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.

Tackling Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem

Recently I wrote about the tyranny of the bell curve. Benjamin Bloom was working on this problem back in the 1980s. As an experiment, he and some of his grad students combined Mastery Learning with 1:1 tutoring. They discovered that average students in the program performed two standard deviations (two sigmas) better than their peers receiving conventional instruction. Using on John Hattie's scales from Visible Learning I equate that to more than four times the rate of learning.

In a seminal paper on the subject, Bloom wrote that that 1:1 tutoring is "too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale" and reported on their efforts to find more scalable solutions. This has become known as Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem.

Like many others working on education technology, I believe that Bloom's 2 Sigma results can be achieved and even surpassed by appropriate use of computer technology. From a number of initiatives, we're getting results that confirm this belief. While approaches vary, they have common elements:


Mastery Learning: That's what Bloom called it. Other terms are Competency Based Pathways and Proficiency Based Learning. There are nuanced differences but the basic premise is that students don't advance until they have demonstrated competency in the current topic.

Asynchronous Learning: Students advance from topic to topic independently. To do mastery learning properly, this is a requirement. However, it doesn't mean that there aren't sync points. For example OLI Courses support students spending variable amounts of time (according to their skills and background) learning the basic material. This way they arrive in class equally prepared for the live debates that are so critical to teaching certain subjects. Some classes resync every Friday with those students who are ahead assisting those who are taking more time. Results from the Khan Academy and School of One are showing us that individual students aren't consistently fast or slow. It slow and fast students trade places from day to day or week to week and the overall variability tends to balance out.

Emphasis on Principles more than Facts: A student who has command of the underlying principles of a subject can often derive the facts. And in today's world, it's easy enough to look up facts that memorizing them is diminishing in importance.

Strategic Intervention: The teacher is more important than ever. After all, learning is fundamentally a human-to-human process. Deploying online curricula in such a way that supports independent work frees teachers to spend more time one-on-one with students. They are enabled to focus on things only teachers can do: diagnosing misunderstanding, demonstrating the value of the subject, motivating and rewarding achievement and developing a personal relationship with each student. Paradoxically, technology has potential humanize the classroom. In a very important TED talk, Salman Khan says that we should move from measuring the student to teacher ratio to measuring the "student to valuable human time with the teacher ratio." (Quote is at 14:30 but watch the whole thing.) Teacher Dashboards are an important mechanism for informing teachers about where they need to apply their skills.

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

A Four Layer Framework for Data Standards

Recently I've been getting involved in a number of education data efforts. It's an alphabet soup of standards and specifications including CEDS, LRMI, SIF, PESC, Ed-Fi and more. As we've discussed these specs and how they fit together we developed a four-layer framework for how different data standards fit together. Our one-page outline of the framework has been used in ways we didn't foresee. I recently updated it with feedback from the CEDS team. Click here for the latest version. It's released under a CC0 license which pretty much means do what you want with it but don't blame me if something goes wrong. And see below for a graphic version.

Breaking the Tyranny of the Bell Curve

If you take a random set of students, teach them all the same way and then give them all the same standardized assessment the results will follow a normal distribution or "bell curve" with a few excelling, the majority performing near average and a few failing. This is the tyranny of the bell curve.

There are all kinds of problems with this: Standardized tests result in normal distributions of scores because they are designed to do so. Not necessarily because human ability really follows a normal distribution. Indeed, human intelligence is malleable.
But let's set that aside for a moment and just go crazy theoretical. Suppose you had a large population of identical students. Then you put them in classrooms where instruction was delivered in identical ways. Then you gave them an identical assessment. The results would approximate a normal (or bell) curve. Why? Because a normal curve is what results when you average out a bunch of random errors. Instruction is naturally error prone. Students don't always pay attention. Even when they do, they don't always understand. Teachers make mistakes. People get sick or have bad days.
My colleague, Josh Jarrett, is fond of saying that high school graduates' knowledge is kind of like Swiss cheese with random holes in their understanding.
When looking at children, my natural inclination is to celebrate their differences. When they are dressed the same, in sports uniforms for example, I gravitate to the differences the color of their hair and their eyes, how they smile, who they cluster around, what grabs their interest.
Despite this diversity, our society needs all children to reach a certain standard of competency in core subjects of literacy and mathematics. Likewise, they need to have a basic understanding of the social and civic institutions and norms that are essential to prosperous society.
So, the challenge is achieving consistent results (academic achievement) while prizing the inconsistency of the inputs (our children). The obvious answer is that we adapt the education to the needs of each student. As a friend put it, "Every student should have an IEP."

But IEPs or Personalized Learning, as we prefer to call it, is prohibitively expensive, right? I believe that the principles of mass customization so successfully applied in other industries can also be applied to education. I'll be writing more on this in coming weeks.


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

Windows in Time

Last January we had to buy a new car for my wife. About five years ago I installed a bluetooth handsfree phone box in her previous car. We liked it so well that now we have them in all of our cars. Yes, I know that even handsfree phone conversations still distract drivers. But it still helps.

So, I had to decide what to put in the new car. These days car stereos often include phone capabilities so I thought that maybe we would upgrade the stereo too. And, wouldn’t it be nice if the stereo could play MP3s. Maybe GPS/nav capabilities would be good. One thing led to another and the unit we chose supports acronym city: MP3, WMA, CD, DVD, MP3, SD, USB, GPS, HD Radio. We’re in geek heaven. (Not a paid endorsement.)

Being new to Seattle, we’ve found the navigation feature to be really valuable. And, in case you’re wondering, It’s much more convenient to have it built-in than to stick a portable to the windshield. So, in the last six months I’ve done a lot of driving in which I followed the instructions of a computer voice.

It’s really a strange window in time. The car is smart enough to tell me where to turn, but not smart enough to make the turn itself. In his book, Evil Plans, Hugh MacLeod suggests that Television occupies another window in time, “a historical accident of the old factory-worker age meeting the modern mass-media age.” That people would willingly spend so much time with “passive, non-interactive media” is a temporary artifact.

What other "time windows" might we be in?