Some interesting tidbits from Gates about computing in the educational arena. The Chronicle of Higher Education has nicely placed the interview outside of their usual paywall.
The Chronicle Interviews Bill Gates. Bill Gates offered some predictions of the future and a defense of Microsoft’s security practices, in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle’s Andrea L. Foster. (The Chronicle, free link)… [The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog]
Some early morning wisdom from Ernie and Wurman. It's not just ok, but a good thing to admit ignorance.
Be happy: admit ignorance.
Richard Saul Wurman is the guy who coined the term 'information
architect.' He's also the the creator of the popular Access Travel
Guides, and the founder of the wonderful TED conferences. I've been
re-reading his book Information Anxiety 2, which… [Ernie The Attorney]
Fascinating case study of better meshing high school with real world demands. I suspect that, if this experiment is allowed to continue (by no means a certain thing), these are students who will be prepared to cope with the world they will have to face. Here’s the money quote for me:
“You have to make available all the technology you can get your hands on,” Farley explains. “And then you have to do one more thing – you have to trust them.” At Hunterdon, kids already prepare their own lesson plans. What’s more, Farley expects to see extensive at-home schooling within two years. “You have to decentralize learning,” he says. “It doesn’t all take place in the classroom. Our technology makes that possible. Then you have to think through what that means for the school buildings. Even more important, you have to think through what that means for the school community.” [Fast Times at Hunterdon High]
If you think this is only applicable or relevant in schools, you haven’t been paying attention. I really don’t fully understand why, but the leadership strength it takes to let the “inmates run the asylum” remains all too rare; despite the accumulation of evidence that it pretty much invariably works, be it in schools, business organizations, or elsewhere. Most likely because few of our leaders had the benefit of this kind of educational environment.
First Impression: Life Speed. “Kids today live in a nanosecond world.”
–Ray Farley , Superintendent, Hunterdon Central Regional High School
I
Another great essay from Paul Graham.
Here’s another useful resource to have handy, courtest of John Dvorak – a Timeline Index.
When you don’t need to memorize them for some silly history class or standardized test, exploring how event relate to one another in time is a fascinating way to spend some time.
Timeline Index – People, Periods, Places, Events . useful website of the day [Dvorak Uncensored]
I’ve been gradually trying to whittle down an extended backlog of items in my aggregator. One side effect with the aggregator in Radio is that posts begin to bump into one another in interesting ways. Patterns suggest themselves and I’m on my way to one answer to why I blog .
Halley reposted something she wrote two years ago addressing the seemingly perennial question of what is a weblog. It’s all worth reading, but the reasons that caught my attention were:
….
4. It’s telepathic training wheels — that is, it’s a very early stage on the way to the REALLY big next big thing — brain-to-brain telepathic transfer. Bye bye telephone, bye bye writing, bye bye fortune cookies, bye bye every other way you used to communicate. Blogs open up people’s minds, you travel the road with them, see it all through their eyes. It’s all we’ve got now, but soon enough we’ll all be in bed with each other, embedded with each other I mean.
…9. A weblog is my head, open to you, day and night, at your convenience. Come on in. Please take your shoes off at the door, I hate having to vacuum after you leave.
10. A weblog is watching brains at work, especially watching brains with the ultimate prosthetic device — everyone else’s brain and the whole net connected. Weblogs let you watch people learning at lightning speed. Awesome to witness.
posted by Halley at 3:28 AM | link
That links very nicely to several recent posts sitting in my aggregator, all pointing to a report from Australia on the internet and self-directed learning. Here’s one quick summary and pointer from Stephen Downes:
Linking Thinking: Self-directed Learning in the Digital Age
This is a remarkable report, much more revolutionary than it may appear at first glance, and worthy of detailed consideration. The author argues, in essence, that the internet enables a great deal of self-directed or informal learning, that learning in this way is viable, that there is an increasing demand for it, that government and institutions can do little to control it, but that it serves not only an economic role but also is a foundation for civil society. In order to support self-directed learning, two major things must be in place: universal access to the internet, access that goes well beyond merely placing computers in libraries and shopping malls, and access to knowledge and information, a vast amount of which is in danger of being captured from the public domain and commercialized. Via elearnspace. By Philip C Candy, Department of Education, Science and Training, August, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]
OLDaily
Today 9:23 PM
One of the compelling features of blogging tools is that they virtually eliminate the barriers to publishing and to creating a record of what you are learning on your journey around the web and through life. Their organizing principles are “just good enough” to be useful and the collective norms loose enough to help most of us get over having to be perfect or having to have the right answer. That makes them potentially powerful tools for learning.
What we each need to learn is idiosyncratic. The trappings of formal learning environments need to be approached with extreme caution. Learning needs to get back to play to succeed. The simplest possible tools, i.e. blogs and wikis, are what we most need to dip into the learning stream and take part. Explorers keep journals primarily for their own benefit, but the rest of us get to benefit vicariously from their generosity.
I want to come back to this line of thought. For now, let me end by pointing to the range of possible learning activities that become possible with a access to the net. At one end we have:
Slashdot has the scoop on The Wiki Game.
Social Media
Today 7:20 PM
Nerdish to the nth degree, perhaps, but it illustrates the learning (and fun) the becomes possible when you make the links in an encyclopedia something you can click on and follow. I know that Ted Nelson still disagrees , but this is close enough to the Xanadu he wrote about to meet my needs.
At the other extreme (along some axis), we have:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
If you want to learn computer programming you can’t go wrong with an education provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science“. Unfortunately, a MIT education isn’t available to everybody.
What if you could get a MIT education from the comfort of your Aeron?
MIT’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” course is available as a series of video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, and it’s all online!
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been MIT’s introductory pre-professional computer science subject since 1981. It emphasizes the role of computer languages as vehicles for expressing knowledge and it presents basic principles of abstraction and modularity, together with essential techniques for designing and implementing computer languages. This course has had a worldwide impact on computer science curricula over the past two decades.
The course leans towards the Lisp programming language, but the information presented in the lectures is valuable to programmers of any language.
The course requires a high level of commitment. There’s just under 22 hours of lectures spread across 30GB of MPEG video (DivX videos are also available).
It’s little wonder that so many institutions are flailing about trying to make sense of this world. It doesn’t take a major clue to realize that the established order is threatened from many directions.
A closing thought. One of the reasons that I have become an advocate of Personal Knowledge Management is this organizational and institutional disruption. It’s not that I disagree with Denham’s contention that knowledge is largely a product of social processes. It’s that I don’t think individual knowledge workers should simply trust that the organizations they belong to at the moment are willing and able to make the necessary investments in effective knowledge creation, capture, and exchange processes. If you happen to belong to such a farsighted organization, great. But you really need to be looking out for yourself as well.
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I finally had lunch with Betsy Devine today at the Bombay Club in Cambridge. This was a long delayed get together that was orginally intended to include Halley Suitt as well. Just as well that we ended up doing two separate lunches. I fear my head would have exploded if I had tried to keep up with both of them at the same time.
As with Halley, Betsy and I picked right up as old friends despite this being our first face-to-face meeting. Rich, stimulating conversation about education, organizations, knowledge sharing, writing, anthropology, humor, politics, science, and architecture to name just some of the topics I can remember.
One topic we talked about was what value was left in the notion of tenure in education both at the university level and below. At one point, Betsy served on the board of education in Princeton while her husband Frank was doing the research that led to his recent Nobel prize (how cool is it to get a chance to talk to someone that close to such an experience – who says blogging is a waste of time when it leads to opportunities like that?). Anyway, I was remarking on how odd tenure seemed to be when applied in public school districts. Betsy explained to me that the role of tenure in that environment was not about academic freedom but about creating some protection for older, more experienced teachers (generally women) who were otherwise at risk of being replaced by the newest crop of teachers just out of school who were not only likely to be more attractive to students and parents but much cheaper as well. I had never made that connection.
That flowed into a discussion of similar biases toward age discrimination in business organizations. That flowed into a discussion of the problems in the private sector that let organizations hold onto the profits that might accrue from replacing your aging, expensive workers with younger blood while being able to pass the broader costs of unemployed middle-aged executives with mortgages and tuitions to pay onto the society as a whole. Age discrimination laws notwithstanding, this pattern of privatizing profits and commonalizing costs is powerful and, unfortunately, rational behavior on the part of executives who are charged with putting the interests of their shareholders first. It says to me that our regulatory frameworks are broken in some important ways that will take a lot more than the trading of rhetorical positions that seems to characterize so much of our current public discourse. One reference that I want to reexamine in this context is the late Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent. I first found this slim volume about 15 years ago. It offers some excellent advice on understanding and acting on our collective responsibilities as informed laypeople in a world increasingly dominated by experts.
I find this graph alone worth thinking about. It’s a potent reminder that a learner’s efficiency is maximized with a Socratic strategy — one learner, one teacher. Well done, apprenticeship is an ideal model. Most classroom settings are large compromises from that ideal — sometimes intentionally.
While, as Jay points out, cost can be a constraint in achieving the ideal, more often than not, the real constraint is failure of imagination. We expect so little of most classroom environments, that it doesn’t occur to us how much more is possible. Compromise is also easier when the the perspective is to minimize training costs. The goal really ought to be maximizing performance on the job. More than that, the goal ought to be to push bring typical performance up to the level of the best performers in the organization; preferably with a strategy that is a bit more robust than mere exhortation.
Are you setting the bar high enough?. “Make no little plans. They fail to stir the blood of men,” said architect Daniel Burnham. Indeed, life’s too short for mediocrity. When I hear someone say they wish their online learning were as effective as their instructor-led workshops, I wonder why they’re shooting so low. They should be aiming to make their technology-enabled learning much better than the passive classroom experience. Let’s face it, the classroom is often a mediocre learning environment.
Workflow Institute‘s Sam Adkins gave a presentation this morning [note that this presentation link downloads a 4MB java applet to do the playback] on Advanced Learning Technology Today. He showed this graph to demonstrate what’s possible.
Twenty years ago, Benjamin Bloom found that individually-tutored students performed as well as the top 2% of classroom students. Equalling this record in automated fashion has become eLearning’s Holy Grail. The Department of Defense has achieved it, but cost is rarely a constraint there. The Advanced Computer Tutoring Project at Carnegie Mellon University claims even higher performance gains among Pittsburgh high-school students studying math. Did the students like it? One swore at a teacher so she’d get kicked out of school for a couple of days — during which she learned geometry with her unrestricted time online. [Internet Time Blog]
What a lovely way to start off a quiet Saturday.
Lest you remain unconvinced of the innovation value of idleness, recall that both the web browser and napster were created by college students who were surely cutting classes at the time.
Protracted defense of laziness. This weekend’s Guardian has a long, fun excerpt from Tom Hodgkinson’s forthcoming “How To Be Idle.”
As Sherlock Holmes knew. Lolling around in his smoking jacket, puffing his pipe, Holmes would sit and ponder for hours on a tricky case. In one superb story, the opium-drenched The Man With The Twisted Lip, Holmes solves yet another case with ease. An incredulous Mr Plod character muses: “I wish I knew how you reach your results,” to which Holmes replies: “I reached this one by sitting upon five pillows and consuming an ounce of shag.”
Rene Descartes, in the 17th century, was similarly addicted to inactivity. Indeed, it was absolutely at the centre of his philosophy. When young and studying with the Jesuits, he was unable to get up in the morning. They would throw buckets of cold water over him and he would turn over and go back to sleep.
