How Computerized Tutors Are Learning to Teach Humans Illustration by Tim Enthoven Over the next few months, Heffernan videotaped Lindquist, who taught math to middle-school students, as she tutored, transcribing the sessions word for word, hoping to isolate what made her a successful teacher. A look at the transcripts suggests the difficulties he faced. Lindquist’s tutoring sessions were highly interactive: a single hour might contain more than 400 lines of dialogue. Lindquist: Do you know how to calculate average driving speed? Student: I think so, but I forget. Lindquist: Well, average speed — as your mom drove you here, did she drive the same speed the whole time? Student: No. Lindquist: But she did have an average speed. Student: It would be hours divided by 55 miles. Lindquist: Which way is it? Student: It would be 55 miles divided by hours. As the session continued, Lindquist gestured, pointed, made eye contact, modulated her voice. But what of the pupils who could most benefit from tutoring — poor, urban, minority?
How a single DMCA notice took down 1.45 million education blogs Web hosting firm ServerBeach recently received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notice from Pearson, the well-known educational publishing company. The notice pertained to Edublogs, which hosts 1.45 million education-related blogs with ServerBeach, and it focused on a single Edublogs page from 2007 that contained a questionnaire copyrighted by Pearson. ServerBeach informed Edublogs about the alleged violation, and Edublogs says it quickly took down the allegedly infringing content. Instead of calling the matter settled, though, ServerBeach took Edublogs' servers offline last Wednesday, temporarily shutting off all 1.45 million blogs, according to Edublogs. ServerBeach confirms taking all of the Edublogs offline, telling Ars that the outage lasted for "roughly 60 minutes before we brought them back online and confirmed their compliance with the DMCA takedown request." As you might expect, ServerBeach and Edublogs have slightly different accounts of how it all happened.
Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice If there's one thing we've seen plenty of here at Techdirt, it's the damage a single DMCA takedown notice can do. From shuttering a legitimate ebook lending site to removing negative reviews to destroying a user's Flickr account to knocking a copyright attorney's site offline, the DMCA notice continues to be the go-to weapon for copyright defenders. Collateral damage is simply shrugged at and the notices continue to fly at an ever-increasing pace. Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice issued aimed at a copy of Beck's Hoplessness Scale posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites (You may recall Pearson from such other related copyright nonsense as The $180 Art Book With No Pictures and No Free Textbooks Ever!). The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach. Well, there actually was a "word of warning."
How Even Highly-Targeted Censorship Can Lead To Overblocking As the battle rages over SOPA and PIPA, censorship is very much on people's minds. But there are many different kinds of censorship, operating at different levels of precision. For example, while some forms are crude and inexact, like Homeland Security's shutdown of 84,000 sites, others are highly targeted, and designed to block in a very specific way. That's the case for the attempted blocking of Newzbin2 in the UK. If an IP address matches one of those contained in the blocking list, the request to access the site is routed to a proxy server where the exact URL – the specific address including the directory and filename – is examined. the Studios now accept that the order should refer to IP address re-routing and not IP address blocking. However, as James Firth notes in a blog post, overblocking is still likely to occur thanks to the combination of two factors: The first is that Newzbin will - and there's strong evidence they have done already, several times - change their IP address.
How Not To Flip » Physics of Learning Blog In this post I would like to deal with the classroom half of the flipped classroom. What type of homework that is given, be it a video, a reading or practice questions, is almost irrelevant to my musings today. The main purpose of this post is to show two examples of what a flipped math classroom can look like. One is a constructivist environment and the other is a Khan Academy classroom. I think most people will find the difference to be quite shocking. First, let’s take a look at Khan Academy. [flowplayer src=edblog/video/khanA.mp4 width=640 height=320 splash=edblog/video/khan.PNG] Here are a few things I’d like to point out and have you consider for analysis: 0:27 student gets help from the teacher (not fellow students) 0:32 “less lecturing more interaction”. Now please have a look at what I would consider to be a constructivist math classroom. [flowplayer src=edblog/video/app_math.mp4 width=640 height=360 splash=edblog/video/maths.PNG] Now consider the points below for your analysis:
Minnesota bans Coursera: State takes bold stand against free education. Screenshot / Coursera UPDATE, Oct. 19, 7:07 p.m.: Common sense has indeed prevailed! Minnesota has decided to stop enforcing an outdated law that had led to Coursera telling the state's residents they weren't allowed to take its free online classes. For more, see my follow-up post here. Original post: Honorable mentions go to New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber’s online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers’ groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the state has decided to crack down on free education, notifying California-based startup Coursera that it is not allowed to offer its online courses to the state’s residents. A policy analyst for the state’s Office of Higher Education told The Chronicle that Minnesota is simply enforcing a longstanding state law requiring colleges to get the government’s permission to offer instruction within its borders.
Khan Academy: Readers weigh in - The Answer Sheet Recent posts on the Khan Academy — including an e-mail I posted from founder Sal Khan — sparked a lot of interest and reaction from readers. The Khan Academy is essentially an on-line library of more than 3,300 videos on subjects including math, physics, and history that are designed to allow students to learn at their own pace and for teachers to use as Sal Khan (Courtesy Khan Academy) instructional tools. One post, titled “Khan Academy: The hype and the reality,” by Karim Kai Ani, a former middle school teacher and math coach, and the founder of Mathalicious, took issue with the way Khan Academy videos deal with the concept of slope. I asked readers to weigh in and following are several of the responses I received. Here they are: This was written Raymond Johnson and Frederick Peck, Ph.D. students in mathematics education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Freudenthal Institute US. All seven slope interpretations are closely related and together create a cohesive whole.
Sal Khan responds to critic - The Answer Sheet A guest post I recently published critiquing the Khan Academy received a great deal of response, including an e-mail from Salman Khan, founder of the academy. Now here’s the next part of the debate: A response from the critic. Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, in 2010. (Courtesy of Khan Academy) For those who may not know, the Khan Academy is essentially a library of more than 3,300 videos on subjects including math, physics, and history that are intended to allow students to learn at their own pace. Below is Khan’s e-mail to me, and following that is a response to Khan from the author of the original post, Karim Kai Ani, a former middle school teacher and math coach who started a company called Mathalicious. Here’s Khan’s e-mail: Hi Valerie, We here at the Khan Academy appreciate a public discourse on education and really encourage as much feedback as possible. In your previous post, you talk about the value of experiential learning versus lecture-based. regards, Sal
Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens. The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs. Early observations are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week. The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.
Khan Academy: The hype and the reality - The Answer Sheet This was written by Karim Kai Ani, a former middle school teacher and math coach, and the founder of Mathalicious, which is rewriting the middle school math curriculum around real-world topics. You can find a response to this post from Sal Khan by clicking here. By Karim Kai Ani In a new profile in Time magazine, Sal Khan, founder of the popular Khan Academy, explains how he prepares for each of his video lessons. During a recent address to Washington D.C. (BLOOMBERG ) of Education Arne Duncan highlighted the importance of teacher education and professional development, and urged that we as a country provide teachers with more time to collaborate and plan lessons for their students. The highest ranking official in American education says that effective teaching requires training and planning, and then holds up as his archetype someone who openly admits to showing up to class every day unprepared. The narrative surrounding Khan Academy has, it seems, gotten a bit out of hand.
Why I Gave Up Flipped Instruction A little over a year ago I wrote a post about the flipped classroom, why I loved it, and how I used it. I have to admit, the flip wasn’t the same economic and political entity then that it is now. And in some ways, I think that matters. Here’s the thing. When I recently re-read the post, I didn’t disagree with anything I’d said. Yet my brief love affair with the flip has ended. When I wrote that post, I imagined the flip as a stepping stone to a fully realized inquiry/PBL classroom. What is the flip? The flipped classroom essentially reverses traditional teaching. When I first encountered the flip, it seemed like a viable way to help deal with the large and sometimes burdensome amount of content included in my senior Biology & Chemistry curricula. My flipped experiments I first encountered the flip in a blog post. My students loved the idea of trying something that very few other students were doing. We began to shift What was my role? The flip faded away The flip is gone for good No.
The 5 Most Overhyped Trends in Education « Looking Up For your perusal, a completely subjective list of five things happening right now in education that are getting lots of notice, energy and resources but don’t deserve it, and why I think we need to reconsider our collective love affair with them: 1. Flipping The Class: What is it? “…a form of blended Learning which encompasses any use of Internet technology to leverage the learning in a classroom, so a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing. This is most commonly being done using teacher created videos that students view outside of class time. What’s The Problem? The problems with flipping are well explained in “The Flip: End of a Love Affair“. The short form is: What is it? What’s the problem? I’ve written before about the problems with BYOD. It’s inequitable. 3. What is it? The consistent message at ECOO12, from top thinkers and all corners, is that when considering using devices in education, pedagogy must come first. 4) 1 to 1: What is it? What is it?
Parody Critiques Popular Khan Academy Videos - Wired Campus Image Courtesy of John Golden Khan Academy has 150 million YouTube views, 320,000 subscribers, and major support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—but that doesn’t mean the free online library of educational videos is perfect. It doesn’t even mean the site is especially effective, say two math professors at Grand Valley State University. The professors, John Golden and David Coffey, have released a parody video calling out what they consider inaccuracies and poor teaching methods in the much-hyped project. In the professors’ video, they stand watching one of the Khan Academy videos as it is projected, noting a few inaccuracies, such as when the site’s creator, Salman Khan, uses positive and negative signs inconsistently and mixes up transitive and associative properties. Khan Academy videos can be effective supplements to classroom teaching, says Mr. Other critics share his concerns. Mr. “With procedural, worked problems: That’s how I learned, that’s how everyone I knew learned.