twosigma

Milton Chen, on minds-on learning:

This fall, I humbly propose a new national campaign to teach basketball with textbooks. If the ensuing expressions of outrage by parents and demonstrations at school board meetings lead to energetic discussions about active hands-on, minds-on learning in academic subjects, this short-lived campaign will be very worthwhile. It will make us smarter about learning and move us closer to creating the kind of curriculum an Education Nation needs.

The LA Times did something controversial this week: They published a database of the “value added” ratings of thousands of Los Angeles elementary school teachers and hundreds of schools, searchable by name. This is a Big Deal.

I’ve been working my way through the technical paper that describes the study (PDF), but my mind keeps wandering back to a passage from the “Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?” newspaper article:

On visits to the classrooms of more than 50 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles, Times reporters found that the most effective instructors differed widely in style and personality. Perhaps not surprisingly, they shared a tendency to be strict, maintain high standards and encourage critical thinking. But the surest sign of a teacher’s effectiveness was the engagement of his or her students — something that often was obvious from the expressions on their faces.

I think student engagement is more than just a good indicator of effective teaching. I’m interested to know if there’s any value-added work in which student engagement is the performance measure, rather than standardized test scores. How effective is each teacher at helping his or her students develop a love of learning? And can this intrinsic motivation help a student succeed in subsequent years, even when assigned to less “effective” teachers?

I’m now on Twitter: @aribadernatal and @studiosketchpad

There’s a new series of articles being posted on the O’Reilly Radar, and I’m liking it: Education 2.0. The posts touch on several different topics: the role of the DIY ethic in the Maker classroom, ways in which schools will change as a process of disintermediation sets in, and reflections on plans for change, areas for change, models for change, and how to shape projects for change.

The posts are chock-full of interesting ideas, such as this one from Rob Tucker:

Ed 2.0 isn’t only or even primarily about technology. It is about arming students with the tools and the fierce determination they will need to learn with and through that technology. It is about encouraging intellectual entrepreneurship – creating of our students hundreds of millions of one-person startups, kludging their way to happiness and success.

Even when it’s exciting, a one-person startup sounds like a lonely endeavor. Will the same be true for the Ed 2.0 learner?

In DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz discusses the economics, sociology, and history of higher ed in the US (“how we got here”) and outlines a variety of promising new trends, techniques, and initiatives (“how we get there”, e.g. OER/CoP/PLN). My favorite passage appears towards the end of the book:

…forget about giving the guy a fish, or teaching him how to fish, either. Teach him how to teach himself, and he’ll always be able to acquire the skills he needs to find food, skills you haven’t even thought of yet for things you didn’t know you could eat. … Today, 90 percent of fish species are over-exploited… The world needs people who can figure out new ways to repair the oceans and to find or grow renewable sources of food.

But if his learning is self-initiated, how does he convince others that he is capable of acquiring these new skills? Portfolios can be a powerful way to supplement (or replace) credentials. For software developers, open-source projects are ideal fodder for portfolios: a GitHub profile can actually be more informative than a traditional resume.

More DIY on Anya’s DIY U blog.

The Mozilla Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation are jointly offering an Education for the Open Web Fellowship:

We invite applications from individuals interested in developing innovative approaches that educate people how to promote the open web. …Ideas can connect the open web with learners of any age: opening up the world of web citizenship to include kids; encouraging high school students to learn from the bendable and hackable world of the Internet; helping people in their 20s learn the skills they need to create wealth or find work in the web era. …ideas need not focus on formal learning within the education system. In fact, informal learning approaches that draw on the fluid nature of the Internet are highly encouraged.

Kudos to Mozilla and Shuttleworth on a great program. In it, they pose the question: Can you imagine your idea reaching thousands of people? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

Also, I should mention:

The fellow must reside in either Europe or Brasil, and be fluent in English.

Found via OpenEducationNews

I had the chance to attend the Startup Lessons Learned conference last week, a day of talks (videos) by entrepreneurs who have been using the Lean Startup approach to help navigate a path amidst uncertainty. The model, elaborated by Eric Ries over several hundred posts on his excellent blog, has been gaining traction recently in my part of town (and today in the NYTimes). Startup face the unusual challenge, he argues, of having to find a solution to a problem when neither the solution nor the problem is entirely known at the outset. The structure and behavior of the startup should be optimized for learning, and for learning fast: One part of the company focuses on understanding the problem, while the other part focuses on learning how to build a solution to the moving-target of a problem. The two parts coordinate through a unified feedback loop (build, measure, learn), which should be repeated as rapidly as possible. The goal of the Lean Startup approach is to maximize the likelihood of figuring things out before exhausting the available resources.

Our own startup has taken this model to heart, and it very much characterizes my day-to-day experiences there. As my research has been focused on how to construct productive social learning environments, the lean startup has been a fitting (and fascinating!) context in which to engage in this work. In some ways, I see the pair-programming process adopted by our engineering team as a model for the type of learning environment that we’re building in order to support collaborative learning online. The knowledge sharing that happens through interactions among peer learners also happens among our developers while pair programming. I wonder about the extent to which this is a useful parallel to draw, and am curious if the strengths and limitations inherent in the one suggest corresponding strengths and limitations in the other. Are Agile teams averse to taking on technical challenges that cannot be solved through verbal discussion? Does this in any way affect or characterize the software that results? For as much as I believe in the power of learning as a social process, I think there is always a need and a place for slowly grappling with thorny problems, both for students and for software developers.

The upcoming New York Maker Faire hits the NYTimes Bits blog today (The Robots Are Coming to Town):

If you’ve never been to one of these events, you’re in for a surprise. A Maker Faire is the home to mind-boggling contraptions built by robotics hobbyists, amateur rocket scientists and electronics enthusiasts. In one corner of the fair, you can see a 3-D printing robot next to a giant robotic spider, turn a corner and you’re faced with fire sculptures and a giant life-size version of the children’s game Mouse Trap.

The Maker Faire is but one of many great contributions that the O’Reilly empire has made to informal STEM education. My experience at the Bay Area Maker Faire last year was memorable and inspiring. In a time when our concept of education is increasingly tied to standardized testing, it’s refreshing to see that this sort of event is so popular. Will it be the kids who master all of the standards or those who grow up with the Maker Faire and Make Magazine who will ultimately build the Next Big Thing?

I’m not sure it’s necessarily two distinct groups. My sense is that the kids who “Make” have a reason to pay attention in their math and science classes, and their test scores may (or may not) reflect this.

Miles Berry suggests in Open Source Education that textbooks, lesson plans, and curricula are the “source code” around which some educators are building communities:

The communities of practice which grow up around open source projects could have much in common with the networks and communities of educational, curricular and pedagogic ‘developers’ which school leaders and teachers have the potential to become, if given the necessary encouragement, opportunities and freedom. Loose communities of teachers working together to develop educational resources, schemes of work or other educational innovation would foster creativity, ownership, and the legitimate peripheral participation [ref] necessary for professional development, as well as being a highly cost effective way of producing some great educational benefits over and beyond education technology.

I’ve recently started following a few different open source projects on GitHub, and enjoy seeing these communities at work. The interdependent and interconnected nature of code commits requires a level of coordination among developers that I’m not sure is necessary to get value from using a repository of peer-contributed educational resource. To what extent do educators those using sites like Curriki engage with one another, in practice? Is there interest among educators in forming richer communities of practice online? GitHub — with its notions of forks, watchers and committers — may prove to be a surprisingly relevant model…

Speaking of “communities of practice” and “legitimate peripheral participation”, Etienne Wenger just spent a week fielding questions on the Networked Learning Conference discussion board:
Making sense of the difference between network and community”. Looks like a discussion that I should have read before posting…

(discovered via the P2P Foundation blog)

In San Francisco… ccSalon SF (5/3/10): The power of open education

… At next month’s salon, we’ll be gathering together three preeminent individuals involved in shaping the future of education and harnessing the power of the internet and digital technologies as forces for good in this field. Each participant will give a brief presentation on their respective projects, followed by an informal panel/discussion period where we’ll explore more in depth the issues, challenges, and opportunities emerging in the field of education.

In NYC: New York City’s First Digital Learning Meetup – May 18, 2010

The longer mission is to provide New York City’s vibrant population of entrepreneurs, innovators, developers, technologists, hackers, researchers, educators and digital media thought leaders with a vehicle for driving this transformation toward a new future of learning. At this first meetup, you can expect:
- A presentation from the organizers of Startl
- A discussion with Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, a leading venture capitalist interested in education and learning
- A couple of sucessful digital learning startups telling their stories

If you haven’t already, it’s worth checking out these recent NYC edtech happenings: Hacking Education, TEDxNYED, Startl.

Has there been a recent uptick in interesting local digital learning meetups, or did I just start paying closer attention? Is there really more interest in NYC than in SF?