Big ideas from TED 2011: Letting students drive their education
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The implications of Khan’s work are nothing short of a total reevaluation of education. In a world in which the only constant is the increase in the pace of change, we simply can’t afford to give our kids anything less than an education system that actually gives them what they need to be successful.
Models for the Future of Learning — from KnowledgeWorks by Katherine Prince, Jesse Moyer, Lisa Scheerer, and Jamie Feltner
January 2011
This report was prepared for, and with the support of, Yellow Springs School District as part of a series of engagements related to its Class of 2020 initiative.
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From DSC:
How will these types of technologies affect what we can do with K-12 education/higher education/workplace training and development? I’d say they will open up a world of new applications and opportunities for those who are ready to innovate; and these types of technologies will move the “Forthcoming Walmart of Education” along.
Above item from:
From DSC:
The first portions of Kelly Tenkely’s solid blog posting — 17 ways to meet individual learning needs in the math classroom — stirred up some thoughts from a training-related session I was in earlier today. Kelly writes:
Differentiating instruction can be challenging. Student’s educational strengths and weaknesses can be widely varied, making it a difficult task to meet each student’s needs in any given lesson. Math is one such subject area where student skill levels can be very different.
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For most students, math takes a lot of practice. Unfortunately, the students who need the most practice are the most reluctant to do so because they haven’t been successful in the past. Many of these students have convinced themselves, through negative self-talk, that “I’m just not good at math.” What is a teacher to do with such a mix of skill and comfort levels in the math classroom?
Though there could be several lines of thought that I could pursue here — such as the good and bad sides of self-efficacy, personalized/customized learning, 1:1 initiatives, other — my thought process was most influenced from a training session I had attended earlier today. That session featured a video from Marcus Buckingham’s short-film series entitled Trombone Player Wanted.
Marcus asserts that there are several myths that many of us grow up with (such as our personalities change as we grow; we grow most in the areas of our weaknesses; our teams don’t need us to show up with our strengths, instead they need us to do ____). Marcus asserts that we should identify and develop our strengths (and manage around our weaknesses) — as we seek to create Win/Win situations. This perspective is consistent with my economics training that states that everyone benefits when each one of us does what we do best.
This made me reflect on the massive, systemic pressure most of our current educational environments/policies/curriculums put on students to get everyone to be at the same place. It seems like our systems stress conformity — in the goal of “level-setting” everyone.
This made me wonder:
I realize that there are basic skills that are very helpful for all adults — balancing a checkbook, being able to read and write, and many other skills. However, the question I started pondering today was…”At what point should we call it quits on a subject area — say that’s good enough — and then allow the students to pursue their individual strengths (rather than try to hammer out performance increases in an area they will rarely use)?”
Examples:
Computer ties human as they square off on ‘Jeopardy!’ — from CNN.com
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.From DSC:
To be clear, I celebrate what the LORD has created and given to us in our amazingly-complex minds! I do not subscribe to the idea that robots are better than humans or that technologies are to be glorified and that technologies will save the world — not at all. (In fact, I have some concerns about the havoc that could easily occur if certain technologies wound up in the wrong hands — with those who have no fear of the LORD and who have massive amounts of pride…with hearts of stone.)
Getting back to my point…
The phenomenon that Christensen, Horn, and Johnson describe in Disrupting Class continues to play out in higher education/K-12. The innovations are mainly happening outside the face-to-face T&L environments.
Also see:
Elementary, my dear Watson: Jeopardy computer offers insight into human cognition — from Sentient Developments by George Dvorsky
Also see:
- Massive parallelism:
Exploit massive parallelism in the consideration of multiple interpretations and hypotheses.- Many experts:
Facilitate the integration, application and con-textual evaluation of a wide range of loosely coupled probabilistic question and content analytics.- Pervasive confidence estimation:
No single component commits to an answer; all components produce features and associated confidences, scoring different question and contentinterpretations. An underlying confidence processing substratelearns how to stack and combine the scores.- Integrate shallow and deep knowledge:
Balance the use of strict semantics and shallow semantics, leveraging many loosely formed ontologies.
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IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies TLT is a scholarly archival journal published quarterly using a delayed open access publication model.
The Web revolution, the popularity of on-line learning, and the broad availability of computers in schools, colleges, universities, workplaces and in other social settings has caused a qualitative change in the field of learning technologies. Both the variety and the complexity of e-learning tools have increased dramatically over the last 10 years. A number of new conferences emerged to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of learning technologies to discuss their work. Yet, there are very few journals, which embrace the field as a whole and provide a space to publish archival quality papers. The goal of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT) is to bridge this gap.TLT covers all advances in learning technologies, including but not limited to the following topics:
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
The IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies will publish archival research papers and critical survey papers. Topics within the scope include technology advances in online learning systems; intelligent tutors; educational software applications and games; simulation systems for education and training; collaborative learning tools, devices and interfaces for learning; interactive techniques for learning; tools for formative and summative assessment; ontologies for learning systems; standards and web services that support learning; authoring tools for learning materials; computer support for peer tutoring and learning via discovery or project work or field or lab work; and creation and management of learning objects. A paper must either describe original research or offer a critical review of the state of the art in a particular area. Papers concerned with evaluation of technology are only appropriate if the technology itself is novel or if significant technical insights are provided. In order to best serve the community, the TLT will be published online, using a delayed open-access policy under which paying subscribers and per-article purchasers have access to newly published content, and then 12 months after the publication of each issue, all readers will have access to the content, free of charge.
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Along these lines, check out:
‘Jeopardy’ champs take on IBM’s Watson
“This is huge; this isn’t just about answering questions,” says computational linguistics expert George Luger of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who was not part of IBM’s team. “Everything before this was just a run-up to computers as true personal assistants.”
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“Every Prodigi ® lesson begins with Easy questions that review prerequisite concepts and get students warmed up. Based on student performance, questions increase in difficulty to Medium, and then to Hard (examination level), and finally Extreme (recreational). Not only that, but students have live access to hints and worked solutions to plug any gaps in their knowledge”
Smartphones as Cognitive Prosthetics — from insidedigitalmedia.com by Phil Leigh
From DSC:
Watch the Digimarc Discover video below — then think about how this might apply to anytime, anywhere learning!!! Wow!
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ALA 2011: Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop held at AAMAS 2011 — from Intelligent Systems
Adaptive and Learning Agents, particularly those in a multi-agent setting are becoming more and more prominent as the sheer size and complexity of many real world systems grows. How to adaptively control, coordinate and optimize such systems is an emerging multi-disciplinary research area at the intersection of Computer Science, Control theory, Economics, and Biology.
