The Third Bit

Once upon a time, about a quarter of a century ago, I went into a prof’s office in Edinburgh and told him that neural networks were the future, because, look, that’s how our brains work, right? Neurons and connections and firing potentials—those are the building blocks of human intelligence, so all we have to do to make AI work is, you know, do that in software. And if it isn’t working yet, well, that just means we need a bigger neural network, or maybe different firing rules. I was in my mid-twenties at the time—about the age that many of today’s ed-tech entrepreneurs are now—and when he tried to explain to me why things might not be that simple, I quickly filed him under “old fogey”. I didn’t bother to read any of the papers he pointed me at: what could those patient, painstaking, footnoted summaries of old news possibly have to say about the brave new world my friends and I were about to create?

Well, you all know how that turned out…

But now it’s 2012, and Audrey Watters’ post “What Should Every Techie Know About Education?” (a.k.a. “the Audrey Test”) is generating some interesting comments. Some are thought-provoking, like Ben Huffman’s that, “Every school superintendent, college president and graduate student in education would be able to easily pass the Audrey Test,and yet, the system is still broken.” Others, like SM’s, do a great job of show why techies need to do their homework before trying to “fix” education. (See BF’s reply for a dissection.)

The Audrey Test has also led to some interesting questions. The two I was asked recently are:

1. How much does one need to know before one solves a problem?
2. How much of the status quo is deeply embedded within the theories of learning and academia?

My answer to the first is, “A lot more than I did two years ago (or even three months ago).” For example, watch this interview with John Sweller. I don’t agree with everything he says, but my disagreement is based on gut instinct, i.e., on a poorly-examined mental model based on (probably inaccurate) recollections of personal experience. He knows more about how learning actually works than I do; that doesn’t mean he’s right, but if I don’t take some time to learn what he and the constructivists he’s criticizing are arguing about, the odds are that I’ll repeat mistakes they made and moved past twenty years ago. Yes, there’s a tradeoff between learning the past and building the future—there are only so many hours in a life—but if I could send email back in time to May 2010, I’d tell myself to spend an hour a day, every day, learning from others

The second question is harder for me to answer. On the one hand, many of the people I’ve found since I started doing my homework are much more deeply opposed to the status quo than I am. (In fact, I didn’t realize how different from the status quo it was possible to be until Audrey’s article pointed me at Paolo Freire, which kind of reinforces my answer to question #1.) On the other hand, every big institution’s prime directive is to perpetuate itself, and one strategy that academia uses well is to keep people so busy talkin’ radical to one another in safe little sandboxes called “departments” and “journals” that they never actually have any effect on the real world. Which brings us back to the Ben Huffman comment quoted earlier…

I don’t know what the answer to #2 is. But here’s what I currently think:

1. Technology has changed every aspect of our lives (see Cat Valente’s thought-provoking “Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed” for commentary on this in a related context).
2. But that doesn’t mean that technology changes everything, every time.
3. So if someone dismisses previous work in education without knowing what it was, they’re probably doing so to give themselves an excuse not to do their homework.
4. Which means they’re probably going to frame questions naively, reinvent a lot of wheels, and waste a lot of time. That will undoubtedly keep them busy, but that’s definitely not the same thing as being productive.

To boil it down: if someone came to you and said, “I’ve never looked at the source code for Django, Rails, Struts, Zend, or any other web application framework, but I don’t need to, because this new language I’m using is so different from everything that’s come before that they’re all obsolete,” you’d admit that there was a chance they were right, but would you bet on it? Particularly if they’d never talked to anyone with, you know, actual real-world web application programming experience? I don’t think it would matter how smart or hard-working or charistmatic or well-funded they were—I think you’d put your money elsewhere. So why is education different?

Later: today’s post by Mark Guzdial is another example of why people like me need to know more about stuff like this. I respect Mark tremendously, and Hal Abelson’s record is as good as anyone’s; if they disagree, I think I have an obligation to do a little learnin’ of my own before venturing an opinion. See also “Scottish Verdict“.

Learning

As I wrote a few days ago, I asked Audrey Watters to put together a “Joel test” to assess how much someone technical knew about education. She has now posted her response; if I were grading it, I’d say, “Exceeds expectations,” because what she has done is explain why a simple 12-point yes-or-no test wouldn’t be enough:

What you do with your code or your content or your users’ data—while incredibly important—is only be part of what I “test.” … If I were to really formalize such [test], I think it would also have to involve what you know, what you think about education, about teaching, about learning, about politics and theory and practice—its history, its present, its future.

A few questions are US-centric, but I’m sure it would be easy to swap in Canadian (or British, or Estonian) acronyms for FERPA and the like. What they’re all triangulating, I think, comes down to one crucial question:

Do you know what’s been done before, or are you a (willing, and possibly even proud) victim of ed-tech amnesia?

I can answer about two thirds of Audrey’s questions; I think that missing third is another reason why my P2PU course on teaching free-range learners fizzled. On the upside, her questions present me with a wonderful learning opportunity

So how about you? How much do you know about where we are, how we got here, what’s worked in the past, and what mistakes we don’t need to make again?

Later: one of the first comments on Audrey’s post said, “All the other questions are in my opinion irrelevant except the last two. No one but the ‘experts’ care about all that.” (By “other”, the poster meant everything except “what is the purpose of education?” and “what is the purpose of educational technology?”.) When someone says that, what I hear is, “I’m going to choose various options without realizing (or without acknowledging) that there were alternatives.” That’s the best way I can think of to perpetuate the status quo.

Still later: Dan Hickey’s post “Some Things About Assessment Badge Developers Might Find Helpful” (and the longer version here) are useful reading as well. I have a lot of catching up to do…

Learning

The final meeting of my P2PU course on teaching free-range learners how to program took place this morning. I enjoyed chatting with the people who showed up, but overall I was disappointed with how things went: less than a quarter of those who signed up back in January were still with us at the halfway mark, and less than 10% were in at the end. Partly, I think, this happened because the demands of day-to-day life trump good intentions every time. I also blame myself: sending out a couple of chapters of reading material at the start of the course sent a clear signal that this was going to be top-down and centralized, rather than bottom-up and peer-to-peer, and that turned a lot of people off.

That mistake is a symptom of something more fundamental: I have never actually completed a course online myself [1]. Think for a moment about what that means. I have probably spent more than twenty thousand hours in classes of various kinds. I wasn’t just learning algebra and history during that time: I was also learning what made a class good or bad. How did the teacher handle interruptions and disruptions? How big were the assignments, and how easy were they to understand? Was there some overall arc to the course, or was it just a disconnected jumble of facts? Consciously or otherwise, the first time it was my turn to teach, I drew on that experience.

But online is different, and a lot of what I soaked up in those hours and years doesn’t apply (or worse, seems to, but is wrong). I’m pretty fluent with email, Skype, chat, bulletin boards, wikis, and so on, but using those things to socialize or to coordinate a software development project isn’t any more relevant to online teaching than knowing the difference between keeping a bunch of undergrads engaged and just blocking their view of the whiteboard.

As many people have pointed out, the greatest and most common weakness in Silicon Valley’s approach to education is a thundering lack of relevant experience [2]. I’d therefore like to propose that the following question be #1 on the Audrey Test:

If my answer is January had been “more than zero”, the people who signed up for my P2PU course would probably have gotten a lot more good out of it. And if the techies who want to revolutionize education by internetting it could say “more than zero”, I think society would get more good out of them.

[1] I did the first six weeks of an online course about online courses through Ryerson University back in 2010. It was awful: there was no discussion on the bulletin boards, I got A’s on the first four assignments by turning the instructor’s point-form notes into sentences, and so on. I’m now lurking on a MOOC that George Siemens is running, but—well, see the comment in the main post about day-to-day life vs. good intentions…

[2] See also Kanyi Maqubela’s “The Reason Silicon Valley Hasn’t Built a Good Health App“.

Learning

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:

1. Stereotype threat.
2. The unreliability of self-reporting.
3. The importance of self-efficacy.
4. 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).
5. 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?

Learning

Someone asked me earlier today if it would be worth Mozilla’s while going to SIGCSE (the big annual computer science education conference in the US). I said, “That’s where the teachers are.” They said, “But we’re teaching non-programmers.” To which I should have replied, “So are most people at SIGCSE, most of the time.” Many (maybe even most?) of the people in “Computing 101″ classes at colleges and universities have never done any programming before, and the grade school teachers who show up are always working with beginners as well. One difference between Moz and regular classroom teachers is that many (most?) college and university instructors focus on students who are likely to become full-time programmers. Another (probably more important) is the setting: free-range vs. battery-farmed.  I’m not sure what to do with these observations, but I think they’re worth pondering. I also think there’s a lot both groups could learn from each other…

Learning

I don’t like tidying up the house when my wife and daughter are away. I don’t mind cleaning, especially the kitchen and bathroom, but picking up toys and shelving books and generally putting things where they officially belong makes the house feel colder. It erases the evidence that other people live here, that “my” life is part of “our” life now. I haven’t gone so far as to strew some of their clothes around the living room, the way a cat would rub its scent onto the leg of the couch, but it’s only been a few days…

I was thinking about this—about the comfort we get from the evidence of others—as I was walking home last night. One of the buildings near Mozilla’s office is being demolished; as I watched the machines tear at at the old bricks, I wondered how the tenants of the other buildings must feel. Some of them (the tenants, I mean) might have been there thirty years or more—it’s that kind of neighborhood. As they watch the last traces of long-gone friends and rivals erased to make room for new stories with new characters, do they feel the same way I do when I look around the kitchen and see no evidence that anyone ever sat at the table drawing a dinosaur for daddy? Or knit on the couch while Jamie Oliver made something with far too much mustard in it?

And then I wondered, why do only the young spraypaint slogans on walls? Why is it always guys in their teens and twenties tagging some variation on, “I was here”? Why don’t the old do it too, not to say, “I was here first,” but to say, “My friend was here,” or, “My first love was here,”, or even just, “Once upon a time, I sat here in the sun with two strangers, eating sandwiches and enjoying the first warmth of spring.” Why aren’t guerrilla armies of pensioners sneaking around at night parking Studebakers on street corners and replacing the khakis in the window of the Gap with the gingham dresses or tie-dye of their youth?

This post was supposed to be a summary of what I did this week, but mostly what I did was bang my head against other people’s software. I don’t think I’ll bother to remember that (or if I do, I won’t be able to distinguish it from the hundreds of other weeks I’ve spent doing the same thing). What I hope I’ll remember is that picture of ninja seniors putting a few random things back the way they were to remind themselves and the world that once upon a time, others were here.

Uncategorized

The Internet has given everyone [1] who wants to say something a way to say it. It, and digital media more generally, have also revolutionized music, and now video: “sample, splice, and remix” are redefining them as profoundly as the phonograph did a century ago.

So why do I—the creator of an open, online course—feel a sense of dread whenever someone says that, “Customized self-publishing is the future of textbooks“? Part of the answer is encapsulated in this quote (from this essay by Alan Reid, found via this post by Mark Guzdial):

Read more…

Uncategorized