The White House proposals called the American Graduation Initiative (AGI) were dropped from the package of education spending that was folded into the health reconciliation bill that has now been passed by Congress and signed by the President. The education legislation, which moved the student loan program into federal control, was not debated in Congress. The AGI was dropped from the legislation during cost-cutting closed-door sessions where Democrats and Obama picked and chose where federal taxpayer education dollars would go.
I am convinced that the stoppage here of federal management of online courses is a lucky break for long term open learning. Not having the feds doling out dollars to set up infrastructures they approve will let network laws and unrestricted innovation emerge the global knowledge commons. — instead of messing it up big time as bureaucrats tend to do.
I realize there is disappointment in the open educational resources (OER) community over losing $500M for OER. Yet the excerpt below from the proposed AGI scares me about the future openness of online learning with the federal government doing what it describes. Won’t content be overseen in Washington? Who decides which community colleges distribute or use the courses? These are taxpayer dollars; would the courses be openly online? Why the departments of Labor and Defense?
Did the liberty of learning dodge a big “O”- shaped bullet here? What do you think?
. . . New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results.
The most equal opportunity for a student to be tested would be for that student to take the same test as everyone else, under equal conditions. Handschooling can accomplish exactly that by allowing each student in literally the whole world to take a specific test when it is convenient for that student using his or her individual device connected to the internet. Test-takers would be in different locations and circumstances, but they would be treated absolutely equally by the test as they interact with it online. A preppy in London, a student attending a “failing school” in Chicago, a slum kid in Mumbai, and a herder in Peru would be able to pass or fail the identical calculus test.
They will cheat! That is the knee jerk reaction to a global testing taken individually. Yet what is dismissed by the jerking knee is the kind of testing that would remove the quality of schools from the equation and allow universal uniform assessment of individual students. Because it is now assumed that cheating will happen unless there is human oversight, generally testing is done in person in a variety of locales, with hovering human monitors. The expense is huge, kids are tested by groups and classes, and equality is damaged. Cheating still happens in testing locations that are not perfectly monitored.
But it turns out that cheat-proof online testing might be very practical and far more foolproof than human live monitoring. Take the example of Professor Pritchard’s work in identifying homework cheaters. The use of computer algorithm monitoring and similar programed detection systems should/could naturally follow from the approach he has used, as described here from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Enter David E. Pritchard, a physics professor who teaches introductory courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (when he’s not in his laboratory devising new ways to use lasers to reveal the curious behavior of supercooled atoms) [as shown in the photo at left].
Mr. Pritchard did detective work on his students worthy of a CSI episode. Because he uses an online homework system in his courses, he realized he could add a detection system to look for unusual behavior patterns. If a student took less than a minute to answer each of several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” he wrote in a paper last month in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research. . . .
My six-year-old grand nephew is deeply into gorillas. He wants to know everything about them: how big they really are, how strong, what kind of noise they make. He begs for stories about gorillas, and spins stories about gorillas that he makes up for himself. His parents and grandparents give him books and toys along the gorilla theme, and tell him what they know on the subject. His teacher at school may even take the time to talk with him on his favorite subject: gorillas. Yet at school, he is unlikely to get to focus more than briefly, if at all, on his the subject that has captured his interest.
Learning is a major part of what kids quite naturally do. When my grand nephew is at school, he becomes a member of a class, not an individual engager of knowledge. His current gorilla obsession is necessarily curtailed.
I really think that even more transformationally wonderful for the future is the fact that the knowledge a youngster is learning is being placed bountifully in his hand. The captivating gorilla cupcake video above is an example of just how very much fun it is today to engage knowledge about gorillas. Below is text from an email I sent my grand nephew with some more gorilla knowledge to engage now, while that is the focus of his interest.
Big Brother will now never control the world because the internet has opened individual communication. Learning is entering a global golden age because the internet has opened individual engagement of knowledge. The new knowledge gorilla is one beautiful cupcake!
One gorilla that interested me is Goma. There are pictures of Goma here. Goma was the very first gorilla ever born in a zoo. She is now 50 years old. The pictures you will see of her were taken way back when I was in high school.
As the plot [of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugs] unfolds, Galt is acknowledged to be a creator and inventor who symbolizes the power of the individual capitalist. He serves as an idealistic counterpoint to the social and economic structure depicted in the novel. The depiction portrays a society based on oppressive bureaucratic functionaries and a culture that embraces the stifling mediocrity and egalitarianism of socialistic idealism. In this popular mass ideology, the industrialists of America were a metaphorical Atlas of Greek mythology, holding up the world, whom Galt convinces to “shrug,” by refusing to lend their productive genius to the regime any longer.
Jack and Jill Galt are individual youngsters who have shrugged off the oppressive bureaucratic functionaries and a culture that embraces the stifling mediocrity and egalitarianism of socialistic education.
Where is Galt’s Gulch for Jack and Jill?
In Atlas Shrugged, Galt’s Gulch was a hidden valley in Colorado where the great men and women of mind and action went to live when they abandon the increasingly slave-state inclinations of a decaying United States – to go on strike – thereby withdrawing the only thing supporting the parasites and looters. (Wikipedia)
For Jack and Jill, Galt’s Gulch is in a virtual place that they hold in their hand. It is the new place where communication, commerce, entertainment, and many other things are happening for individuals. The key word there is “individual.” When you interact with the virtual online world through your mobile device, there may be other individuals out there — BUT you are in full power over what you are doing. Mediocrity is not imposed. There is no limit to your pursuit of excellence.
Galt’s Gulch is where students go who refuse to let their productive genius be stunted by the education regime any longer. Jack and Jill Galt can read because they are handschooled.
NOTE: This essay was inspired by an article in today’s New York Times: “Judge Blocks Closing of 19 New York City Schools” — a sickening depiction of oppressive bureaucratic functionaries and a culture that embraces the stifling mediocrity, as Rand wrote. All it takes for kids in this picture — as for more privileged youngsters — to “Go Galt” is a mobile internet browser, which most of them have already. Trusting individual kids is the solution to failing education now that all they need to learn is in their hands. While mayors, the President, bureaucrats, and unions battle over school control, the individuals students in Galt Gulch will be learning to read, doing their physics, and mastering history that is unbiased by limiting standards.
With the announcement today, “We’ve set the news free,” Nature takes another big step toward being the dominant cluster of science knowledge within the network that forms the commons. By making all of the news pieces free, Nature is releasing nodes of current science into the complexity of emergent online knowledge. Network laws can then manage these nodes cognitively so they become part of relevant patterns of knowledge to study and learn online.
An example of what that means will be the trajectory of a NatureNews story from last week called “Scientists supersize quantum mechanics.” That story is already prominent, showing up as number three on the list of search returns for “quantum news” on Google. There is more: Because NatureNews is opening its full Archives, the quantum story will remain in the network of ideas for as long as it is not replaced by a more elucidating and/or current story. Eventually, the story will fade as it is replaced by more current reports on the subject it covers. Teachers and students can stay informed of the latest in many sciences by connecting to NatureNews RSS feeds.
Although they have set the news free, many underlying articles at Nature remain limited to paid subscribers. That will change because those articles, when they are locked away from the commons by subscriptions, are downgraded by not being able to participate in the network that forms the online knowledge commons.
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
