The Audrey Test
Audrey Watters’ writings are a must-read for anyone interested in education and technology. As she’s commented many times, many of the techies who want to revolutionize education don’t actually know much about it: they’ve been through school themselves, but either aren’t aware of, or haven’t bothered to investigate, the decades of painstaking research that’s been done on how people actually learn. In response, she’s compiling a “Joel test” (which I think should be dubbed the “Audrey test”) for ed-tech, i.e., a dozen quick questions you can use to tell if someone knows their stuff or is just bluffing. There are already lots of interesting replies to her original tweet; my five suggestions for her list are:
- Stereotype threat.
- The unreliability of self-reporting.
- The importance of self-efficacy.
- The teacher’s enthusiasm matters more than the teaching method (which is why every new idea initially seems so promising, then does less well when scaled up).
- Students can learn to do well on drill exercises without actually learning fundamental concepts (e.g., Eric Mazur’s students could get good grades on midterms but still not think in Newtonian physics).
What would be on your list? What are the dozen things you really, really want every technologist to know about education?
What I particularly like about the Joel test is that it’s not about what you know, but what you actually do. It requires a bit of self-honesty, of course, but even the reflection in answering the questions is valuable (do I do that? Should I? Should I do it more/better? Does it really help?) is a valuable process.
Your suggestions for Audrey are good, but they’re all about what you should know. Can they be turned into questions about what ed tech people do?
It’s not exactly what you asked for, but here’s a quick go at my “Web Test” for educators (from my perspective as a Web-focused techie working with educators for the last decade). Like in Joel’s test they are all simple yes/no and you want nearly all to be yes.
1. Is the primary “textbook” for your subject a collaborative, online, copyleft resource in multiple languages?
2. Do you never waste your students time by lecturing them in person when you could direct them to videos of the same material presented better by others?
3. Do you teach your students how to use (and contribute) to wikipedia rather than scare them away from it with inaccurate slanders?
4. When you say “not all knowledge is online, some is in old fashioned books” it is because it’s a problem you are working to quickly solve, not an essential and eternal truth that forever dooms “lazy” students who rely on Google to get answers.
5. Are your multiple choice review questions and answers developed, analyzed and statistically reviewed for effectiveness in collaboration with a worldwide audience.
6. Do you understand why “free for non-commercial” or “free for educational use” are cultural misunderstandings that need to be stamped out?
It’s actually the exact inverse of what we’re after