sábado, 30 de marzo de 2013

Need a Job? Invent It


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WHEN Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman

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This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.
That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”
 My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it. If that’s true, I asked Wagner, what do young people need to know today?
“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”
So what should be the focus of education reform today?
“We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over,” said Wagner. “Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school. More than a century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”
What does that mean for teachers and principals?
“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”
Who is doing it right?
“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” he said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing. In the U.S., 500 K-12 schools affiliated with Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning Initiative and a consortium of 100 school districts called EdLeader21 are developing new approaches to teaching 21st-century skills. There are also a growing number of ‘reinvented’ colleges like the Olin College of Engineering, the M.I.T. Media Lab and the ‘D-school’ at Stanford where students learn to innovate.”

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domingo, 24 de marzo de 2013

Imprisoned by Innovation


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PRISONS — those bastions of routine and tradition — are finally ripe for disruption. Such is the rosy conclusion of “Beyond the Bars,” a provocative report from management consultants at Deloitte published earlier this month.
Evgeny Morozov

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“Imagine a virtual incarceration system,” the report’s authors write, “that uses advanced risk modeling, geospatial analytics, smartphone technology and principles from the study of human behavior to achieve superior outcomes.”
Such gizmos are meant to reduce overcrowding and help manage the spiraling costs of incarceration by allowing offenders to serve their sentences at home. Thanks to the almighty smartphone, offenders can be under the constant gaze of case managers, who will monitor their activities in real time. Welcome to the Panopticon for couch potatoes.
Deloitte’s proposal also taps a favorite Silicon Valley trick — a tactic known as “gamification” — to award the participating offenders with points for not being late for their appointments or never leaving their assigned zone. “A sufficient number of points,” the authors say, “would earn the offender tangible benefits such as additional freedom or extended curfews.”
That smartphones allow us to imprison twice the number of people at half the cost is the kind of cutting-edge innovation that only management consultants and tech entrepreneurs would be excited about. Such breakthroughs would be worth celebrating if they didn’t distract us from the more radical (and simpler) solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons: incarcerating fewer people.
Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.
Take the recent obsession with self-tracking. From what we eat to how much energy we consume: everything is trackable, not least because our gadgets come equipped with clever sensors. Right now, most of such self-tracking efforts come from the grass-roots enthusiasts. But it won’t take long for governments to start exploring self-tracking as a solution to problems that could, and probably should, be tackled differently.
Are you not eating enough vegetables? Well, your smartphone will tell you so — never mind that there are none for sale in your neighborhood, and you can’t afford to buy them anyway.
By offloading the responsibility for problem solving from governments to citizens, self-tracking can get us to optimize our behavior within the constraints of an existing system. What we need is a chance to reform the system itself — perhaps by dismantling those constraints. Ambitious reforms like regulating the food industry and building the infrastructure needed to get good food to hungry people shouldn’t lose their relevance in the era of universal self-tracking.
That we now have the means to make the most miserable experiences more tolerable should not be an excuse not to reduce the misery of those experiences.
Take Chromaroma, a game that uses London’s smart public transportation card to make commutes more fun by awarding points for “checking in” at stations. According to The Guardian, the game is “the makeover London commuting has been waiting for.” But is it, really? As the writer Steven Poole put it, “Actually, the makeover London commuting has been waiting for is a more reliable service, with Tube lines that don’t close every weekend and trains that can hold more than 17 people.”
Many trendy technologies can not only hinder needed reforms but actually also entrench social iniquities. Consider the current enthusiasm for Big Data, with its ability to yield powerful insights based on correlations alone. According to one recent tome on the subject, once we fully embrace Big Data, “society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what.”
But a problem tackled through correlations alone lends itself to a very different set of solutions than a problem mapped out in all its causal complexity.
It may help to know that most crimes in a given neighborhood are committed by people who share certain “likes” on Facebook. But to stop there and become suspicious of everyone else who shares the same “likes” would be irresponsible, especially when those “likes” are themselves just proxies for class, race or gender. If criminal behavior does stem from economic inequality or racial discrimination, we need to fix those root causes, not just prevent the damage likely to be caused by people who fit a profile.
Smart technology, thanks to its ubiquity and affordability, offers us the cheapest — and trendiest — fix. But the gleaming aura of disruption-talk that often accompanies such fixes masks their underlying conservatism. Technological innovation does not guarantee political innovation; at times, it might even impede it. The task ahead is to prevent our imagination from being incarcerated by smart technologies. Or should we settle for gamifying ourselves to death?
Evgeny Morozov, author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism,” is a guest columnist.

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sábado, 23 de marzo de 2013

Digitally Aided Education, Using the Students’ Own Electronic Gear


Todd Anderson for The New York Times
Middle-school students using their own electronic devices during a science class at New Smyrna Beach Middle School in New Smyrna Beach, Fla.
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Educators and policy makers continue to debate whether computers are a good teaching tool. But a growing number of schools are adopting a new, even more controversial approach: asking students to bring their own smartphones, tablets, laptops and even their video game players to class.
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Todd Anderson for The New York Times
Meagan Strickland, 13, uses her iPhone 4S and a school-owned iPad 2 in a history class at New Smyrna Beach Middle School.
Todd Anderson for The New York Times
Students at New Smyrna Beach Middle School in Florida are sometimes told to “B.Y.O.T.,” or “bring your own technology.”
Officials at the schools say the students’ own devices are the simplest way to use a new generation of learning apps that can, for example, teach them math, test them with quizzes and enable them to share and comment on each other’s essays.
Advocates of this new trend, called B.Y.O.T. for bring your own technology, say there is another advantage: it saves money for schools short of cash.
Some large school districts in Central Florida and near Houston and Atlanta have already signed on, and they are fielding calls and providing tours to administrators from hundreds of other districts that are considering whether to follow their lead.
But B.Y.O.T. has many skeptics, even among people who otherwise see benefits of using more technology in classrooms.
“The schools are hoping, hoping there’s going to be a for-free solution because they don’t have any money,” said Elliot Soloway, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who consults with many school districts about the use of computers to promote learning.
“If you look at initiatives in public education, this has the momentum.”
But Mr. Soloway also said he was “frightened” by the notion of schools using B.Y.O.T. as a quick budget fix because there was no evidence that a classroom full of students using different personal devices would enhance learning. Roy Pea, a professor of learning sciences at Stanford University, also has doubts. He is the co-author of a White House-backed National Educational Technology Plan published in 2011 that advocates for technology-centric classrooms.
But he said the B.Y.O.T. approach could be counterproductive if teachers were forced to build lessons around different devices — in effect, subverting curriculum to technology.
“Why are they so happy to have these devices when just a few years ago they didn’t want them in the classroom?” Dr. Pea asked about school administrators.
The Volusia County School District in Central Florida, bordering Daytona Beach, is one of the places that used to have signs around its schools that admonished students: no cellphones allowed. But the signs have been replaced over the last two years with new ones that read: B.Y.O.T.
Volusia school officials say that they realized they should take advantage of, rather than fight, students’ deep connections with their devices. At the same time, the district found that the cost of providing and maintaining computers for students was becoming prohibitive.
Since the change, Volusia officials say, they have not encountered many tech support problems or complaints from teachers. Rather, students are more engaged, they say, and the only problem that regularly crops up is that students forget to charge the batteries in their devices.
“It’s almost like bringing your homework,” said Jessica Levene, manager of learning technologies for the Volusia district, where 21 of 70 schools are using B.Y.O.T. “Make sure you have your device and that it’s charged.”
She conceded that students could text each other more easily now but said the school was keeping them busy on their devices. And while district administrators worried initially that poorer students would not own devices, they discovered something of “an inverse relationship” between family income and the sophistication of their devices, particularly smartphones, said Don Boulware, the district’s director of technology services.
At Woodward Avenue Elementary School in the Volusia district, fifth-grade teacher Dana Zacharko said her students tended to bring in smartphones or iPod Touches. She said she had found apps that allowed her to teach all kinds of subjects.
For instance, a recent assignment entailed learning about fractions by using an app called “Factor Samurai.” A number appears on the screen, and the student is supposed to cut it with a finger — as if slicing with a Samurai sword — so that it gets cut into smaller values. But students lose points if they try to slice through prime numbers.
Ms. Zacharko will also start class discussion on a reading assignment by asking students to use their devices to write comments in an online forum. “Their typing is amazing on these devices,” she said.
The fact that students in the same classroom can use many different devices is not a handicap because they are all using the same lessons on the Internet, said Lenny Schad, former chief information officer in the Katy Independent School District near Houston, which started a program with a different moniker: B.Y.O.D., for Bring Your Own Device.
“The Internet is the great equalizer,” Mr. Schad said.
He added that students’ devices were not meant to be a substitute for teachers, but could be used as tools for assignments. He noted that the concept was catching on; he said he had given dozens of presentations to other districts and educators about his district’s initiative.
“My message: It shouldn’t be ‘if’ we do it, it should be ‘when’ we do it,’ ” said Mr. Schad, who this year moved to the nearby Houston Independent School District, where he plans to employ a similar strategy. “I don’t know how districts can’t look at this model.”
He said that policy makers who opposed B.Y.O.T. were holding on to an unrealistic notion that districts should equip students with computers themselves.
“On a smartphone, there are no limitations,” Mr. Schad said. “This is the world they live in and we’re bringing it into the classroom.”
Another district that has adopted B.Y.O.T. is Forsyth County in Cumming, Ga., near Atlanta. Because its B.Y.O.T. program started in 2008, more than 300 people have visited in the last year from other districts around the country to learn from the district’s experience. The Forsyth district has a tour planned this spring with 160 spots for visiting educators from around the country that is fully booked.
In Forsyth, the most common devices are iPhones, iPod Touches, Android phones and tablets. They are effective for students answering multiple-choice questions on math Web sites or taking a quiz, said Anne Kohler, a special-education teacher at South Forsyth High School. She says that policy makers and others who oppose the idea of using devices in classrooms are behind the curve.
“They don’t understand how kids acquire knowledge,” she said. “They’re not the people actually doing it.”

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lunes, 18 de marzo de 2013

Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life - NYTimes.com

Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life - NYTimes.com:

For months, Henry Markram and his team had been feeding data into a supercomputer, four vending-machine-size black boxes whirring quietly in the basement of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

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miércoles, 6 de marzo de 2013

The Professor's Big Stage


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I just spent the last two days at a great conference convened by M.I.T. and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” — a k a “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from massive open online courses?”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.
“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas.
Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”
O.K., not every professor will develop a global following, but the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real. These were my key take-aways from the conference:
¶Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.
¶Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of M.I.T.’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come to class, where the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem solving and discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those passing the class went from nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent. And since this course was the first step to a degree in science and technology, it meant that many more students potentially moved on toward a degree and career in that field.
¶We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.
¶Bottom line: There is still huge value in the residential college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs. We still need more research on what works, but standing still is not an option.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.

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