PROCESS POST: Dreaming about learning apps that use data collection and dashboard displays

Posted on November 7, 2012 by boadams1

I love dreaming about the future of education. From dreams come possibilities and innovations. To stretch my own thinking, I seek inspiration from a number of sources. Frog design and TED are two of my favorites.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve thought more about data collection and dashboard display, all in the service of continuing to develop systems that visualize and enhance individual student learning. Recent inspirations for this dreaming have come from:

Advancing the Future of Healthcare: frog’s Connected Care Solution. I particularly love the images and visuals of the individual health dashboard. Where frog is showing dashboard items for blood pressure, BMI, physical activity, etc., I see a translation to education that could be dashboard items for oral communication, collaborative problem solving, and project management success.
Matt Killingsworth: Want to be happier? Stay in the moment (TED talk). In the talk, Killingsworth describes his app that collects information from a huge data set of people. In translation to education, I could see such an app being used on student smart phones, so that learners could real-time report on what they’re doing in class or at home to learn, if they are enjoying and/or benefiting from what they are doing, if they feel deeply engaged or confused or bored. That individual data could be aggregated to see a clearer picture of an individual learner’s preferences, proficiencies, etc. That data could also be aggregated on a larger set to see what types of activities are working best for various learner profiles, age groups, etc. And all of this data could feed into the dashboards imagined above.

Does any such app, data collection, and dash boarding already exist? If so, I would love for you to leave a comment and a link about what’s already out there. The closest thing I have seen personally is the data tool being developed with Khan Academy that provides individual and class data sets of learning targets, time spent on modules, etc.

Just like frog design’s CCS could reveal what’s working and what to address with a person’s health, and just like Matt Killingsworth’s app could reveal what is leading to greater happiness for folks, a comparable learning app could make tangible so much about what is working and what to address with individual learners and groups of learners.

If we can dream it, we can build it.

Guns and butter, production possibilities frontiers, and students doing real-life work #WhatIfWeekly

Posted on October 30, 2012 by boadams1

I believe the most underutilized resource in our nation is our young people in schools. As an economics major in college, and as a long-time teacher of 8th graders enrolled in economics, I studied “production possibilities frontiers.” You may remember them as “guns and butter” graphs, if you’ve studied any introductory econ.

Perhaps the school application is “20th century learners” and “21st century learners,” instead of guns and butter. Regardless, to work below the frontier is to underutilize resources – to waste available capacity. I believe we are wasting a good bit of the capacity of our student learners.

I believe students are perfectly capable and willing and eager to work on real-world issues. I love finding examples of such work, partly because I think it’s like the Bannister 4-minute mile. Once we know it’s possible, more people will do it! If you read here regularly, you’ll likely remember previous examples that I have highlighted about students doing real-life work. Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School. Geoff Mulgan’s Studio Schools. Brittany Wenger. There are many examples.

Recently, I’ve discovered a few more examples of students doing work that goes beyond just handing it in to a teacher for grading and “recycling.” They’re doing work for a larger scope. For a bigger cause.

Adobe has created The Adobe Educators’ Choice Awards: Honoring the work of innovative educators. The finalists in the primary and secondary-school categories are fabulous. Tagature and the study of graffiti tags combined with classics literature…turned into a book that you can acquire. A partnership among students and Powerhouse Factories to create gig posters for the band Belle Histoire. The Digital Voices project for understanding cultures (see the actual class website here). The work does not stop with the teacher and the classroom walls. The work extends well into the real world.
Recently, TED released “Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole: Science is for everyone, kids included.” The story they share is about 10 year olds who become the youngest people ever to publish a peer-reviewded science paper. As the talk begins, Lotto shares that “perception is grounded in our experience… Now if perception is grounded in our history, it means we’re only ever responding according to what we’ve done before. But actually, it’s a tremendous problem, because how can we ever see differently?” We must see “students” differently. They CAN work on real-world challenges. They WANT to work on real-world challenges. They SHOULD be working on real-world challenges. We adults are too often the greatest limitations to helping them reach their production possibilities frontier…exceed it even! What if more of us inspired and enabled such work and play for our students?!

Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course #TED #IDreamASchool

Posted on October 26, 2012 by boadams1

So one thing that I took from home is this notionthat educators don’t necessarily have to teach. Instead, they can provide an environment and resourcesthat tease out your natural ability to learn on your own. Self-study, self-exploration, self-empowerment:these are the virtues of a great education.

– Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course

Schocken’s lessons here are literal and archetypal. His story reveals a path to developing capacity as a “guide on the side” and re-balancing from the model of “sage on the stage.”

And I love that he explains that we are NOT trying to replace teachers with technology.

We don’t replace teachers, by the way. We believe that teachers should be empowered, not replaced.

238 Provocations for School 3.0 – John Maeda’s TEDGlobal 2012 Talk #School3pt0

Posted on October 25, 2012 by boadams1

There are at least 238 provocations for School 3.0 in “John Maeda: How art, technology, and design inform creative leaders.”

I see ideations for such things as form + content, networking diagrams for learning communities, play leading to powerful discovery, and 235 more!

What do you see?

Monday morning ideation – imagining the future of schools and schools of the future #WhatIfWeekly

Posted on October 22, 2012 by boadams1

Three idea seeds from my weekend “studying”…

1. What if we developed “nutrition info” for our school courses? Looking at an egg crate this weekend, I wondered why we don’t have something like this for our courses in schools? How might we develop guides for the 7Cs that could accompany a course description and indicate to folks what’s actually in the content-and-skills meal that one’s about to partake in?

2. What if we understood capital-P PBL as futebol de salão? Reading Farnam Street, I learned about a game credited with developing the soft skills of young Brazilian soccer players.

This insanely fast, tightly compressed five-on-five version of the game— played on a field the size of a basketball court— creates 600 percent more touches, demands instant pattern recognition and, in the words of Emilio Miranda, a professor of soccer at the University of São Paulo, serves as Brazil’s “laboratory of improvisation.”

For students working on real-life problems in a curriculum more balanced toward challenges and contexts, instead of so content-centric, they could be developing such soft skills for problem finding and problem solving in comparable improvisation labs for applying their interrelated subjects of math, science, English, history, etc.

3. What if we devised ways for personal learning, like Susan Solomon describes medicine is developing personal drug treatments? Listening to the TED talk “Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells.” I was struck by this part of the transcript:

But it isn’t really enough just to look at the cells from a few people or a small group of people,because we have to step back.We’ve got to look at the big picture.Look around this room. We are all different,and a disease that I might have,if I had Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease,it probably would affect me differently than if one of you had that disease,and if we both had Parkinson’s disease,and we took the same medication,but we had different genetic makeup,we probably would have a different result,and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully for me was actually ineffective for you,and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for you is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious,but unfortunately it is not the way that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs because, until now, it hasn’t had the tools.

And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model.The way we’ve been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store,no one asks you what size you are, or if you’re going dancing or hiking.They just say, “Well, you have feet, here are your shoes.”It doesn’t work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet.So we really have to change this.

Too much of formalized education in schools seems targeted to the mean…or overly generalized, so that many experience something comparable to the shoe store that says, “Well, you have feet, here are your shoes.” With the advances in technology and brain research, how might we design personal learning, like Solomon describes designing personal drug treatment?