Texas makes MAJOR move in favor of school choice

Good news! Up to a 40,000 children have immediately signed up!

(194) Texas makes MAJOR move in favor of school choice - YouTube

Estonia's AI Leap Brings Chatbots Into Schools

Good news! Bravo! Compare that approach to other Western countries silly efforts to prohibit smartphones etc. in class rooms!

"Estonia has a reputation as one of the most digitally advanced nations in the world, thanks to its efficient digital platforms for government services and its startup-friendly culture. Its citizens’ digital prowess is largely due to the government’s decades-long campaign to bring technology into schools. Now, the government is launching AI Leap 2025, which will bring AI tools to an initial cohort of 20,000 high school students in September. Siim Sikkut, a former member of the Estonian government and part of the launch team, says the AI Leap program goes beyond just providing access to new technology. Its goal is to give students the skills they need to use it both ethically and effectively. ..."

Estonia's AI Leap Brings Chatbots Into Schools - IEEE Spectrum "Students are meant to use AI for learning rather than cheating"

What's behind the ban on cell phones in K-12 schools? Foolishness

How many K-12 schools provide tablet computers or similar devices to each student? Then students could e.g. choose their own learning program at their own speed etc. 

The traditional role of teachers is entirely outdated! Teachers ought to be more like facilitators to encourage each student to learn on their own according to their preferences and capabilities.

Clearly, smart device use should be integrated into children/adolescents education!

Such banning of smartphones seems to be a foolish and counterproductive endeavor! The focus on possible addiction and misuse of social media by students is misguided!

"... States such as Florida, Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina, and Louisiana have passed laws recently to ban or restrict cell phones in K-12 schools, while countless school districts in dozens of other states have implemented policies to limit use. ...

high school students must stow phones in backpacks and use them only between classes and during lunch ...

Mounting research suggests that smartphone use may be fueling the country's mental health crisis among youth ..."

What's behind the ban on cell phones in K-12 schools? | Hub "A growing number of states and schools are now banning or restricting cell phones. Johns Hopkins experts Carol Vidal and Annette Anderson explain the research and weigh in on the controversial policies."

Wissenschaftsfreiheit - Basta, Bologna!

Tolle Schlagzeile! Habe die Details zu dieser Bologna Reform nicht mehr parat, kann mir aber gut vorstellen, dass es ein Windei oder eine Salami der Bildungsbürokraten und vieler dusseliger Professoren war!

Wissenschaftsfreiheit - Basta, Bologna! | Cicero Online Vor 25 Jahren wurde an den Universitäten der Bologna-Prozess gestartet. Er hat ein Hochschulsystem geschaffen, in dem Konformität der Weg zum Erfolg geworden ist. Gefördert wird derjenige, der sich den Drittmittelgebern anpasst.

Smartphones in school? Only when they clearly support learning | UNESCO

One of those hot button topics of our time! How to integrate the latest technology in the education of children.

Smartphones are multi-purpose tools. Let's take advantage!
Don't ban smartphones!
Don't overregulate!

There is a revolution going on affecting the education of children. Traditional education will change dramatically.

E.g. more individualized learning will become possible and much more.

I am not as pessimistic as the UNESCO report.

"KEY MESSAGES

1. Good, impartial evidence on the impact of education technology is in short supply.
   There is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education. Technology evolves faster than it is possible to evaluate it: Education technology products change every 36 months, on average. ...
   A lot of the evidence comes from those trying to sell it. Pearson funded its own studies, contesting independent analysis that showed its products had no impact.
2. Technology offers an education lifeline for millions but excludes many more.
   Accessible technology and universal design have opened up opportunities for learners with disabilities. About 87% of visually impaired adults indicated that accessible technology devices were replacing traditional assistive tools. Radio, television and mobile phones fill in for traditional education among hard-to-reach populations. Almost 40 countries use radio instruction. In Mexico, a programme of televised lessons combined with in-class support increased secondary school enrolment by 21%.
3. Online learning stopped education from melting down during COVID-19 school closures. Distance learning had a potential reach of over 1 billion students; but it also failed to reach at least half a billion, or 31% of students worldwide – and 72% of the poorest. ...
4. Digital technology has dramatically increased access to teaching and learning resources.
   Examples include the National Academic Digital Library of Ethiopia and National Digital Library of India. The Teachers Portal in Bangladesh has over 600,000 users. ...
5. But it should focus on learning outcomes, not on digital inputs.
   In Peru, when over 1 million laptops were distributed without being incorporated into pedagogy, learning did not improve. In the United States, analysis of over 2 million students found that learning gaps widened when instruction was exclusively remote.
6. And it need not be advanced to be effective.
   In China, high-quality lesson recordings delivered to 100 million rural students improved student outcomes by 32% and reduced urban–rural earning gaps by 38%.
7. Finally, it can have detrimental impact if inappropriate or excessive.
   Large-scale international assessment data, such as that provided by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), suggest a negative link between excessive ICT use and student performance. Mere proximity to a mobile device was found to distract students and to have a negative impact on learning in 14 countries, yet less than one in four have banned smartphone use in schools.
8. The fast pace of change in technology is putting strain on education systems to adapt.
   Countries are starting to define the digital skills they want to prioritize in curricula and assessment standards. Globally, 54% of countries have digital skill standards but often these have been defined by non-state, mostly commercial, actors.
9. Many students do not have much chance to practise with digital technology in schools.
   Even in the world’s richest countries, only about 10% of 15-year-old students used digital devices for more than an hour per week in mathematics and science.
10. Teachers often feel unprepared and lack confidence teaching with technology. Only half of countries have standards for developing teacher ICT skills. While 5% of ransomware attacks target education, few teacher training programmes cover cybersecurity.
11. Various issues impede the potential of digital data in education management. Many countries lack capacity: Just over half of countries use student identification numbers. Countries that do invest in data struggle: A recent survey among UK universities found that 43% had trouble linking data systems.
12. Online content has grown without enough regulation [???] of quality control or diversity [???].
    Online content is produced by dominant groups, affecting access to it. Nearly 90% of content in higher education repositories with open education resource collections was created in Europe and Northern America; 92% of content in the OER Commons global library is in English. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) mainly benefit educated learners and those from richer countries.
13. Higher education is adopting digital technology the fastest and being transformed by it the most.
    There were over 220 million students attending MOOCs in 2021. But digital platforms challenge universities’ role and pose regulatory and ethical challenges, for instance related to exclusive subscription deals and to student and personnel data.
14. Technology is often bought to plug a gap, with no view to the long-term costs
    … for national budgets. The cost of moving to basic digital learning in low-income countries and connecting all schools to the internet in lower-middle-income countries would add 50% to their current financing gap for achieving national SDG 4 targets. Money is not always well spent: Around two-thirds of education software licences were unused in the United States.
    …for children’s well-being. Almost one sixth of countries have banned smartphones in schools. Children’s data are being exposed, yet only 16% of countries explicitly guarantee data privacy in education by law. One analysis found that 89% of 163 education technology products recommended during the pandemic could survey children. Further, 39 of 42 governments providing online education during the pandemic fostered uses that risked or infringed on children’s rights. ..."

Smartphones in school? Only when they clearly support learning | UNESCO

UNESCO: 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report

aiEDUcation Project for AI literacy

Now with the takeoff of machine learning & AI, I believe pedagogy and the education of children will never be the same again. 

Exciting times for students. More exploration and discovery, more personalization, create your own syllabus and much more.

The Internet was already a major improvement. E.g. allowing more parents to choose home schooling or other alternative to conventional K-12 schooling.

"Recent surveys show that teachers actually use generative AI tools more than students (e.g. for creating lesson plans and interesting word problems). The AI Education Project, funded by Google, Intel, and OpenAI, has trained over 7,000 teachers in AI usage, with generative AI commonly used for lesson planning and parent communication. ..." Last Week in AI

aiEDU Are your students ready for the age of artificial intelligence?

Reading for fun plunges to ‘crisis’ level for US students

How times change over the millennia! Stone tablets and parchment were replaced with paper. Paper served us so well for at least the last 600 years.

Now we are in the digital age! Books or other paper based reading materials have become like stone tablets for younger generations!

How do we teach the next generation about all the great things that happened and all the important lessons learnt in the past and distant past? A tremendous challenge!

On e.g. YouTube you can learn so much if you know what to select among the hundreds of millions of videos.

"Only 14 percent of students say they read for fun every day, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report released recently, down 3 percentage points from 2020 and 13 since 2012. The report indicates 31 percent of students never or hardly ever read for fun. ..."

Reading for fun plunges to ‘crisis’ level for US students | The Hill

Schools should teach AI to every child, according to Andrew Ng and Andrea Pasinetti

A very reasonable and timely plea! Andrew Ng is a well recognized AI expert affiliated with Stanford University!

Schools should teach AI to every child, according to Andrew Ng and Andrea Pasinetti | VentureBeat

Professor Of New Media Banned Technology Use In Class

Posted: 9/28/2014

Trigger

Just read “Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class”. This Washington Post blog post is about Professor of media studies Clay Shirky at New York University. “He is a leading voice on the effect technology has had on society — and vice versa — and has been writing extensively about the Internet for nearly a decade. … For years Shirky has allowed his students to bring laptops, tablets and phones into class and use them at will.”

The Professor explained in a very long letter why he resorted to this drastic measure. It is not very convincing.

Notes

First, I think, this professor is quite stupid, authoritarian, and condescending. The best a professor can hope for is that some students pay attention and he or she can work with or engage these students.

I would also surmise, this professor does not have the guts to show  those students the door who distract or disturb other students. Thus, he resorted to a punish all measure.

Prof. Shirky claims:

1. “I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor.”
2. “I’ve generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom.”
3. “Then there was the competitive aspect. It’s my job to be more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally, there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even if young ones. Time management is their job, not mine.”

What changed:

1. “Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time.”
2. “The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year.”
3. “The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices themselves”

Was the professor becoming outdated and boring and students noticed?

Or was he a laissez faire professor before, because he got good ratings from his students?

He expressed his deep condescension for students like:

1. “We’ve known for some time that multitasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.”
2. “This effect takes place over more than one time frame — even when multi-tasking doesn’t significantly degrade immediate performance, it can have negative long-term effects on “declarative memory”, the kind of focused recall that lets people characterize and use what they learned from earlier studying. (Multitasking thus makes the famous “learned it the day before the test, forgot it the day after” effect even more pernicious.)”
3. “People often start multitasking because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded.”
4. “On top of this, multi-tasking doesn’t even exercise task-switching as a skill. A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. (“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, …  Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.”
5. “Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re focusing on.”
6. And he goes on and on adding more embarrassments ...

Is it possible that young people are quite capable of multitasking and much better at that than older generations despite possibly flawed scientific studies to the contrary. Should students not find out for themselves how far they can go with multitasking and not be told by their professor?

In Conclusion

This is reportedly a leading professor of new media! That is laughable! He does not have a clue, he is so prejudiced like a fogey! Does he not realize that the exponential progress of technology questions all past approaches to education and learning?

How much tuition pay students for this crap? How much debt do they incur?

Human Primal Fear And Irrationality

The German Urangst

When you Bing or Google either term, i.e. “primal fear” or “urangst”, you will not be very successful but finding a same name movie from 1996.

The German language Wikipedia has an entry for “urangst”. This article refers to Sigmund Freud’s understanding of Urangst, which he views as resulting from the act of birth. Curiously, Wikipedia does not have a link to a corresponding article in English. The English language Wikipedia disambiguates the term “primal fear” only as the movie, a novel, a German heavy metal band and so on.

Sometimes it is beneficial to be fluent in more than one language, because in some cases the people of one language have expressed an important concept better than the other people and vice versa. I would suggest that the German language “Urangst” and its lesser developed English language counterpart “primal fear” is such a case.

Another Interpretation Of Primal Fear

I would postulate that all humans suffer to some degree of primal fear (not necessarily related to their birth) as an important part of their self preservation instinct.

Presumably, primal fear like love, language or music is one common universal denominator among human beings.

It is probably primal fear that contributes to the age old human extinction scenarios (e.g. apocalypse or doomsday). E.g. environmentalism (a pseudo religion of our time), overpopulationism etc. are probably inspired by primal fears.

Presumably, primal fears are often not admitted or concealed.

Consequences Of Primal Fear

Primal fears can be your worst enemy!

The Age of Reason or Enlightenment and what followed presumably did little to reduce the primal fear of humans. Consequently, to this day superstition and irrationality of humans govern their lives and are a daily fact of life.

Representative democracy is too often not much more than an excessive outpouring of those fears or the exploitation of these primal fears of constituents cloaked in pseudo rational arguments besides staying in power and serving vested interests.

Primal fear tends to elicit bad or worse remedies outweighing the perceived fears. Overreactions are too frequently the outcome.

To Counter Primal Fear

Start with better and more private education of the people at every age! Education should become more interesting to people than trivial entertainment! As they say, the mind is a terrible thing to waste.

More individual freedom, accountability AND responsibility to set free the potential of each human being!

Start with more participation of the people in government, e.g. by strict and short term limits for everyone in public office or service to increase personnel rotation and the chances of more people taking part in government affairs.

No public office should be automatically restricted/reserved to people with special formal education or certification (e.g. teachers, judges, doctors etc.).

I am sure, I am missing something. J

Essay Grading Vs. Essay Writing Software Race

Trigger

New York Times recently published an article titled “Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break” (4/4/2013). This software was introduced by the EdX Consortium founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “[EdX] will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.”

What are these other tasks? Who frees the student from writing those essays?

Import

It will be only a matter of time until students use essay writing software to outsmart the grading software.

Viewed from this perspective, what is the importance or benefit of traditional essays for the educational assessment of students in the 21^st century?

I have an inkling that traditional forms of student assessment go the way of the Dodo bird! J

Further Reading

See, e.g. my earlier blog on education reform.

Education Reform In The 21st Century

Imminence & Scope Of Education Reform

In the meantime, most people who follow the news and recent technological advancements have come to realize that the pressure of radical reform of how individuals at any age will educate themselves or will be educated is imminent.

For over three thousand years human education has evolved. The transfer of knowledge from great teachers was enhanced by permanent storage of knowledge, the fast and widespread dissemination of knowledge, and constant discourse about knowledge by humans.

The Status Quo Of Human Education

The education of humans has evolved to become highly structured, sequentially phased, specialized and institutionalized. The class room setting is still the most common, standard mode of teaching. There are numerous barriers to entry. Education is largely organized by tracks.

Some typical characteristics of current education of humans:

1.       Students meet in a group at a specific physical location, at a specific time to be taught by a specially trained human professional.

2.       Students have to or need to specialize in some discipline fairly early on.

3.       There are certain times during a human’s life when they are expected to have completed a certain education.

4.       The progress of a student’s education is measured sequentially or certified in some prescribed way, e.g. by examinations, grades, degrees, certifications etc.

5.       Teaching is conducted by specially trained and certified people who often do this for a lifetime

Private education has been too a large extent displaced by public education with all its negative consequences. Government in many countries has essentially nationalized education.

Tabula Rasa Approach

People, who follow my blog (if there are any such people) know that I like this approach also called Gedankenexperiment (German for thought experiment). It opens up the mind and frees up the mind from unnecessary constraints. It allows e.g. to question anything in existence.

Some examples:

1.       College education in the US has almost become prohibitively expensive no matter how much federal government tries to subsidize it. During the Great Recession it became noticeable that a fine MBA or law school degree is not necessarily advantageous, but very expensive.

2.       What is the current measurement and certification of someone’s educational attainment useful for? We know that many high school/college drop outs are among the smartest and most accomplished people on earth.

3.       What does it prove if a person who has once in his life time written a doctoral thesis for which the person then received a Ph. D.? We know that many Ph. Ds. over their entire lifetime will achieve little more than an average non Ph. D. or they may turn out not to be really qualified for what they are doing.

4.       To be a professor is often a lifelong tenure. What is really the justification for that?

This list of examples could go on.

An Exciting Hypothetical New World

In the age of the Internet and the Cloud, the availability of ubiquitous computers of various sizes and power it would be conceivable that:

1.       Each child and its parents can be educated wherever they are, whenever they wish whatever subject over the Cloud and Internet

2.       For any adult of any age anywhere in the world to learn any subject at any time at any level of depth over the Cloud and Internet.

3.       Self education by any child or individual anywhere, any subject, and anytime will be available

4.       Educational contents can be prepared and delivered by anyone, anywhere, at any time who wishes to do so

5.       A borderless global marketplace of education evolves. Such a marketplace would certainly help to reduce the price and cost of education.

What are some of the implications?

·         Many, e.g. traditional brick and mortar schools (including universities) are kind of obsolete.

·         Just imagine potentially one single educational entity could provide and deliver the educational content for any conceivable discipline for the whole world.

·         Why should not educational content from Mongolia be available to children in Paris?

Premise Of Education Reform

Too many people on this planet, especially in Western countries, are still not well educated. They do not understand well the principles and benefits of individual liberty and responsibility. They do little understand freedom of contract or free market economy.

Bread and games (panem et circenses) are still too common in our societies since before the Romans. Too many people may have resigned or are apathetic about education and its many benefits. Or do powerful, vested interests think it better that way to leave many people uneducated?

Primary Goals Of Education Reform

1.       Significantly reduce the role, control, and influence of government in education. More private than public education. Government should not be in the business of providing or delivering education.

2.       The role of government should be very limited to e.g. quality control, minimum standard curricula etc.

3.       We need more experimentation and trial and error to figure out the future of education. Government, in general, is not helpful.

4.       More personalized, individual education instead of mass education. E.g. more home schooling than public education.

5.       Less emphasis on traditional measurement and certification of educational aptitude.

6.       The traditional distinction between institutions like primary, secondary education, high school, community college, university etc. are outdated. There should be fluid educational providers of any kind.

7.       Education in a linear, sequential, and track like fashion is outdated. E.g. there ought to be more fluidity between generalization and specialization and between disciplines or subjects at any time in an individual’s life.

8.       The traditional distinction between teacher/professor and student is outdated. Potentially anybody can be a teacher and any student can be a teacher. Thus, role reversals ought to be the norm. Probably, we ought to aspire more to mutual teaching and learning at any age, mix of ages and backgrounds.

Other, Related Blog Posts By This Author

Here about high school curricula. Here, here about history as a critical subject of education.