Some Work of Noble Note

May Yet Be Done

Category Archives: Education

“Something ere the end
some work of noble note may yet be done”
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My musings on Education – how it’s applied, what makes it effective, noteworthy institutions or individuals, movements, etc.
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Reflections on the Revolution in EdTech…

Some graduate programs take over your life in that they are so demanding of your time, all you find yourself doing is working on classes, papers, and research pertaining to said degree. Then there are MBA programs. MBA programs take over your life in that they simply erase everything that you had going on and give you brand new, MBA-centric replacements. New friends, new hobbies, new routines, and, obviously, new responsibilities inside and outside the classroom.

To write the Great American MBA Novel is no mean feat and would require (irony of ironies) more free time than one could ever possibly get while actually in an MBA program. Instead, I want to focus on the specific changes I’ve seen in returning back to school. I’ve done the math. I’ve been in school from 1989 – 2009 and now again in 2014. The comparison points that are especially useful are 2005 (my last year of high school), 2009 (my last year of college), and now obviously 2014. Those are admittedly convenient benchmark years in my own life, but it turns out, they actually characterize stages of technological advancement fairly well, too.

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The New Textbook Revolution

The recent Amazon / Brazilian Department of Education announcement raises some larger questions about the future of (digital) textbooks.  It’s not enough to accept that textbooks will be read over devices like the iPad rather than in hardcopy.  Instead, the paradigm of digital has the potential to change the entire business model of the textbook market altogether.

But first, a preamble.

I remember reading a prominent author recently discuss the crisis of self he felt knowing that his ebook was to be a fundamentally different product of labor than his regular print books.  There is no “final draft” of an ebook; he can go back and change the digital text infinitely many times.  He will never be held accountable for any piece of writing in the same way that he would have been with hardcopy.  With that realization came flux.  What does it mean to put one’s thoughts down anymore?  Imagine the mandates of authors like Nabokov and Kafka who wanted all their unfinished fiction burnt upon their death.  In the care of opportunistic or merely generous relatives, those directives were ignored and the works shared with the world, giving us invaluable literary benchmarks like The Castle and The Original of Laura.

Textbook authors are similarly less beholden to history with the new digital textbook world.  It may not mean similarly existential crises of self-understanding as fiction authors face (as comical as that would be), but it does lead to a large disconnect around the current textbook model.

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“Amazon to the Amazon”: Digital Textbooks in Brazil

As EdSurge reports, Amazon and Brazil’s Department of Education have come to terms on an agreement allowing Amazon to deliver digital textbooks to teachers throughout the country.  The delivery would be done exclusively via Whispercast, the mobile device management system Amazon uses for Kindles deployed within an organization.  In addition to stating that Amazon has already delivered more than 40 million textbooks, the announcement also dropped an almost innocuous note that Amazon and the Brazilian DoE have jointly started converting over 200 textbooks to digital for delivery to public high schools as well.

There are three elements to this announcement, two concerning Amazon specifically, and one broader implication.

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Google[x] as a model for education

Two weeks ago, Google[x] was profiled in Fast Company.  It was notable not because of how fascinating a read it made, but because it was the first such profile the notoriously secretive Google[x] has ever allowed of itself.  Google[x], of course, is the ultra-secretive lab at Google dedicated to creating “moonshots.”  To date, it’s been responsible for giving the world Google Glass and Project Loon; other rumored projects still in works include incredible inventions like a ladder to the moon and connecting every appliance (and non-appliance) in your house to the internet, i.e., advancing the “internet of things.”

The [x] in its name initially represented a stand-in until people could figure out what to call the division; it now represents Google[x]’s desire to have 10x the impact of traditional product improvements.  They’re looking for impacting billions, ideally, though a few hundred million is acceptable.  Everything about Google[x] is remarkable.  It’s a skunkworks group, with a level of corporate support that every scientist would kill for.  Its ambitions are so great as to trivialize the “skunkworks” label for every other such division out there.  And it’s peopled by exaggerated versions of the smartest, most ADD kids you knew in school.  All of which combine to give it such a collegial mindset, you can’t help but wonder how to apply it to schools.

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Aaron Levie’s Education Thoughts

Aaron Levie was profiled in an education-focused interview a few weeks ago on Medium.  The interviewer, Afraj Gill, did a fantastic job getting past the platitudes and gave Aaron a chance to share some clearly well-established thoughts regarding education.  I try to be selective when recommending articles and this one clears just about every bar I’ve set for myself.  Gill’s profile is that important for a few reasons.

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Educational ROI Evaluated by Discipline

“The return on higher education would be much better if college were cheaper,” states The Economist in a rare tautologism.  The magazine goes on to note that the cost of post-secondary schooling has risen at almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983 and at not-for-profit and for-profit colleges, the default rate among graduates three years out is 15% and 22% respectively.  All of which begs the question, what are students paying for?  While the editorial then goes further to explore nuances in the ROI on a college degree based on different disciplines studied, the magazine is content to accept the data in line with conventional wisdom.  “Unsurprisingly, engineering is a good bet wherever you study it…[but] arts and humanities courses are much more varied,” it concludes before ceasing to perform any real analysis.

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Deep Dive: ClassDojo

As iconic an image of the classroom as the perfectly polished red apple on a teacher’s desk, as evocative a symbol as the moss green, lined chalkboards, is the slightly askew gold star collected by eager kindergarteners for (out)performance in the eyes of their teachers.  Why not update that for the Web 2.0 era?  ClassDojo is premised on tech-ifying classroom behavior management.  Rather than handing out gold stars or even manually tracking positive comments on a clipboard or poster, teachers can now manage all of this not just electronically but through a mobile app.  And by gamifying classroom behavior, students should become more incentivized to maximize their engagement.

For an enterprise as elementary as Gold Star Management (GSM…just kidding, we don’t actually need that acronym), the app is appropriately simple and intuitive.  It may toe the line dangerously between “feature” vs. “platform,” but there’s no denying that it does what it wants to do better than any other company out there.

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A Call for an Educational Gini Coefficient

It’s not often you get to discuss the negatives of having too much data, but Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Oxford) and Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) do just that.  In their recently published book, Learning with Big Data, they explore the dystopian extrapolation of the current movement towards data gathering in education.  In some ways, theirs is a warning as old as Nineteen Eighty Four (or even Brave New World); when authorities have at their fingertips every type of data they could desire, how can we trust them to act in our best interest?  (Maybe this goes all the way back to Juvenal?)

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Deep Dive: Edmodo

“It’s Facebook for the classroom.”  That’s a common description for one of the most impressive EdTech platforms out there, but it’s likely quite unfair.  The visual resemblance between Edmodo and Facebook may be uncanny, but the use case for Edmodo is terrifically different.  Between content management, social, and analytics, Edmodo shows promise beyond just being your classroom profile and newsfeed.  The potential for the company is sky high, but at the same time, my biggest reservation about Edmodo is around its ability to – truly – transform education.

Features

Edmodo’s main feature is “social,” in other words, imagine having a separate Facebook just for your classmates and your teacher.  Everything that popped up your newsfeed was related to your class and the only people you could communicate with were your peers and teacher. I’d like to think that would improve student engagement.  Facebook is the world’s greatest procrastination tool because it appeals to our very human desire for social connection as well as the darker, voyeuristic side of us.  Edmodo works by co-opting that promise of social connection and even voyeurism for an educational context.  You can send messages to anyone in your class, send out a blast, share homework assignments and pictures, not to mention watch your peers’ profiles and interactions the same way you “Facebook stalk” your friends.  You’d expect that would increase engagement with the classroom context then, even if only marginally.

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Education’s Awakening: Adaptive Learning

In an earlier post, I talked about how education at Oxford has remained remarkably unchanged over the course of centuries.  As an example of an “evolved” learning style, I provided the “American” higher education system, with its investment in lecture-based pedagogy and social learning.  Really, though, all that represents is a sideways move in learning evolution.  American colleges didn’t advance learning, they just borrowed elements from less advanced learning environments, namely the K-12 classroom.

This is sad because the traditional classroom developed not out of any particularly brilliant insights on how best to teach students.  Instead, it developed from a need to educate as many students in the shortest amount of time and with the fewest consumption of resources.  Kids have required education since the dawn of civilization and parents figured out that it was more efficient for them to throw all the kids together in a classroom and use only one adult to teach all the kids at once.  Efficient in terms of time commitment for parents?  Yes.  But no one can possibly defend this as the optimal path toward academic efficacy.

Adaptive learning, then, marks the dawn of the next stage of education’s evolution.  Guided by the foundational premise that every student learns differently, adaptive learning uses technology to understand something about how a student learns and then provide content differently based on how it qualifies a student’s knowledge level.  A basic example is the GMAT; as you answer questions on the GMAT, it adjusts the difficulty of each successive question it serves up to you.  It helps the GMAT create gradations of knowledge by constantly subdividing test takers into more refined groups of “knowledge isobars,” if you will.

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