies are. For one reason, because it isn't possible to know all of the dimensions that make cookies good. People invent new ways to make cookies good every day. People thought Oreos were good until Doublestuff cookies came out. The second reason is that there's no agreement about what makes a really good cookie. Some people like chocolate chip and others like vanilla wafers: its stupid to argue about which one is better.
Here's the worst problem: Even if you measure a hundred dimensions, it still won't tell people how to make a good cookie. Once you start applying the "instrument" (that's what the educational measurement people call a test) people start using the scores to decide what makes cookies good, rather just trying to make good cookies. This is how disasters like the melamine contamination happen. They were using a test for quality in children's milk that included a test for protein. It turns out that adding melamine to products makes products test higher for protein and is really cheap. When the tests drive school policy, schools are compelled to start look for anything like melamine: something that improves the scores on the tests, regardless of it's actual value.
Just like we all know what a good cookie tastes like, we all know good education when we see it. Education should be about engaging children in interesting work that requires them to construct knowledge in meaningful ways. We need to return to a model that uses common sense to improve education, and not be slaves to measures that don't really measure what we care about.
Today, I saw an article ranting about science educators, arguing that teaching students about science isn't really necessary for scientific literacy. Here's what I wrote in reply:
It's not clear at all what "science literacy" means -- or ought to mean -- but to equate it with "content of modern science" is a particularly depauperate view. Those who advocate for scientific literacy principally want to prepare non-scientists to understand (1) enough about science to know the kinds of questions science can answer and (2) something about the nature of the answers that science can provide. These concepts are not part of science themselves, but are important to understand how scientific knowledge and practice should intersect with other spheres of human endeavor, such as politics, energy policy, and education.
I remember as a graduate student wrestling a lot with the question of what scientific literacy really ought to be. It's a tough, thorny question. Science education is descended from what used to be called "nature study" in the 1800's. In the 1960's, after Sputnik, science education became very focused on producing a new generation of scientists. The idea of "scientific literacy" is really quite new, becoming especially popularized in 1989 in Project 2061: Science for All Americans. Not everyone needs to be conversant with the depths of the history and philosophy of science, but some level of understanding is critical to distinguish scientific understanding from other kinds of ideology -- a proposition that the Bush administration never did understand.
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