Tag: Education

May 21, 2011

Disrupting College

It’s taken a while but I got around to reading the Center for American Progress report, Disrupting College. 1 It was a really fascinating read, highly recommend it.

One quote particularly stood out. While describing the disruption that occurred in the computer industry the authors characterize the old mainframe model by writing:

We had to take our computational problems to these centralized computer centers where experts solved them for us.

This contrasts with the current smartphone era. We now have the computational power for many daily tasks residing in our front pocket. This all got me thinking about college.

With the traditional college system we have the same mainframe model. We take our knowledge problems and inexperience to a centralized place where experts with many years of training help solve them for, or in the best case with, us. Carry the analogy from mainframe computing over to education and holy mind explosion Batman! If we could even achieve half of the transformation accomplished with computers we’d be in for some wonderful times.

A future where the tools for education are accessible on an individual scale and where geographic location is no longer a limiting factor makes me really excited.

Notes:

  1. Hat tip goes to Daniel ↩

April 9, 2011

Construction of space in computer labs

I was reading this article about online courses on the MindShift blog today. It starts off with this image.

What a horribly depressing vision of a computer lab. While it is how the lab in my high school and those at Whitman were set up it nevertheless seems like such an utter failure at creating a place where students can collaborate around digital content.

In addition to the great firewall problem of web access in schools perhaps a large reason why online courses and digital initiatives fail is because they are forced into spaces like this.

This is what makes me most excited about the role iPads could play in schools. The opposite of a desktop machine, an iPad would allow students to engage with content without having to sit in straight rows with nothing in front of them but a monitor.

If a school could create socially designed spaces for their computers they might be surprised by the type of learning that happens.

March 6, 2011

Openness, Socialism, and Capitalism. Open knowledge in education is far from a socialist idea. Instead, it fits well with the root ideals behind capitalism. If you are the one paying for research and innovation then you darn well ought to be able to share in the products that are created. Buy one get one.

March 3, 2011

College professors and students jump into the wiki world. It turns out that not all universities are content to view Wikipedia as an inaccurate and untrustworthy knowledge pool. Professors at various east coast schools are having students work in groups to improve entries. Sounds like a great use of all that journal access colleges have. (via Three trends that will shape the future of curriculum)

February 24, 2011

What’s the New Narrative in the Education Revolution?. An interview with Will Richardson about changing education. Schools should be re-geared to be more about learning and helping students get content on their own. Teachers should become co-learners, supporters, and mentors.

February 9, 2011

Moving to a Staff Blog. One school benefits by ditching mass emails and keeping all communication between staff on an internal blog. The information is archived, searchable, and comments beat the heck out of traditional email.

February 7, 2011

The new AP sounds like a good step

Last month the New York Times published a feature on the changes coming to Advanced Placement courses. 1

I finally got around to reading it and found it pretty interesting. They mention the following change, among others, for the biology course and exam:

College Board officials say the new labs should help students learn how to frame scientific questions and assemble data, and the exam will measure how well they can apply those skills…The board plans to cut the number of multiple-choice questions nearly in half on the new test, to 55. It will add five questions based on math calculations, and it will more than double the number of free-response questions, to nine.

It is not a perfect exam but it sounds like a good step forward in many ways.

In the AP U.S. History course I took during my Junior year we had to copy definitions for all the glossary terms to index cards that counted as a significant part of our grade. These index cards then made up a good chunk of the test material for class and, theoretically, the AP exam.

Ultimately I could rattle off dates and dictionary like definitions without really understanding the greater context and relevancy of events. It was nothing like the American History course I took Freshman year in college.

If cutting the number of multiple-choice questions in half means fewer students have to mindlessly re-copy glossary definitions then that’s progress. 2

Notes:

  1. H/T to Lauren. ↩
  2. Until we have our perfect system that is. 🙂 ↩

January 30, 2011

Back to the Future. Peter Thiel believes education is the next bubble to pop and that college serves as a way to defer thinking about your life.

January 24, 2011

Is College Really a Million Dollar Investment?. Or, when is a million dollars not a million dollars? It’s also a number that will only be going down in coming years

January 5, 2011

Your child left behind

The Atlantic surveys a recent study that focuses on how individual states compare in international math score rankings. The results are fairly surprising. It all goes to show that for schools more money brings more problems.