hacking education

How much can a simple marshmallow test at the age of 4 tell you about your future?  The results are pretty amazing.

It's interesting to contemplate the implications of this study, and makes you wonder if the lessons we're teaching our students are of the most value, especially in this age of instant gratification.

Pitch:

Create an online quiz database which directly challenges the conventional paradigms that learning is finite, success is defined as a ratio of correct to incorrect, and cheating is bad.  It is populated by individual contributions, and utilizes game mechanics and social media to reward users and encourage participation.

Idea:

This idea challenges three longstanding educational paradigms: 

1. Learning is finite (one right answer to every question)
2. The measure of students’ success is some ratio of correct to incorrect answers (GPAs, A-F grades, and standardized tests)
3. Using resources outside of those strictly defined is cheating (asking a peer for help on a test)

The idea is to create an online learning layer that compliments students’ institutional learning.

Establish an online quiz bank populated by crowdsourcing, where students, teachers, and the interested public contribute the questions.

Participation would be encouraged by game mechanics--with points given for correct responses and requirements to “level-up” clearly indicated. Each student would have a profile to highlight his or her achievements.

Success within this learning environment would be measured by quantity of correct answers given and the difficulty of the questions answered. No record would be kept of incorrect responses given, taking away the risk of exerting oneself at the fringe of one’s knowledge.

Questions would come in three forms:

1. Questions with numeric answers would be asked with an open response. When the correct answer is given the question is banked and the points earned.
2. Open-ended questions like, “Why was Pearl Harbor bombed?” would be given in multiple-choice format, only instead of several “wrong” answers and one “right” answer, all choices would be “right” and the challenge would be to choose the “best” answer. If there were 4 options, the very “best” answer would yield 4 points, the next best answer would yield 3, the next 2, and the weakest 1, thus giving a reward for participation while still reinforcing the objective to choose the most relevant answer. Older students would see longer, deeper answers than younger students, allowing for a sliding scale of difficulty for the same question.
3. The question, “Why was Pearl Harbor bombed?”, would also be available for an open response. These responses would become constrained by a word count (with younger students being constrained to fewer words and older students offered more thus enabling a deeper level to their answers). These student-provided answers would then feed into the options provided in the multiple-choice version of the question that other students would answer.

This framework discourages the use of rote questions, e.g. “What year did the French Revolution begin?”, that have diminished value in a Wikipedia world.

Additionally, points would be given a la royalty system for owning the “best” open-response answer. The royalty system would also incentivize students to generate questions for the system.

Because the status quo is about testing students within tight parameters the use of any outside resource is considered cheating. In our new learning ecosystem the uses of all resources are encouraged. When a student finds the answer online or works with mom or a peer to help answer, is that not valid learning? Education is something worth cheating for.

This ecosystem for learning would provide endless potential for growth, drives students to explore and eventually create--not just regurgitate.

I am a Teach for America corp member, 2009.  While I applaud the efforts of TFA, I don't personally believe that TFA is the solution to the educational inequity that is occuring in this country.  There are a lot of great things that Teach for America has going on for it, but it still seems to get a lot of flak.  And since I'm not totally enchanted with TFA, I can see both sides of the arguments.  Today I read this piece over on the Huffington Post, called Rebutting 7 Myths About Teach for America, which I really appreciated, especially this excerpt below.  It helps put the program in perspective.

In an ideal world, the teachers in this country would go through a rigorous development program, as doctors do, that would look something like this:

1. Ed schools would be highly competitive (the nations with the highest achieving students like Finland and Singapore only take teachers from the top 10 percent of college graduates);
2. Ed schools would be rigorous and provide students with real preparation;
3. Graduates would have to pass a tough exam demonstrating that they'd mastered the content;
4. New teachers would enter a carefully controlled and monitored environment, with seasoned mentors by their side to make sure they learned (and did no harm);
5. Effective teachers would be rewarded and given more responsibility; and
6. Ineffective ones would be given additional support and, if that didn't work, counseled out.

In our dysfunctional, Alice-in-Wonderland education world, not one of these six things happens with any regularity.

In my ideal world, there would still be room for TFA, but 80 percent or more of teachers would be seasoned veterans -- there's nothing incompatible both coexisting.

A better analogy for doctors would be the following: imagine that our least accomplished college grads went to medical schools, which were noncompetitive schools of quackery that taught students little. Upon graduating, new doctors had to pass nothing more than an eighth-grade level test (or none at all) and were immediately thrown into emergency rooms, treating the neediest patients. Not surprisingly, the mortality rates would be off the charts for these patients, almost all of whom are of course poor and minority.

(Incidentally, it's easy to imagine what defenders of this outrageous and immoral system would say: "It's not the doctors' fault. Look at how many of our patients are obese, have bad diets, drink and smoke too much, etc. What can we be expected to do when you ask us to treat such patients???" (This is, of course, exactly what the unions say.))

If this were the status quo in the medical profession, I would absolutely favor "Doctors for America" -- especially if the positive impact of the new doctors mirrored the positive impact of TFA corps members, for whom there's now overwhelming evidence that they are doing a good job - certainly far better than the teachers they're replacing (namely, the last teachers hired in every district).

Evidently Microsoft has an official website about reforming education that has been up since 2010.  It can be found at letsredu.com. 

LET'S REDU from Redu on Vimeo.

I had always considered the education reform to be changing a system that is broken (the current education system), and making changes to that system.  For this reason I have never wanted to be part of the education reform since trying to fix a broken system is often a black hole for resources.  Thus, I've always favored an evolution of education.  I've seen the evolution of education as creating a system that shares very little with its previous ancestor, and changing into something much more pointed and powerful.  However, Sir Ken in this talk says that we need a revolution, and explains it in such a way that makes me think that even an evolution has a faulty foundation, and we need a clean break.  A revolution suggests doing away with the entire system that is in place, and starting anew.  And I tend to agree.  Maybe we need to change the tagline of this blog...  This talk is much less dense idea-wise from his other famous talk, but still interesting nonetheless.  Please to enjoy!

Our idea for the Rightbrainsare.us competition has been posted, and here's the link:

http://rightbrainsare.us/ideas/%E2%80%9Ca-thing-worth-having-is-a-thing-worth-cheating-for-%E2%80%9D-w-c-field/

Click thru, give it a read, and show some support for us and reforming the education system. Tell your friends and help us make this idea become a reality by taking 5 seconds, literally, to click on this link and click on the pink heart (like) in the top left. 

We would also love some feedback on the idea.

Dave and I were brainstorming Friday night for a competition that we're planning to enter.  At some point we'll probably post more information about our idea here.  Until then, check out the Kineo. Upon reading about it, I immediately saw an application for our most recent idea.  

I have long felt that the method for delivering education is going to approximate what Orson Scott Card described in his epic work, "Ender's Game", where each student learns via a personalized desk. In terms of the 21st century, we'd call it a tablet computer.  This just offers further proof to me that that's the direction education is headed.

One of the biggest tells that indicate whether a technology could effectively replace or even supplement conventional learning styles is if it is effective in areas where educational opportunities are limited or unavailable.  Like India.  There are many places in India where the people don't have access to schools or teachers.  One man, Sugata Mitra, has been experimenting with various technologies and reports on them in this TED talk from last July.

Every reader of this site should have seen Sir Ken Robinson's talk on Educational Paradigms by now.  If you haven't check it out now.  After you've seen it, you'll recognize at least two things.  1. That his talk is absolutely inspiring, and 2. the technology they use in that video is extremely fascinating.  Turns out that the RSA (Royal Society for advancement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has a whole bunch of similar videos that are of similar interest.  They can be found at http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/.

Greetings HackingEdu readers,

My name is Jonathan Woahn.  Dave and I have been working together since the time we met in 9th grade, on everything from science projects to business plans.  Since that time, our life paths have taken us each in various directions, but we have both returned time and time again to the world of education.  

In 2009 I joined Teach for America, and since that time I have been teaching at the lowest performing school in San Francisco, possibly the entire state of California.  Daily I deal with the many shortcomings and problems of the public education system, which continually reaffirms to me that there has to be a better way.  In my spare time, I spend countless hours researching the various tides, movements and players of educational reform, and dilligently seek opportunities to play a role in the coming evolution.  Dave has invited me to start posting my finds on this blog, and I believe this to be an opportunity to play a small role in the reform.     

Please visit my blog at http://www.theteachforamericablog.com to find out more about my experiences in the classroom, in the California educational system, and with Teach for America.