Assorted Stuff

Teaching by Algorithm

August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

A BBC video starts by asking “Could computer algorithms upgrade education?”. It just gets worse from there.

It’s a profile of the Alt Schools, a small chain of private schools based in San Francisco, funded by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg. They also ask if this is the school of the future… and I certainly hope not.

I love the part where the CEO is giving the camera a tour of the company offices and notes that “almost everyone down there on the floor is a programmer”, and then, over there in the back, you have the educators. Plus the marketing and design people.

It’s pretty clear from that tour and this whole profile that the philosophy behind Alt School is very much driven by coding and data. They are using all this data (collected from largely rich, white kids based on the school in the video) to train their algorithms, with the goal to automate the teaching process. Something that makes the video’s note about the diminishing influence of teachers leading to a decline in good people entering the profession even more likely.

Or am I being paranoid?

Certainly teaching in a school where everything is recorded and deposited into a computer is pretty creepy. But is “hyper-personalized” instruction, driven by massive amounts of data and delivered by screen, really the future of learning? Or is it just the future for kids whose districts have the money to buy into this kind of marketing?

Watch the video. The New Yorker and Wired Magazine offer more details in their stories about this concept.

Technology Changes Everything. Or Nothing.

July 20, 2017 Leave a Comment

This from a recent segment of the BBC World Service podcast, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, caught my attention.

Two economists… published research showing that many companies had invested in computers for little or no reward, but others had reaped big benefits. What explained the difference was whether the companies had been willing to reorganize to take advantage of what computers had to offer.

You couldn’t just take your old systems and add better computers. You needed to do things differently.

The program1 is about how the technology of electricity failed to improved businesses who remained organized around steam, in the same way that computers failed to improve businesses who remained organized around manual practices.

With that in mind, go back to that first paragraph of the pull quote and replace “companies” with “schools”, minus the published research part.

Over the past twenty years or so, many, if not most, schools simply added computers to the old systems. And then wondered why the promised revolution never appeared. It’s still happening today.

The presenter ends the podcast with a few lines to consider the next time you hear or read about some service, app, or system someone claims will “revolutionize” learning.

The thing about a revolutionary technology is that it changes everything. That’s why we call it revolutionary. And changing everything takes time. And imagination. And courage. And, sometimes, just a lot of hard work.

Instead of just accepting the statement as fact, dig deeper and look for that imagination, courage, and hard work required to produce genuine change.

Look Behind the Graph

July 19, 2017 Leave a Comment

According to many excited retweets in my stream today, the number of females and “underrepresented” minorities taking AP Computer Science tests is way up. Like double up according to USA Today.

Now, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade (although a little rain today might be nice :-), but I’m also bothered by the unquestioned acceptance of statistics in the form of dramatic bar charts. So let’s take a closer look at that chart.

Notice that the bar to the far right combines two AP exams, the standard AP CS A exam, first offered in 1984, and the new AP CS Principles exam which was first administered in May of this year.

If you remove that new program, there is still a growth in both females and “underrepresented” minorities2 in the CS A class, just not nearly as dramatic as reported in the headlines. Even so, a very positive sign. It’s also positive that so many students are enrolling in the Principles course, which is far more accessible to those who are not necessarily looking at CS as a career path.

However, also missing from the analysis, both in the article and tweets pointing to it, is any information about how many of those new students actually did well on those AP exams. Five is the best score but three or four would also be respectable. We could discuss some value in earning a two.

I call this the Jay Mathews syndrome: attributing all success to just taking an AP exam, regardless of any measure of actual learning demonstrated by it.

Anyway, I mean absolutely no disparagement of the efforts to encourage more female and minority students to at least sample the study of computer science. And hopefully we’ll see this kind of steady increase when AP statistics are released next summer.

But anytime someone reports huge statistical increases, or decreases, especially in anything dealing with education, be skeptical and take a closer look. The story is likely much more complicated than the graph out front.

EdTech Deja Vu

July 3, 2017 Leave a Comment

If last week was a “normal” end of June, I would have spent five or six days attending the ISTE Conference, this year in San Antonio. This year I had to skip the event and join the #notatiste crowd.

But I wonder just how much I missed by not being there in person.

I certainly regret not having the rare opportunity to see friends and colleagues face-to-face. Beyond that, it wasn’t hard to keep up with the big ideas being tossed around in the convention center, thanks to the active stream of tweets, posts, podcasts, and video.

2Anyway, one concept that seemed to be all over the place was “personalization”. Presenters discussed how to personalize instruction. Vendors offered thousands of products to help the process. Visionaries talked of how artificial intelligence (AI) would personalize education.

But to me all of that seemed very, very familiar. Haven’t we tried this before?

Twenty years ago, when I was transitioning out of the classroom and into edtech training, I worked with several elementary schools whose principals had bought into a system called SuccessMaker. It was an expensive “programmed learning” system contained on dozens of CDs that was supposed to improve student learning in reading and math.

The software presented the students with activities wrapped with animated characters and, based on the child’s response, moved them through the lessons. The developer recommended that students should spend 20 minutes a day on their system. I remember clearly a trainer from the company promising teachers they would see tremendous improvement in test scores very quickly. And that students would be highly motivated to learn because they like using technology.

So, how is that system different from those that were being promoted at ISTE? I’m not sure much has really changed in those twenty years.

Those new “personalized” learning systems on the ISTE vendor floor likely use much more sophisticated algorithms to tailor lessons for students. They certainly collect far more data, sending it to the cloud to be processed along with information on tens of thousand students. As opposed to relying on the basic information provided by the teacher and storing individual student records on a single, non-networked machine.

Plus the marketing hasn’t changed much. Developers still promise miracle jumps in test scores. They still emphasize high student engagement because “technology”.

And, as with those systems from two decades ago, none of the learning is really personal.

Fear the Camera

July 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Please excuse me while I rant…

I found that sign displayed outside of a waterside tourist space during a recent trip and there’s nothing particularly remarkable about this list of rules. It’s the kind of stuff you might expect in any place with drinking crowds. I certainly want the “No weapons” restriction in a bar.

Then we come to the line “No Professional Cameras”.

I’m pretty sure whoever wrote that rule was thinking of a camera like the one used to make this image: a relatively big, black, single-lens reflex with interchangeable lenses. The variety of device you might expect to see in the hands of a paparazzi while stalking a Kardashian.

Except mine is not a “professional” camera.

I’ve never been paid a dime for any image I’ve made with it. I’ve never had a job that required me to use this device. I’m not a professional photographer, so this is not a “professional” camera.

Now, I’m certainly not going to complain directly to the management of this establishment about that one line. Their place, their rules.

I’m just pointing out this single, relatively minor entry in the unfortunately long list of examples of the modern day fear of photography.

Like the Metro cop who told me I couldn’t take pictures on the platform 2 and then walked past a group of kids doing exactly that with their smartphones. Or the security guards in DC who questioned me for pointing my camera at an interesting reflection in the window of a government building from a public street.

Do a quick Google search and you’ll find many, many similar stories, some with far worse consequences.

My point to this somewhat lame post is, cameras are everywhere, in the hands of just about everyone. Trying to ban or limit their use, especially by calling one particular style “professional”, is going to be an exercise in frustration. Far better to ask people to be respectful of others when making pictures. Doesn’t always work, but still better.

Ok, I’m done ranting. Thanks for reading this far.

For those interested, the ACLU has a short, simple guide to photographers’ rights. If you use a camera of any kind in public, read it.