Thank you Karen Billings and everyone from the SIIA for
another successful Ed Tech Industry Summit this week.
Lots of interesting companies, and here are some highlights.
First the three winners from the Innovation Incubator:
Farimah Schuerman watching Curtis Linton receive School Improvement Network's Codie Award
Derek Luebbe of Jetlag Learning won most innovative product
for simCEO. By placing
students in the roles of CEO and of investors around virtually any educational
topic, simCEO energizes students to learn.
Saad Alam of Citelighter
won the educator’s choice award. Citelighter allows to students to research and
write more efficiently by allowing them to curate, annotate, organize, and
collaborate.
James McClafferty of Brain
Parade won the most likely to succeed for See.Touch.Learn. See.Touch.Learn
is a visual learning and assessment system which has proven especially helpful
in reaching special education students.
Lil Kellog won the Ed Tech Impact Award for her many years
of contributions to education.
Derek Luebbe of Letlag Learning and James McClafferty of Brain Parade
Dr. Dustin (Dusty) Heuston of The Waterford Institute won
the Lifetime Achievement Award, and provided his thoughts on where US education
needs to go.
We must
focus on early learning. By the time students are in third grade, it is
virtually impossible for most of them to catch up; students who had been slow
learners would be expected to learn at twice the rate of other students for
five or more successive years. By Kindergarten, students from low SES
environments face an incredibly wide knowledge gulf. Their lack of cognitive
stimulation has impeded brain development. Their vocabularies are 1/3 as large
as high SES student, which creates a substantial obstacle throughout their
academic sojourn. Their lack of reading readiness will leave them far behind
their cohort.
We must broadly
deploy technology that uses adaptive learning to individualize instruction. We
cannot merely improve the efficacy of our current education system, especially
when we are also trying to cut education costs. We must transform it through the use of technology. Limitations in the current delivery system means that teachers can provide students with barely 1
minute of individualized instruction a day. Even if we could improve the current education system, the limited gains would not be keeping pace with the rest of the
world. As tech continues to become more powerful, accessible, and cheaper, it
can improve and replace much of the role teachers play in delivering cognitive
learning, while enhancing the teacher's role as coach and leader.
Congratulations to all of the Codie
Award winners. We want to send special congratulations to our clients:
Lisa Barnett with Atomic Learning's first two Codies of the evening
Lisa Barnett of Atomic
Learning for Tech Skills Plus Training Package winning Best Postsecondary
Learning Solution, Best Postsecondary Solution, and Best Education Solution.
Curtis Linton of School
Improvement Network for PD 360 Mobile’s winning Best Educational Use of a
Mobile Device, and thank you for your kind words. PD 360 is the leading
Professional Development platform for educators.
Berj Akian of Classlink winning Best Cloud Application Service for LaunchPad iOS and Touch Apps.
LaunchPad allows schools to deliver a personal virtual desktop to all students
to any device through the cloud.
Looks like our next conference will be ISTE in San Antonio. We'd love to talk to you there, so let us know if you're going.
We all understood that the Common Core was meant to drive
change in instruction, but did we understood how much change? Less than 40% of what
is supposed to be taught in Math under the Common Core is currently taught at
that grade today.
One of the most interesting presentations at NCTM was the
results of a study comparing the Common Core to state standards. Dawn Teuscher
of Brigham Young University presented, based on a paper she co-wrote with
Shannon Dingman of the University of Arkansas, Jill Newton of Purdue
University, and Lisa Kasmer of Grand Valley State University. The name of the
paper is Common Mathematics Standards in the United States, and it is
due to be published in The Elementary School Journal.
The paper specifically studies grades 6-8, comparing the
Common Core State Standards in Math (CCSSM) to the current state standards in
eight large states. But the implications are more universal and can likely be
extrapolated to all states and all grades.
First step was to granularize the CCSSM, as these standards
are written in a way that generally encompasses multiple learning expectations.
For example:
CCSSM 8.EE.5: Graph proportional relationships, interpreting the
unit rate as the slope of the graph. Compare two different proportional
relationships represented in different ways, For example, compare a
distance-time graph to a distance time equation to determine which of the two
moving objects has greater speed.
This is really three different learning expectations:
Graph proportional relationships
Compare two different proportional relationships
represented in different ways
Interpret unit rate as the slope of a graph
The researchers went into all the standards, and broke them down into learning expectations, which can then be compared to the existing state standards.
Second stage was to map the CCSSM learning expectations to
the learning expectations of existing state standards. There were four possibilities
for CCSSM learning expectations:
The existing standards could teach the material
at an earlier grade than CCSSM
It could be taught at the same grade level under
both plans
It could be taught at a higher grade currently
It could be something new that is not currently
taught at all
The study found that, across states, about 40% of the CCSSM objectives are not taught at
all today, in any grade. About 15% is taught in higher grades. About 15% is
taught in lower grades. And only about 30% of the material is currently taught
in the grade dictated by the Common Core. The specifics are different state by
state, one state may teach an objective in 4th, another in 5th,
and a third may not actually teach that skill, but the overall percentages generally
apply.
Looking at individual grades:
48% of grade 6 CCSSM standards are new in at
least ¾ of the states (absolute values, inequalities, measure of variation, and
geometry)
46% of grade 7 CCSSM standards are new in at
least ¾ of the states (relationship between 2D and 3D figures, angle
measurement, random sampling, comparative inferences)
39% of grade 8 CCSSM standards are new in at
least ¾ of the states (transformational geometry, qualitative features and
comparisons of functions)
The biggest focus areas of new material are around
statistics and probability and geometry. In fact, only about one quarter of the
learning objectives of the Middle School CCSSM were found across all states.
How will teachers be able to adapt to teaching material that was never taught in K12 before? How will teachers teach material that used to be taught 1-3 grades later? What happens during the next 3-4 years when students who weren't taught CCSSM material in lower grades are expected to learn even more advanced material? Who among you has figured out that the figures don't add up to the 60% that is in the title of this blog post (55% of the objectives are either not taught yet or are taught in a higher grade level, while an additional 15% are taught at a lower grade level)?
We all want our next generation to be skilled in math and science. The current state standards aren't getting us there. But, as national education funding gets sequestered, and
state education funding is being squeezed by Medicare and Medicaid, making this
type of change should be easy. Right?
Eight thousand people showed up for the Texas Computer
Education Association Fusion 2013 Conference in Austin this last week. I’m the
last one here, because good old American Airlines canceled my original flight
for Friday and then my newly booked flight for Saturday. But this gives me a good chance to compose a
recap.
First of all, the fun stuff. Alan Stern and I found a great
wine bar, Cru, on 2nd
Street. If you’re in Austin, they have very economical flights of wine
tastings, and great appetizers to go with them. We then headed over to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar on 6th
Street for a great show. And tonight, I’m going to Antone’s on 5th Street for a
Carnaval of Brazilian music.
Getting back to Education, Charles Blaschke, of Education Turnkey Systems, probably knows more
about education funding than any person in the US. At the SIIA member
breakfast, he noted that districts have slammed on the brakes for all
purchases, and that there is $2 billion of uncommitted Title I funds, because
of fear of sequestration. Districts can allocate up to 25% of their Title I
funds for the following year, and since they have no confidence that there will
be federal funding next year that is comparable to what they have this year,
they are holding on to as much as they can. This has made for a terrible
November through February time period for education publishers, a spending
desert that will continue at least until districts get a better sense of what
they will receive next year. Even then, if federal education levels are cut (a
good possibility), the education technology publishing community can expect a
terrible next 12 months.
But you couldn’t tell that by the looking at the number and
size of the booths on the exhibition floor. There seemed to be a lot of
relatively new companies with a lot of money to spend on conference booths.
Educator traffic in the exhibition hall seemed to be down. Many vendors
reported a fairly healthy number of visitors on Wednesday, but significant dips
on Thursday and virtually no visitors on Friday. Still, with TCEA as the de
facto winter education technology conference of the winter, it’s an essential
place for education publishers to be seen.
Peter Sheahan of Change
Labs in Australia was the opening keynote speaker at the conference. He
related the changes in the US Education sector to other sectors that have
experience seismic changes. One key underlying factor is that in none of these
transformations were people before the change able to predict or explain what
would happen during the change. Thus, if you encounter someone who says with
any certainty, “this is what you need to do” the only thing you can be certain
of is that that person is wrong.
Because there is no algorithm that you can apply to improve
the education system in the US, the best strategy is to make sure you surround
yourself with people who are knowledgeable, professional, and flexible.
In schools, this means that change has little to do with the
technology, and everything to do with the teacher. It’s not going to work from
top down, but has to be achieved through two way communications. Allow teachers
some measure of control, and help them make some simple first steps to change,
and you can start driving improvements.
For education technology companies, maybe that means working
with Farimah and me at Academic Business Advisors.
Seth Mattison of BridgeWorks
was the closing keynote speaker. As if the huge changes facing education aren’t
enough, we also have to deal with three generations of educators who just don’t
get it. Of course, which three don’t get it, and which one does, depends on
which generation you’re in:
Traditionals:
born before 1947, look at the other generations as lacking loyalty, too
consumer oriented, and not willing to stick with a plan long enough for it to
work.
Boomers:
born 1947 – 1962,see the other generations as pessimistic, not willing to try
out new things and take chances in order to make things better.
Gen X:
born 1963 – 1980 just don’t trust the other generations, and they just want to
be told what they have to do, when they have to do it by, and then be left
alone to do it their way.
Millennials:
born 1981 – 2000 don’t see the value of face to face communications and demand want a say in what is going to be done; they don’t want to be told what to do,
they want to help shape both what is going to be done and how it’s going to be
accomplished.
There are a few people, irrespective of birth year, who do
not feel entirely comfortable with any one of the generations, but can often be
used to help fuse the four generations into a functioning team. Mattison’s
advice was to find these people, and have them help push your teams to
evolutionary, not revolutionary change.
Of course, no tech conference would be worth its weight
without a few website and app tips. Here are a few I gleaned from the conference:
Endless
Alphabet is a very cute early reading app that teaches kids the alphabet
and vocabulary.
Thinglink.com
allows you or students to post a picture and then annotate sections of the
picture with explanations, sound, animation, or video. For example, if you were
teaching Spanish, students could post a picture and label parts of the picture
with the word in Spanish.
CopyPasteCharacter.com
offers all the special font characters so you can copy and paste them into
documents, presentations, chats, or web pages.
EZBib is a
free bibliography maker. If you scan in the bar code of a book, it will
automatically give you back the information for an MLA citation.
All in all, a worthwhile four days, but I can’t wait to get
back to my own bed.
This post is written by Farimah Schuerman, Managing Partner of Academic Business Advisors.
Are you a senior manager of a company that develops and
sells instructional solutions, especially for
math and reading? If so, you've
felt the pain of the recession and may wonder how you can best survive the
"new normal." One way to ensure your company's survival is to see the
current situation from your customer's view. What's causing them to more
carefully consider every purchase may run deeper than you think.
The rush to meet the guidelines for the Common Core
standards and the anxiety around meeting the objectives of the related
assessments is masking a much deeper and more daunting challenge school
districts’ leadership team: Change Management.
While leaders of commercial enterprises have understood and embraced practices
that guide a corporation through change when outside forces require it, this has
never been a part of the education culture.
Now, school personnel at all levels are being bombarded with change. If
you understand the forces behind the change and can help administrators cope
and adapt, you could find your business thriving, even during a down economy.
Three Forces Driving Change: What’s
the Impact on School Administrators?
Driving Force #1: Common
Core Standards Are Forcing New Processes
The shift to Common Core has required districts to take a
long, hard look at which processes they can keep doing as before, and which
must change. Teaching is shifting from
knowledge-based, to learning-based approaches. It’s not what the teacher knows,
it’s what the students learn; students need to grasp concepts, not commit facts
to short term memory, and to demonstrate that they can apply what they have
learned to new problems. Good teachers
have used this approach for years with success, but many others have not. Successful
companies are already reacting to this catalyst and providing leadership, producing
instructional materials, particularly in reading and math, that use the latest
cognitive research to help teachers help each student learn.
This leads me to the second pressure point: meaningful
professional development (PD) and related evaluation. Teachers need to be prepared not only to
align instruction to the Common Core Curriculum, but how to extract the best
learning. This involves disrupting
traditional classroom strategies based on the new realities: the use of new
technologies, mainstreaming students with special needs, and problem based
learning, just to name a few. We hear the terms "personalized
learning" and "individualized instruction" which expand on the
concept of differentiated instruction. I wonder how many teachers are equipped
to teach this way, especially as class sizes grow larger than we've experienced
before. The best PD providers are building both product-specific and generalized
tools for helping teachers successfully make these changes and for
administrators to better manage them.
Driving Force #3: Doing
More with Less
A third pressure is the combination of diminished or flat
school funding while expenses, particularly those around staff benefits, are on
the rise.
In this time of greater accountability, teachers,
administrators, and materials are being measured, evaluated, and judged, even
when outcomes can’t be specifically tied to specific actions. Diminished
funding also comes at a time when there is momentum to acquire and support costly
technology solutions which promise to improve learning. A firehose of new
technology applications have the potential to provide more reliable collection
and analysis of student data. But, administrators feel forced to make stressful
decisions and often feel the frustration that there may be no "good"
decision, just the best one they can make under bad circumstances and with
incomplete information or unbiased guidance. Successful companies are finding
ways of tying their solutions to both fiscal austerity and high achievement.
Strong Company Leaders to the Rescue
So what's the point of painting this negative picture? It's not to depress you, but to remind you
that in order to be successful in this environment, everyone who works for your
company must understand these forces and be empathetic. Company leaders,
starting with the CEO and every employee must understand the buyer's
perspective when trying to get excellent products, with game-changing
possibilities, into the hands of students who need them. So, here are some guiding questions I suggest
you consider as a leader of an organization that serves the school market:
How does your product (or service) make the
buyer's life better?
Can you articulate how your product solves a
pressing problem?
Does the problem your product or service
addresses keep school leaders up at night?
What else is required, or has to change for educators
to implement your product successfully and do you understand how the
implementation will be managed?
Does your product or service replace a product
that is established and gets the job done - not as well as yours, but works?
How much teacher training will be required to
effectively utilize your product or service and when do you expect this
training to be provided?
When your product is implemented, will instructional
time have to be managed differently?
Will using your product require that students are
identified in a new or different way?
Four Steps You Can Take Today on the Pathway to Success
1. Help Potential
Customers Secure Funds
How will educators pay for your product? While this is a basic question, the answer is
not always straightforward. If grants
are necessary, how will they be secured?
How can you help? Does the use of
your product save some other expense?
Credit recovery products have used this approach, retaining students
brings income to the district that can cover the expense. What strategies like
this could you use to reduce perceived costs?
2. Train and Support Your
Sales Team
It is critical that your sales team can display empathy for school
administrators who are under fire. Some
ways they do this are by confirming timing and by offering alternatives for
scheduling, and by being sensitive to the timing of other initiatives that are
going on in the district. They need to develop a deep understanding of the
district’s priorities. Administrators
are pulled into committees, community meetings, staff trainings and are
thrashed around by external forces can affect the salesperson's ability to drive
deals forward on your company's schedule.
3. Think Through the Entire
Process from Sale to Implementation
Understanding the principals of change management will help
your company guide and support your customers through the challenges they
face. When you are proposing a product
adoption, think about how it will affect the district or school and take the
time to plan the change with the administrators. Look at calendaring with them. Offer support for how data might flow if the
product has instructional impact. Think
about how teachers will need to do things differently, and figure out how best
to stage those changes so they are as easy as possible. Assign support staff to
monitor these changes; don't encumber the sales team with that task, that's not
their role, or their expertise. Supporting implementations will distract them
from their principal function: driving new sales. Take time to help your entire
staff understand the current dynamics of change so that each one can be
empathetic and supportive during any interaction with customers or prospects.
4. Plan for the Future
Finally, senior management needs to be prepared that sales
are slower under these circumstances, and you need to be cognizant of the cash
flow implications of this slowed decision-making process. Unless you have a "must-have"
product, you will need to tighten your belts and hunker down. Keep these points
in mind!
You can listen to a 15 minute discussion on these issues with Glen McCandless of Selling to Schools, Mitch Weisburgh, and me on Blog Talk Radio.
This process of re-imagining products and services requires
a radical change in underlying beliefs; it’s what in 1962 Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm
shift. While business leaders can attempt this process internally, it
is often best facilitated by outsiders, because it involves a significant shift
in perception.
Current projections by Department of Education’s NCES are
for Postsecondary enrollments to grow at 1.5% to 2.0% through 2020 (to about 21 million students), although
the demographics point to a decrease in the 18-22 year old population through
2015, a greater percent of students will be enrolling. This forecast of slow
growth assumes that we will not meet the Obama’s goal that by 2020 the US would
have the highest college graduation rate in the world, 60%. Achieving that goal
would add another 6 to 10 million students.
Time to complete programs
Students attending proprietary (also known as for-profit) higher
education institutions tend to graduate faster than students at the
not-for-profit or public ones, as shown in the following chart:
38% of Postsecondary students are adult learners, and the
For-Profit sector has drawn a greater proportion of these students than either
the Publics or the Not-For-Profits. The 25-44 demographic is going to increase
by 28% by Fall 2020 to 9.6M, and a higher percentage of them will attend
Postsecondary institutions (from 9.8% to 10.8%). This translates to an increase
of just over 300,000 students in this demographic in Fall of 2020
registrations.
Current benefits of the GI bill are $1,473 per month for 36
months. Only 6% of veterans use the full amount; and the average veteran that
uses these funds uses them for only 17 months. The market leader is U of
Phoenix with 17,000 veteran-students (the 3rd and 4th have 4,000 students) and
$133M last year in GI Bill revenues. The biggest caveat in targeting veterans
is that 54% drop out of 4-year programs, and 63% drop out of 2-year programs.
Trending Career Preferences
The National Research Center for College and University
Admissions (NRCCUA) conducts surveys of HS seniors, including career
preferences. Below are the professions that moved up the most between the (college
graduating) classes of 2013 and 2017:
2.78M (13.5%) of postsecondary students enrolled in fully
online programs 2010-11. 6.1M students
(31%) took at least one online course in Fall 2010. Online enrollments are
increasing at 5.5% annually compared to 1.4% of all postsecondary enrollments.
$18.5B was spent on online postsecondary education in
2010-11, and will grow by 11% per year for the next five years (unless prices
decrease, which is a possibility given some of the new business models)
80% of online students live within 100 miles of the campus
Of 6.700 colleges, only 2.6% offer fully online learning
programs
Almost ¾ of students who seek online degrees do so primarily
for career, job, or employment reasons.
Early this week, ABA attended the October 2012 State
Education Technology Directors Association (SEDTA) meeting with our client, SymbaloEdu. What happened at the meeting?
Lots of face to face meetings with delegates we've come to
know, some great sessions including updates from the states on Big
Data initiatives, broadband and device access, preparing high quality
online assessments and accelerating the shift to digital and open content. These were preceded by an enlightening
plenary by Betsy Corcoran,
co-founder and CEO of EdSurge. If you
aren't currently subscribed, you should be at www.edsurge.com. Her talk focused on the current environment
of innovation, fueled by investment from the new crop of Internet entrepreneurs
with an interest in education. This
interest coupled with a new economy in which a business can be launched with
very little initial investment, have resulted in a proliferation of education
start-ups trying to reach the market, many of whom solve one small problem in
learning. We will be talking about that in greater depth in an upcoming
article.
The luncheon program continued the tradition of hearing from
students, and in this case we were treated with perspectives from three high
school boys, each with very different experiences. All were from Jamesville School District in
Wisconsin. Cathy White, the Assistive Technology Specialist at the district,
spoke in depth about technology tools she has used with students, not only
those diagnosed with learning challenges, but all students who may have less
obvious challenges to overcome.
Jamesville is using her knowledge and experience to extend to others in
the teaching staff. Atomic Learning has developed
excellent materials for training in this area that schools and districts have
found useful. The ever-increasing movement towards personalized learning
underscores the need for educators to be equipped with this kind of knowledge
to support all learners. The recognition
of the needs of these three young men, coupled with the necessary tech tools to
serves those unique needs, led to tremendous outcomes in achievement well
beyond what we would have seen even ten years ago.
The first full day’s program was capped by a panel of
Education Technology leaders, Linda Roberts, director of technology for the
DOE during the Clinton administration, John
Bailey, who held that
position during the GW Bush years, and Karen Cator, who is currently in that
role. They shared insights about major
trends including the impact of such trends as mobile and wireless and
personalization. They agreed that the policy
impact was enormous in the establishment of eRate, and that cloud computing has
shifted companies from annual software releases to iterative modifications and
improvements to Internet delivered learning.
This is really interesting since for many years the stability of
software throughout the school years was such a factor in product selection for
so long.
Most valuable to all of the companies in our industry was
the announced release of State Education
Policy Center, (SEPC) which has been created as a repository of state
policies at http://sepc.setda.org/. This provides, in one central place, the
unique policies that guide purchasing and use of instructional materials for
the different states. "The SEPC is
intended to provide up-to-date information regarding select technology-related
education policies and practices to inform school reform and improvement
efforts." This site is open to the
education community at large in hopes that cross-pollination of ideas will lead
to better policies by all.
Finally, but very importantly was the release of yet another
report, Out of Print, Reimagining the
K12 Textbook in a Digital Age.
This more lengthy report can be found at www.SETDA.org.
Some things to remember about this organization’s reports:
These studies and reports are jointly produced
by state and corporate members, so they represent a true collaboration.
While the reports are valuable, active
participation, if appropriate, is far more valuable in the long run.
These reports contain information of value well
beyond the scope of technology.
Here are some amazing programs that were not designed
specifically for education, but could have an incredible impact on learning.
ElectNext
With Election Day fast approaching, ElectNext allows everyone to find the
candidates (President, Governor, Senate, Congress) that are in their district
and who most resemble their values. If
you
answer a series of about 10 questions (which are selected by a secret
algorithm), you can view the candidate who most aligns to your answers, and
then you can explore what their policies are in those areas. Plus you can look
at the other candidate(s) and see where they do and don’t align with you.
Can you imagine the great class discussions you could have
on the issues and candidates? How many Middle School student know who is their
Congressman, and what he or she stands for? And that’s just the start, plans
are to expand ElectNext to help you evaluate and become active in whatever
issues you are passionate about.
Vantageous
Vantageous will
allow you to use virtually any PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone to take multi
angle videos. Let’s say two students are making a presentation, or having a
debate. You can use up to four devices to video the performance. You will then
press play, and while the videos are running select which angle is active at
any particular time. When you’re done, you can save, download, or upload your
video to play or share. It’s a great addition to digital storytelling.
The program should be out in the next few weeks, and you can
sign up on the website for notification of when the program is ready.
ThunderClap
Do you want to extend your social reach to do good? ThunderClap allows you to write a
message and set a target number of respondents. Once that number of people have
agreed with you message, it sends out posts from each of those people to the
various social networks carrying that message.
Let’s say a high school class has an issue that they can get
behind, like possibly supporting someone who had an accident. They may decide
that they want 250 people to send out tweets or Facebook updates about it. They
post a message to Thunderclap, and they talk to friends and relatives to
support that issue. Once they reach 250 supporters, the posts go out. If those
250 people have an average reach of 250 people, they’ve reached over 60,000
people.
Thunderclap has been used for causes like helping refugees
in Sudan, and ending Polio. The UN used it to announce World Humanitarian day
and reached 1 billion people.
Seeds
Does your class want to get involved with Microlending to third
world entrepreneurs? Seeds
isn’t quite ready yet, and they are looking for backers themselves, but they
are building a social game that allows microlending. They point out that most
social gamers are women, and most of the people who benefit from micro lending
are women, so this is a natural. In many parts of Africa, there are more people
with cell phones than people who have access to potable water, so receiving and
paying back funds (by texting) is easier than taking a shower.
Shout Roulette
ShoutRoulette is
the fastest, simplest way to yell at people you think are morons about the
things you are right about. Just pick a topic, choose your opinion and in
moments you will be matched up with someone who vehemently disagrees with you.
Then just start screaming. And I didn’t even have to write that, I just copied
it from their website.
ShoutRoulette came out of Comedy Hack Day, which paired
comedians with hackers to create funny apps. You probably can’t use this one in
the classroom, but if you get tired grading papers or writing business plans,
it’s always a good release to yell at someone other than your spouse or
children.
NYTM
I saw all of these programs, and a few more at the October 9
New York Tech Meetup. They are monthly and the
next one is November 13. They are a blast, and hope to see you there.
We all know that over a quarter of all children in the US do not graduate high school, and of the ones that do, fewer than one third go on to graduate with a college degree. Do the math; about a quarter of all children end up with college degrees.
The painting is described thus: "Ludwig van Beethoven was recognised as a child prodigy. He worked at the age of 13 as organist, pianist/harpsichordist and violist at the court in Bonn, and had published three early piano sonatas. This portrait in oils is the earliest authenticated likeness of Beethoven." (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Knowing this, would it be better to just test for the brightest 25% of kids in preschool, and then focus our resources on them?
Doesn’t that very idea send shivers up your spine?
In their article, Drawing for Early Education of Creative Thinking of Children of Different Cultures, Dr. Ghazi Chakroun and Dr. Lina Abu Safieh point to the tests used in Saudi Ariabia, Egypt, Tunisia, and France “as a strategic bet for a better future.” According to the article, tests are increasingly able to distinguish the cognitively talented at a very early age, independent of language, gender, and culture.
Imagine a national policy to give up on 75% of a country’s five year olds.
The second item is just as scary, but in a different way.
At the NY Technology Meetup this week, there was a really cool demonstration of Tripl.com. You sign up for the service, which is free. Tripl then goes through all your Facebook friends’ Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, and Instagram pictures and posts (and possibly other social networks) to generate travel logs. You can follow their trips on maps with markers for all their pictures, you can see links to historical information about where they’ve been, and you can read their posts about the highlights about the trips. The site then aggregates the data about those travels so that it can be sold to advertisers.
This means that if a friend of yours signs up for the service, your data is accessed and then sent to Tripl clients. And if one company has figured out how to do this, doesn’t that mean others have and/or will? And what control do you really have over how that data is used?
One attendee asked the founders of Tripl, “What if we don’t want our data shared or sold this way?”
Marc Prensky is smarter than you. In addition to his many degrees (BA, language, teaching, and business), he speaks three languages fluently, has written 4 books, runs two companies, and is possibly best known for coining the phrases digital natives and digital immigrants.
Yet, with your smartphone, tablet, or computer and connections to the Internet, you can beat him in virtually any cognitive task. Fact recall, math calculations, problem solving, music creation (despite the fact that he was a professional musician), virtually anything you can name, there's a website or an app for that.
The ability to stretch your mental abilities, to extend your brain, if you will, is what Prensky calls brain gain in his new book, Brain Gain: Technology and The Quest for Digital Wisdom.
For tens of thousands of years (unless it's true that the earth is only 6,000 years old) humans have increased the abilities of their bodies with tools. It's only in the last 60+ years that we've been able to measurability increase the power of our minds using technology. In his book, Prensky details the ways this shift from physical to mental augmentation changes the way we act and think, and our very humanness. Here are a few discussions he raises in the book.
What is the essence of digital wisdom?
It's one thing to be able to retouch a digital photo on your phone and share it with your 1,000 closest friends. It's another thing entirely to know a) whether this is something you should be doing, b) how to do it well, and c) the best tools to use for the results you want.
What changes should we be making to the way we educate ourselves and our kids?
We all need to learn how to learn to do things that today we can't even imagine we'll ever have to do. How would we have trained kids to properly use social networking in 2002? We didn't know something like that could exist, much less that over a billion people would be using it for intantaneous communication. Tweeting would have been associated with bird calls, something probably most used outside in an open field. Yet billions of us use social networking, and not just for fun, for professional development, for collaboration on projects, to keep up-to-date on fast breaking news in our fields. What do we subtract from education to make room for the new capabiliities that are essential for operating in the digital world? Is it still necessary to teach kids how to multiply three digit numbers, when virtually everyone does it on some type of calculator today? Do we emphasize reading and writing, when so much of what we ingest is video, images, and voice? Why do we stop after high school or college? It could be that a lot of what we teach in school is just taught because of inertia, but maybe it's time to take a closer look.
How will thinking machines be even more tightly integrated with our senses?
In addition to wearable computers, we may have some types of computing ability inserted under our skin, or attached directly to neurons. To a certain extent, smart artificial limbs already operate this way, but there could be devices that add to our memory, improve our sight, or give use specialized computational abilities. These devices could initially help people who are debilitated, like sufferers of Alzeimer's disease; but eventually used to enhance human cognitive abilities for some or all of us far beyond what we are capable of now. How would you like to instantly know how your son or daughter did on the last school assignment just by thinking the question?
What happens when machines get smarter than us?
The current pace of technological improvement indicates that computers should first surpass the neurological processing power of the human brain somewhere around the year 2030. By 2050, computer generated intelligence will be about 1 billion times the amount of human intelligence. How will that change our relationship with computers? How will that change us?
Most of us spend our days concerned with what we will be doing today, tomorrow, or next week. But sometimes its very valuable to look at the longer term. How did we get here? Were are we heading? And what should we be doing to ceate the type of future we want? Brain Gain is one of those books that can clarify this process and provide some great points for reflection.
and Judah Karkowsky, VP of Business Development at Wireless Generation. ClassLink is known for LaunchPad, a Codie Award winner that provides students, parents, and teachers access to applications from any device at any time. Wireless Generation is known for their mClass products, which began with streamlining qualitative students assessment by teachers and has expanded
The general consensus is that, sometime before the end of five years, mobile learning is going to be larger than print, desktop, or laptop; it’s where the growth is, while usage in the other areas is likely to shrink. If you are not starting with mobile development now, you will be left behind in three years.
Stan, Judah, and attendees talked about the following issues regarding mLearning.
Authentication
Teachers, parents, and students don’t want to have to log in for every application. The OAuth protocol allows users to login in and authenticate from other applications. Have you ever been offered to login using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter accounts? That’s OAuth. Automatic login using LDAP can be used for single sign on inside the school.
Education privacy, or FERPA, is pretty strict, and there are potential pitfalls to storing student data in the cloud. On the other hand, if you have the school district store sensitive data (like student names) on their equipment and disassociate that data from applications specific data in the cloud, you make it that much more difficult for a person to follow the footprints and obtain information that might hurt a student. Wireless Generation has very strict policies, for example any person only has the rights to the information to the students that he or she is directly involved with; a teacher can’t even access a former student’s information the following year. A large cloud storage platform, like Amazon, has many safeguards built in, but the data will only be as secure as your applications data architecture.
ClassLink is a district wide solution for authentication and privacy, so application and content developers might want to consider ClassLink compatibility and talk to either Stan or to Berj Akian.
Platform
The consensus seemed to be that for distributed applications, REST, or Representational state transfer, is fast, universal, and scalable.
When developing for specific devices, programming in the native platform gives you greater access to features and somewhat faster response time than programming in a more generic platform. For example, if you are creating a system for iPads, and you want to access the device’s camera, you need to program in iOS.
However, developing in a platform like Sencha Touch allows you to develop once, and then have your application run on a wide variety of platforms. If you don’t need access to hardware features, this may be the best option, and Sencha has a lot of data collection capabilities built in.
The iOS 4.3.x home screen, as shown on an iPhone 3GS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Apple Approval
If you want your application to be available through Apple's App store, it needs to be approved by Apple. The approval process generally takes about two weeks, but it is highly unlikely that you will be approved the first time you apply. For example, one of the developers was rejected because the name of his application had a capital letter in the middle, and that is against Apple standards. Another was not able to send data between two of his own applications. He needed to have the first application store the data on the cloud, and then have the second app access it there rather than on the device.
The main disadvantage to not being on iTunes is that it’s more difficult for potential users to find you, and secondarily that there are some features of iOS that are not accessible through the browser and are only accessible in native applications.
Furthermore, Apple has no provision for a sandlot or beta rollout. If you roll out or post your new release on the App store for a limited number of people, you are technically in violation of Apple’s contract, and you could lose your ability to create any applications to be accessed from the App store.
Don’t let your developers create the user interface.
There are three aspects to any app: the interface, the functionality, and the data. Create functional specs for the functionality and the data, and then go to professional designers to create the User Interface. They’ll often come up with ideas you’d never thought of. In fact, it may be worth the cost to have three groups of designers develop different interfaces, go through a few iterations, and then pick the best one. UI design is not generally that expensive, but is critical to the usability of your application.
Internal development vs outsourcing
Outsourcing has become more expensive over the last three years. It can reduce your overhead, but it can also be disastrous. Make sure that you plan so you can re-source development if it goes awry.
Conclusions
Both speakers stressed the importance of UI testing, multiple rounds before product release. In the near term, expect greater mLearning adoption in grades 6-12 than in elementary. If you have existing web products, chop them down to what people really use and what is really important about them before developing mobile applications.
Post Conclusions
After this article was posted, I received an email from my sister, Betsy Silver, who is the Director of Public Sector Business Development at RDA Software. She pointed that if you do your due diligence correctly, the team that you hire will have done this type of development many times for other clients, so they can get the work done faster and better since they are familiar with both the pitfalls and the best practices. If speed to market and quality of development are more important than cost, outsourcing can be a win. She also noted that RDA does this tpe of hybrid cloud/on-premise work for mobile devices as well as cloud applications.
