Learnable Programming Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming? Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types. Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning: Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Thus, the goals of a programming system should be: to support and encourage powerful ways of thinkingto enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. Alan Perlis wrote, "To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program." How do we get people to understand programming? We change programming. Contents A programming system has two parts. The language should provide: Wait.
Google Course Builder will catalogue and deliver the world's educational content Following hot on the heels of Stanford's announcement that it would be taking on iTunes U with its own free course software, Google has just released a new "Course Builder" tool. Following a trial course in July that saw 155,000 registered students (with 20,000 completing it), the search giant has bundled the technologies used into an open source package available to anyone here. The tool includes all of the formalities you would expect from a full educational course, including a registration process and schedule alongside certificates and the standard content repository that you would expect. Unlike services like iTunes U, the result is much more holistic -- this feels less like a way for a casual user to "play along" with the real course taking place at a university and more like a dedicated service in itself. Interestingly, Stanford also features as one of the first organisations said to be "considering how this experimental technology might work".
Udacity and Online Pedagogy: Players, Learners, Objects | Online Learning | HYBRID PEDAGOGY This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context. Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. The problem is that learning cannot be reduced to “testable reusable units of cognition.” A proactive (not reactionary) approach to digital pedagogy sees learning as irreducible to 1s and 0s and engages learners as more than mere columns in a spreadsheet. Shortly after “Broadcast Education: A Response to Coursera” appeared on Hybrid Pedagogy, Sean received a message from Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity. But Udacity isn’t silly. [Photo by Walter Benson]
A Better Way to Teach? Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor. The research, appearing online today in Science, was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory. “It’s almost certainly the case that lectures have been ineffective for centuries.
Come the Revolution Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school. “I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.” Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years.
Guide to Open Learning ABSTRACT: This document is an introduction to Open Learning. It examines briefly what "Open" means and the different facets of the open movement and what "Learning" means and how it is different for every person. Attention is brought to the issue of the digital divide and ways to reduce or eliminate barriers to education. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ^ Issac Newton said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." To define Open Learning is a challenge in itself. Open Learning is a system that aims to eliminate or greatly lower barriers to use, extraction, and reuse of knowledge. Open Learning is largely available because of the internet, although it is possible for it to take the form of offline content as well. Start Working in the Open! ^ "Learning is growing new structure in the brain. I hear and I forget. "All . . . by nature desire to know. ^The Digital Divide I must begin by mentioning the digital divide.
Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey | Education April 4, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere. Similar defunding is under way nationwide. Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects – and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12. "There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it's the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill," concludes Ronald G. A more accurate description, I think, is "Failure by Design," the title of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a major source of reliable information and analysis on the state of the economy. Claims are also made about the alleged benefits of the radical expansion of financial institutions since the 1970s.
Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete. Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. “I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet.
The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy An Explainer Post There's an article in this month's Wired Magazine about Khan Academy. The headline speaks volumes -- "How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education" -- as do the responses I've seen to the article. As usual, there's plenty of praise for Sal Khan and his one-man-educational-video-making machine. That dichotomy says it all, right? Technology Replacing Teachers If one person can create 2400 educational videos and these videos can in turn be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection then why do we need teachers? While "technology will replace teachers" seems like a silly argument to make, one need only look at the state of most school budgets and know that something's got to give. The Bill Gates Connection "Retain qualified people." Since retiring as the CEO of Microsoft, Gates has used his wealth to support a number of charitable causes, particularly around education. What does all of this have to do with Sal Khan? Old Wine, New Bottles, Bad Pedagogy
Report: School turnaround mostly failing in Wash. The federal school turnaround program is mostly failing in Washington state, even though teachers and administrators are trying their best to make a difference for kids, according to a report issued Thursday by education researchers at the University of Washington. The federal government is spending more than $3 billion nationwide to help districts turn around their worst-performing schools. Washington school districts are failing to make aggressive reforms with their more than $50 million share of the money, researchers from UW's Center on Reinventing Public Education say. Teachers are working very hard but their efforts are mostly wasted because the districts don't have a good plan, said Sarah Yatsko, a UW research analyst and lead author of the study. She said part of the problem is that districts were rushed into reform by the federal government. "We've got the money. She expects a similar critique could be made of turnaround efforts in other states. Online:
Science teacher Seattle University | Seattle U teacher honored for innovation Originally published November 17, 2011 at 12:03 AM | Page modified November 17, 2011 at 11:18 AM Fourteen years ago, Vicky Minderhout did something very radical for a university professor: She set aside her biochemistry-lecture notes, moved away from the lectern and began teaching from the center of the classroom. She wanted to coach her students at Seattle University to think about how biochemistry works, to puzzle their way through the structures of proteins and work out the functions of carbohydrates. She wanted them to discover answers for themselves. "I view it as a coaching role," Minderhout said. "We're really trying to coach thinking." Today, Minderhout, 61, is being honored as Washington's professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in recognition of her student-centered method of teaching science. Minderhout never gave a lecture, and her small-group work "was really good for building critical-thinking skills," Ryskalczyk said. Filling in gaps