Federated Permissions - Post Facebook

The early web was strictly a public place. Everything out there was visible to everyone. Not too long afterward, private services appeared. Between the extremes of private services, like online banking, and public services, like Twitter, is a spectrum of permissions management.

Whenever permissions are restricted to some degree a credential is needed -- usually a username/password combination. Even public services like Wikipedia use credentials so that contributors can be identified. The result is that anyone that spends more than a minimum amount of time on the internet has a bunch of credentials to keep track of. This has resulted in a call for federated identity systems that let you log into multiple services using the same credentials. 

The most well-known federated ID systems are OpenID and SAML. Despite OpenID being supported by Google, Yahoo, Flickr, MySpace, AOL and many other popular sites, it remains largely unused by individuals. The trouble is that most people have solved the problem by simply using the same two or three passwords across all of their services. To them, the convenience of this approach outweighs the security risk.

In computer security we talk about two components -- authentication and authorization. Authentication is determining who someone is. Authorization determines whether that individual should have access to particular data or services. Federated ID solves the authentication problem but the much more complicated authorization issue is left to the individual websites. Not only does federated ID not solve the authorization problem -- the current solutions can make it more complicated.

For example, in order to preserve privacy, SAML issues each service a different identifier for the same person. This is intended to prevent sites from correlating user behavior from site-to-site. But it makes it really hard to grant privileges because the person granting rights doesn't know the ID that will be randomly assigned to the individual. Meanwhile, there are other ways to correlate user behavior anyway.

Which brings us to Facebook.

Facebook is really a privacy manager. Sure it supplies features like a profile, wall, forums, messaging, photo sharing, games and so forth. But better versions of most of these features are available elsewhere on the web. What Facebook lets you do is selectively grant access to your private (or semiprivate) information that is stored in those services. And Facebook's advantage is that they have accounts for a majority of internet users in North America. That lets them remain dominant despite being pretty bad about managing privacy.

What's next? With competitors envious of their position and users wishing they could jump ship it seems unreasonable that Facebook will remain dominant. I think the next step is Federated Permissions. This would be a system that lets me share private information with select individuals or organizations -- friends, family, business associates, care providers, etc. -- regardless of their identity provider.

To help bring this about. I'll start with some definitions, two Use Cases and a set of Requirements.

Definitions:

• Identity Provider: The service that "logs you in" and tells other services that you are who you claim to. In the use cases below, I suggest that your email provider is also your identity provider. That would be a convenient option though not the only one.
• Content Provider: A service that trusts your identity provider and supplies certain content and services to you.
• Public ID: An identifier assigned to an individual that others can use when granting permissions. In the use cases below, I assume that your public ID is also your email address -- also a convenient option but not the only one.

These definitions are commonly used by existing federated identity systems.

Use Case #1

Sara Smith is organizing a student exchange trip to Germany. In order to share the group's experiences with people back home she wants to share photos and an online journal. All of the students should be able to contribute material and, because the students are minors, only family and select friends should be able to access the content.

First, Sara logs into "genericmail.com" which is both her mail provider and her identity provider. She creates two new groups called "germany2012crew@genericmail.com" and  "germany2012family@genericmail.com". She loads these with the email addresses (public IDs) of the people going on the trip (crew) and family and friends remaining home.

Next, Sara creates a new blog using "semiprivateblog.org." She grants write access to "germany2012crew@genericmail.com" and read access to "germany2012family@genericmail.com". She goes to "sharemyphotos.org", creates a photo album and grants equivalent access.

Finally, she composes an email describing these services and sends it out to the two groups. Since these groups double as email groups the messages get delivered to all of the right people.

While on the trip, lots of stories, messages and photos are shared with the people back at home.

Use Case #2

Max Jones has been attending Notable Community College for two years. He's applying to Potential University where he intends to complete a BS.

First, Max accesses the application page on Potential University's website. So far, he's unknown to Potential University but he's able to log into the site using his public ID, "maxtowin@genericmail.com". Upon logging in, the Potential University site requests access to Max's personal profile. This causes "genericmail.com" to pop up a window asking Max permission to deliver the info. Max clicks "yes" and re-enters his password for verification. The application form is pre-populated with Max's name, address, birthdate, etc.

Next, the application form asks about previous education. Max enters "Notable.edu." Potential U. requests access to Max's transcripts from Notable. As with the profile, Notable pops up a form asking for Max to grant permission to share the transcript. Max grants permission and the information is shared.

Moments later Max is informed that he has met the basic acceptance criteria.

Requirements

A federated permissions system would be based on a set of standard protocols and a network of trusted services. Here are some basic requirements. OpenID and related initiatives fulfill some but not all of these.

• Public Identifiers that are well-known so that permissions can be granted as easily and conveniently as addressing an email message.
• Public Group Identifiers that can be used to grant permissions to groups of people with ongoing management of membership. (Notably, the membership of groups doesn't necessarily have to be public.)
• Revocable Trust relationships between identity providers and content providers.
• Revocable Permissions for individuals and groups to access content and services.
• Standard Policies for relationships between identity and service providers.
• Audit Trails to monitor compliance with policies and regulations.

Today, Facebook's IPO received a lukewarm reception. Could it be that the market is already anticipating a post-facebook option for managing privacy?

When Will Education Productivity Improve?

Recent studies of 1:1 laptop:student initiatives show minimal benefit to supplying every student with their own laptop. This shouldn't be surprising.

Studies from the mid-1990s showed that, twenty years after the introduction of the personal computer, they didn't substantially improve personal productivity. Indeed, annual productivity growth in the US averaged around 1.2-1.5% between the mid-70s and the mid-90s. Economists at the time had several explanations: Perhaps the benefits were mostly in quality of life improvements rather than personal productivity. Maybe inflation had hidden the benefits. Increased government regulation was consuming resources. Or perhaps productivity gains were lost to solitaire and spam (even before Farmville and World of Warcraft).

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

While these may be factors, two important theories were confirmed when the productivity gains finally arrived in the late 1990s and the 2000s.

First is the Network Effect, the idea that the value of a good or service is increased by the number of others that are using it. The classic example is the telephone. It's not terribly useful to have the only telephone in the world but the value of your telephone increases with each other telephone that someone buys. Network effects related to the internet really started to take off in the late 90s. These included email, the world-wide-web, e-commerce and much more. Obsession with the network effect contributed to the Dot-Com Bubble but the productivity value of the effect continued even after the crash.

Second and related is Organizational Change. If you introduce new technology to an organization but practice continues as usual, there's increased cost (for the technology) with limited benefit. The structure of an organization must change in order to take advantage of new technologies. In other words, the way goods are produced or services are delivered has to be redesigned with the new technology in mind.

Organizational change is hard. An entire discipline of Change Management has been developed around it. As a result, technology is frequently deployed in hopes that organizational change will spontaneously follow. Technologists like myself are often guilty of taking this approach. But external pressure is is usually the real catalyst for change. In the case of business productivity, that pressure came in the form of economic recessions.

The recessions of 1990-1991, 2001 and 2007-2009 have all ended in so-called Jobless Recoveries. In each case, while GDP rose -- indicating an end to the depression -- employment remained low. Many economists believe that jobless recoveries occurred  because the organizational changes were finally made that took advantage of available technology. Erik Brynjolfsson, an MIT economist, says, "It's as if the economy had a pent-up potential for labor savings that hadn't been harvested until the recession." If you look at the chart above, you'll see a correlation between productivity growth and the end of recent recessions.

Returning to education: Teaching and learning are today where industry was in the early 1990s. We've had computers in classrooms for decades. Learning Management Systems are installed at nearly every college and university in the US and in many high schools. Yet, educational achievement remains flat.

As with other industries, educational institutions will have to take advantage of network effects and make organizational changes before the potential of education technology can be realized. Unlike most industries where productivity is measured by the dollar value of goods and services delivered divided labor invested, I believe educational productivity should be measured by student achievement divided by the dollars invested in their education. So far, we have a few examples of institutions achieving superior results by this measure. Each operates very differently from traditional education. They include:

• Western Governor's University
• Rocketship Education
• Rio Salado College
• School of One / New Classrooms
• Carpe Diem Schools

A number of other examples are coming online and we're excited to see the results. I'll report on them here.

(As with most of my posts, I link to a lot of background information here. If you're interested in this topic or seek evidence to support these claims, I encourage you to follow the links.)

The Perverse Vocabulary of Feedback Loops

I come from a family of engineers. Naturally, we cannot talk about feedback loops without getting into control theory. Conveniently, engineering control theory can be adapted to education reasonably well as soon as you get over some vocabulary hurdles.

An open-loop control system.

Here is a basic control system. One example might be a cruise control for your car. In that case, the reference is the speed you want to go, e.g. 65 miles per hour. The controller translates that reference to an input value – the throttle position . Then the system (the engine, transmission, drive train, tires) produces an output – the actual speed of the car.

In control theory, this is an "open-loop" control system meaning that it has no feedback. The controller must have a very good mathematical model of the system and the system itself must be very precise to get a predictable output. Open loop systems are used when there's a large acceptable margin of error. A cooling fan, for example.

A closed-loop control system.

A car with an open-loop cruise control would slow down as it climbed hills and speed up when it descended. For more precise control, real cruise controls use a feedback loop. A sensor detects the output value (the speed of the car) and returns it to the controller. The controller takes the difference between the feedback and the reference values and adjusts the input (throttle) accordingly.

Mathematically, taking the difference is subtraction so we call this "negative feedback." In contrast, "positive feedback" sends systems wildly out of control. A familiar example is pointing a microphone at a speaker. The terrific squeal that you hear is a "positive feedback loop."

So, when talking about control systems, "closed loop" is better than "open loop" and "negative feedback" is good while "positive feedback" is bad. The precise engineering terminology is the opposite of what we might use in casual conversation. Let's now apply this to education.

A personalized learning system.

With a few word substitutions we get a personalized learning system. For a moment, let's ignore the feedback loop. In an open-loop learning system a set of educational standards (such as the various state or common core standards) are translated into instruction in the form of textbooks, lectures and exercises. These activities are delivered to the student resulting in skills. Conventional schooling is much like this. In order to handle a class of a dozen or more students, all students perform the same activities. But, remember that open-loop systems require a very precise system to get predictable results. Students come to us with different personalities, talents, preferences and backgrounds. The result is a wide margin of error as illustrated by the spectrum of grades assigned at the end of of a course.

Good teachers do better than this. They find ways to adapt their teaching to the needs of individual students. Good students, being intelligent, can also use feedback to adapt their learning to match the instructional methods being used. Both kinds of adaptation require feedback from assessment. And to do this well, the feedback should be compared with the standards for what is intended to be taught.

For feedback to be really effective, it must be frequent, fast and rich. Feedback must come often so that course corrections are made frequently. It must be fast, ideally immediate; otherwise it's too late to affect the learning process. And it should be rich. "Incorrect" is not nearly so meaningful as, "You misplaced the negative sign in step 3."

Frequent, fast and rich feedback depends on frequent, fast and rich assessments. In conventional schooling, assessment is expensive. It costs a lot of teacher time to compose, administer and score assessments. This is an excellent opportunity to apply technology. Computer supports can minimize the effort required to compose, administer and score assessments. And computers can tabulate the results into effective teacher and student dashboards. The result is a more personalized and effective learning experience. Or, as an engineer might say, "more predictable output with a smaller margin of error."

FETC Reminds Me How Hard it is to Change

Last week I attended the FETC conference. This picture from the show floor inadvertantly captures the de facto theme: "21st Century Technology that does not change the way you work.

The audience was composed of about 50% classroom teachers, 25% other school officials the the balance of technologists, vendors, district and state people and so forth. This an education technology conference and the teachers who attend are tech savvy and forward thinking. But the framework remains a conventional classroom and the attitude seems to be "Take school, add technology, mix well and serve."

In my presentation I argued for a different perspective. Digital abundance is nice but we've been adding technology to classrooms for decades with little impact on student learning. In order to the big improvements that society is demanding of schools, we have to change our education systems. Teachers will be more important than ever -- i'm under no illusions that computers can replace them. But just as the practice of business had to change to take advantage of new technology, so must the practice of education.

Resources for Today's Speech at FETC

I'm speaking today at the FETC conference. Here are links to some of the resources I reference in my talk:

• Jane McGonigal: Reality Is Broken http://www.janemcgonigal.com 
• Clayton Christensen – Disrupting Class http://www.innosightinstitute.org 
• Duncker’s Candle Problem http://anthonyogrady.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/carrots-and-sticks/ 
• Dan Pink: The Surprising Science of Motivation http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html 
• Learning Resource Metadata Initiative: http://lrmi.net
• Shared Learning Collaborative: http://slcedu.org

These previous posts on this blog discuss some of the same subjects:

Breaking the Tyranny of the Bell Curve
Tackling Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem
The Personalized Learning Model
The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Blackout: SOPA, PIPA

In solidarity with Wikipedia, ReddIt and others I'm posting a black message on my blog today in protest of SOPA and PIPA. For more information, Wikipedia has an excellent writeup.

Was Lou Gehrig’s ALS Caused by Tap Water?

My good friend (and sometimes mentor) Paul Cox has been researching ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's Disease). His theory, that ALS is caused by a non-protein amino acid called BMAA, was at first viewed with skepticism. But now his Ethnomedicine Foundation coordinates research at more than 21 universities worldwide. Collectively they've published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals.

This new article offers an excellent introduction to his work:
Was Lou Gehrig’s ALS Caused by Tap Water?

Here's a quick summary: Cyanobacteria, also known as blue green algae, create BMAA which can contaminate water and food. Some plants, such as the Cycad Tree concentrate BMAA. The Flying Fox bat, which eats the nuts of the Cycad tree, concentrates it more. The Chamorro, natives of Guam, consider the flying fox to be a delicacy and they suffer from ALS and related diseases at a much higher rate than other populations.

The trail was difficult to follow and prove because BMAA gets incorporated into the body's proteins, possibly substituting for Serine, a protein amino acid. When incorporated into protein, BMAA is undetectable using normal methods. To find it, they had to break up proteins using enzymes and then test. It can also take many years from the time that a person is exposed to BMAA before symptoms appear. Cox theorizes that this is because BMAA can get bound up into proteins in the body's tissues and not delay symptoms until those tissues are broken down and replaced many years later. There was also skepticism about the substitution theory -- that BMAA might be used place of another amino acid. But evidence is building that substitution does occur.

BMAA is also being implicated in Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease. Most exciting is the potential that this research may result in effective treatments for these terrible diseases. 

Quote: Peter Sandman on Climate Change Outrage

If you’re talking to a room full of people who hate the idea of the set of remedies you have proposed for climate change and instead of trying to reduce their outrage about the remedies, you’re busy trying to increase their outrage about climate change, you’re fighting the wrong fight.

(Peter Sandman, Quoted on Freakonomics)

Video Presentation - Changing the Rules to the Game of School

My presentation at the iNACOL VSS Conference two weeks ago was very well-received. The video version is below, it's just voice over slides but it flows pretty well.

VSS Presentation: Changing the Rules to the Game of School

Today I'm speaking at the iNACOL VSS conference. The following outline of my presentation is primarily a resource for attendees but others may find it valuable as well.

A New Perspective on Technology:

Changing the Rules to the Game of School

• Thesis
• The Game of School was designed around scarce resources but new technology offers abundance where scarcity once ruled.
• Digital Abundance
• Abundant Content
• LRMI
• Learning Maps
• Abundant Assessment
• Games
• Game of School
• Goal (from Disrupting Class)
• 1840: Preserve the Democracy
• 1890: Prepare Everyone for Vocations
• 1980: Keep America Competitive
• 2000: Eliminate Poverty
• Rules
• Failure Consequences
• Proxies for Achievement
• Unbundling
• Feedback
• Formative Assessment
• Control Theory
• Pedagogical Theory
• Voluntary Participation
• Duncker’s Candle Problem
• Motivation
• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose
• Design of the Game
• Resources & References
• Jane McGonigal: Reality Is Broken
  http://www.janemcgonigal.com
• Clayton Christensen – Disrupting Class
  http://www.innosightinstitute.org
• Duncker’s Candle Problem
  http://anthonyogrady.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/carrots-and-sticks/
• Dan Pink: The Surprising Science of Motivation
  http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
• Learning Resource Metadata Initiative:
  http://lrmi.net
• Watch for announcements on OfThat.com
  of Abundant Assessments, Learning Maps and more.

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Try this: Browse to Google's Homepage and search for a recipe. Given the season, try "Pumpkin Pie." On the left the Recipe Search Bar automatically appears because Google sensed that a lot of the matches were recipes. Now you can narrow the list by selecting those that do have maple syrup but don't include amaretto since it's missing from your spice cabinet. There are also options to select for cooking time and calories.

Now, suppose teachers and students had the same kind of facilitation for their searches. This week I was experimenting with AdWords and discovered that 246,000 people searched for "right triangle." (many of them probably teachers) and 60,500 people searched for "triangle calculator" (most likely students). Wouldn't it be cool if such searches resulted in a Learning Search Bar that let you choose between videos, activities and lesson plans; or that let you target a particular age group or find resources for students with specific disabilities? Indeed, there were 880 searches for "math for the blind."

That's the idea behind the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. In June, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft jointly announced Schema.org. This is a common metadata vocabulary for describing things like blog posts, audio recordings, organizations, places, news articles and things for sale. Then they encouraged industry-specific consortia to submit extensions to the vocabulary. So, we formed LRMI to represent the education industry.

It's an amazing group. Co-funded by the Hewlett and Gates foundations and co-sponsored by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers the team has representatives from major educational publishers as well as OER repositories. The technical working group involves a cross section of educators and metadata experts. We're making excellent progress and are on schedule to solicit public comments on a draft specification starting in December.

Before long, the search for quality learning materials on the web will become much easier.

Quote of the Day: Bill James on Trust

"We have a better society when we can trust one another. And wherever and whenever there’s an evaporation of systems based on trust I think there’s a loss to society. I also think that one evaporation of trust in society tends to feed another, and that we would have a better society if we could, rather than promoting fear and working to reduce the places where terrible things happen, if we could promote trust and work on building societies in which people are more trustworthy. I think we’re all better off in a million different ways if and when we can do that."

- Bill James, being interviewed by Freakonomics (quote appears at the very end of the podcast. Transcript here)

The Personalized Learning Model

The first two parts of this series discussed the Tyranny of the Bell Curve and a strategy for Tackling Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. In this third and last part I describe the Personalized Learning Model that many of us are using to guide investments in education technology.

The diagram to the right is similar to those used by other education technology organizations so it's not unique to the Gates Foundation. The key components in most any Adaptive Learning System or Instructional Improvement System are Student Data, Educational Content and Assessments. We use precise definitions of these:

• Learning Objectives are specific competencies to be learned in a particular subject domain. Most courses, both online and legacy media, start with a set of learning objectives. However, if data, content and assessment systems are to interoperate, a common set of objectives must be shared among them.
• Student Data is a collection of  evidence of what competencies or skills a student has achieved. On a scale of weak to strong evidence, it includes presence information (the student attended a class), activity information (the student viewed a particular video or performed a lab) and assessment results.
• Learning Content includes reading materials, textbooks, interactive activities, lesson plans, exercises and any other content that's intended to teach about a subject.
• Assessments are student activities that are instrumented in such a way that we can measure competence in knowledge or skills. You can think of multiple choice and true/false as activities that are deliberately simplified to make them easier to instrument. However, assessment technology is advancing in ways that make it possible to instrument more realistic activities.

The Feedback Loop describes the process of learning, from determining what a student doesn't know, to teaching the subject, to assessing competency. For the feedback loop to work effectively, it must cycle frequently supplying rich and accurate feedback to students and educators.

Most of our education technology investments involve some combination of improving the state of practice in these areas and improving interoperability among systems. Future posts in this blog will profile some of the most important initiatives we and others are working on.


Posts in this series:
Breaking the Tyranny of the Bell Curve
Tackling Bloom's Two Sigma Problem
The Personalized Learning Model

On Track for 50% of High School Courses Online by 2019

In the 2008 book, Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen applied his theories of disruptive innovation to education. By that time, disruptive innovation had been studied well enough that Christensen and his colleagues could predict the adoption curve of such an innovation. It's an impressive feat -- telling us how soon something new is going to impact our lives.

They predicted that by 2014, 25% of high school courses would be taken online and that by 2019 fully half of them will be taught that way. When Christensen and his colleagues talk about online education, they include blended or hybrid formats in that bucket. This is important because the evidence shows that it's a blend of online materials and personal attention that results in superior learning outcomes.

In a recent Washington Post Column, Christensen and co-author Michael Horn offer an update citing emerging examples like Khan Academy in Los Altos and Rocketship Education. "In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2010, roughly 4 million did." Then they reassert their prediction of 50% of high school courses online by 2019.

Three years into the prediction, we seem to be on track.

Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die

As a teenager I learned to program on an Apple ][. First BASIC and then Pascal and assembly language. I played computer games, hacked them and then wrote my own. I have fond memories of those times. But none of that, nor the careers that followed for me and countless others would have happened without Steve Jobs. There's hardly a person in the world whose life hasn't been impacted in some way by his vision and drive to see it realized.

I join many others in recommending the following speech he made at the 2005 Stanford University Commencement. Fittingly titled, "How to Live Before You Die":

May he rest in peace.

We Need an Energy Breakthrough

I haven't yet read The Quest by Daniel Yergin -- only this review. But it's nice to know that someone who has spent a career studying energy issues agrees with my conclusions. We need a breakthrough in energy technology. The environmental burden caused by fossil fuels is too great for us to rely on that source as we try to elevate the standard of living for the world's populations.