Group items tagged

"I am obliged to say something about calculators and computers. You would protest if I did not. I could refuse because I can prove I am incompetent. I know almost nothing about calculators and computers. It is a lack of knowledge that prevents me from tackling any minor problem of calculators and computers in mathematics education. It does not prevent me from indicating what in my view is a major problem. "Technology influences education. The ballpoint, Xerox, and the overhead projector have fundamentally changed instruction. But this is as it were unintentionally educational technology. Programmed instruction, teaching machines, language laboratories, which were intentional educational technology, founded on big theory, did not fare as well, to say the least of it. "Calculators are being used at school, and they will be used even more in the future. Computer science is taught and will be taught even more. How to do it - these are minor questions. Computer assisted instruction has still a long way to go even in the few cases where it looks feasible. " What I seek is neither calculators and computers as educational technology nor as technological education but as a powerful tool to arouse and increase mathematical understanding."

New employees too infrequently "possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self-help, and pride in good work for its own sake". Thus a 1906 Board of Education report. So "for as long as we have evidence, employers have been critical of the ability of the education system to provide the workers they need." Concluding para: ".... the world's most efficient and effective education systems, from Finland to Singapore, have some strikingly common characteristics: they are unremitting in their focus on the core skills of literacy and numeracy, but they set those skills in the wider context of developing higher-order complex thinking. Most of all, they take equality seriously: they focus, in a way which education systems historically did not, on ensuring that all - not just a privileged few - develop the higher-order skills needed to use and analyse information, and that they have access to rewarding higher-level training. Put at its crudest, conventional subjects still matter, but they need to be taught and learnt in innovative ways."

Thoughtful piece by Keith Devlin, who is no naysayer, having put a lot of effort into making and running MOOCs. Key excerpt: "Teaching and learning are complex processes that require considerable expertise to understand well. In particular, education has a significant feature unfamiliar to most legislators and business leaders (as well as some prominent business-leaders-turned-philanthropists), who tend to view it as a process that takes a raw material -- incoming students -- and produces graduates who emerge at the other end with knowledge and skills that society finds of value. (Those outcomes need not be employment skills -- their value is to society, and that can manifest in many different ways.) But the production-line analogy has a major limitation. If a manufacturer finds the raw materials are inferior, she or he looks for other suppliers (or else uses the threat thereof to force the suppliers to up their game). But in education, you have to work with the supply you get -- and still produce a quality output. Indeed, that is the whole point of education."

Plenty of references to MOOCs and to Educational Technology in the BIS International Education Strategy, launched today by Vince Cable and David Willetts at Pearson's HQ in London. (I was there.)

MOOCs and Open Education. Useful, if HE-focused, 21p report [PDF] by Stephen Powell and Li Yuan from Jisc Cetis. Worth most project people at least scan reading, for orientation purposes.

US oriented & UK relevant. 50 min talk about inequity in maths learning by Uri Treisman. Data in 36 page PDF of Treisman's slides at http://tinyurl.com/cn85gp6. Keith Devlin writes " This month's column is short, but I am asking you to set aside 51 minutes and 36 seconds to watch the embedded video. It is a recording of the Iris M. Carl Equity Address given on Friday April 19 at this year's NCTM Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. The title of the talk is "Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize" and the speaker is Uri Treisman, professor of mathematics and of public affairs, and director of the Charles A. Dana Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. I was not able to be at NCTM, but on the recommendation of several colleagues, I watched the YouTube video. I simply cannot write a column on mathematics or mathematics education in the same month as Treisman's immensely more important, profound-and powerfully articulated-words became part of mathematics education history. As a community, we now have our own "I have a dream" speech."

"This course is for teachers of math (K-12) or for other helpers of students, such as parents. After the summer I will release a student version of this course. This course provides an opportunity for teachers and parents to preview the ideas for students and think about how they may be useful, as well as learn from new research ideas and share ideas with other teachers and parents who enroll in the course. The course will also include interviews with some of the world's leading thinkers, such as Sebastian Thrun (Udacity/Google) and Carol Dweck (expert on mindset)."

Just published. I really liked this section: "Rather than data-driven-decision making, it seems to me we need a culture of decision-driven data collection-the data are collected only after a clear theory of how they are to be used has been developed, to be certain that they will be usable. The argument I am making here is that for instructional guidance, teachers simply do not need or find useful (and certainly do not want to wait, or to pay, for) the precision that the educational measurement community is used to providing. All this may seem like a counsel of despair, so perhaps it is appropriate to conclude these reflections by saying that I am actually very positive about the role that assessment can have in improving schooling. First, as Haertel points out, often the unit of action is the instructional group rather than the individual student. For this reason, Caroline Wylie and I have been exploring the use of single items that can be embedded in instructional episodes (Wiliam, 2011; Wylie & Wiliam, 2006, 2007). The response of one student to one item is not particularly meaningful, but the response of a class of 30 students to a single item does give the teacher useful information about whether to move on, or to review an instructional episode."

Getting on for 15 years ago I put David Wiley's precursor to Creative Commons "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course that I played a role in, having read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist. Wiley is still active in this field and this post has a very incisive observation in it about personalisation. I do not know whether I agree with it fully (adaptive learning and algorithms may/should have a role too): "There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."

Needs keeping an eye on, as much as anything else in view of Coursebuilder/EdX collaboration points made by Peter Norvig during telco in April.

Staged interview with one of the designers of Saylor's Real World Math courses

Upbeat piece in the Economist about the imminent impact of "adaptive technology" on school eduction in the US (and then on the world).

"But as Gates's higher-education activism grows, so does anxiety over the consequences." Worth us being properly aware of issues associated with how charitable money is beginning to be viewed in HE in the US. The discussion of the piece is interesting, in that there are some strong counters to the line advanced in the article.

Personal and current piece by Audrey Watters who has just visited Seymour Papert. Introductory excerpt: "In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child."

According to Duolingo, which is the brainchild of the inventor of reCaptcha Luis von Ahn "Since its launch 15 months ago, Duolingo has reached 10 million students and become the most popular way to learn languages online. No ad campaign, no gimmicks; just your support and a mission of free language education for the world." See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

Suggestion that social networks could be instrumental in helping MOOCs extend reach beyond those who are already enfranchised and educated. Potentially relevant to Citizens' Maths?

My gut feeling is that social networking could well be really important to us. In the Scratch context, I feel the Scratch community is potentially useful.

Hagiography about Thrun, as Udacity switches focus. (The company's strap line has changed from "Invent your future through free interactive college classes" to "Advance your education and career through project-based online classes). A couple of reactions:http://hapgood.us/2013/11/14/thrun-enters-burgeoning-sieve-market/; http://hackeducation.com/2013/11/14/thrun-as-saint/ Aren't both tilting a bit at windmills?

Interesting 1/10/2013 post from Keith Devlin about the production of technology based maths education.

"New niche certifications being offered by providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are aimed at satisfying employers' specific needs. Available at a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree, they represent the latest crack in the monopoly traditional universities have in credentialing higher education."