Handschooling is the individual engagement of knowledge

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Posted on 25th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Schools we now have

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It is fascinating to watch educators who blithely ignore the emergence of individual control of learning as it is empowered by mobile devices. In the report below from Associated Press, religious leaders in Iran have imposed restrictions on teaching by revising course content and eliminating courses at universities. The boy in the picture above is connecting to websites of his own choosing from anywhere on earth.

So far, the fact that they do not all have mobiles that browse the web is the major reason every kid on earth is not yet accessing knowledge the way the boy is. That is changing fast. Governments, such as China, also still have some capacity to block and censor the web.

Over the next few years, which do you think will choose what a student learns: 1. The mobile-owning student with individual direct access to open knowledge online? OR 2. The educators who shape the curricula at universities and attempt to block internet content they disapprove? Iranian Abolfazl Hassani apparently thinks it will be the educators who control what a student studies:

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran has imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings, state radio reported Sunday.

The list includes law, philosophy, management, psychology, political science and the two subjects that appear to cause the most concern among Iran’s conservative leadership — women’s studies and human rights.

“The content of the current courses in the 12 subjects is not in harmony with religious fundamentals and they are based on Western schools of thought,” senior education official Abolfazl Hassani told state radio.

Hassani said the restrictions prevent universities from opening new departments in these subjects. The government will also revise the content of current programs by up to 70 percent over the next few years, he said.

Fourth graders stuck with print version of inaccurate history

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Posted on 20th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Schools we now have

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The Washington Post reports today that:

A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the conflict.

The WP article goes on to discuss the controversy the textbook’s questionable “facts” about black soldiers in the Civil War. As is a widespread habit, the report has no hesitancy to assign fault for the error — at least by indirect implication — on the internet, as the reader is told:

The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Two ways online resources would solve and prevent the fourth graders being stuck with inaccurate history in the expensive textbook issued to them by their school.

First, if young Virginians using an online textbook it could be corrected quickly and cheaply.

Second, online resources would present not just the view of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In this instance, as in most in my view, the Wikipedians have done a far better job than the textbook publisher of setting out the facts:

African Americans in the Confederate Army

“Nearly 40% of the Confederacy’s population were unfree. the work required to sustain the same society during war naturally fell disproportionately on black shoulders as well. By drawing so many white men into the army, indeed, the war multiplied the importance of the black work force.”[20] Even Georgia’s Governor Joseph E. Brown noted that “the country and the army are mainly dependent upon slave labor for support.”[21] Slave labor was used in a wide variety of support roles, from infrastructure and mining, to teamster and medical roles such as hospital attendants and nurses.[22]

The idea of arming slaves for use as soldiers was speculated on from the onset of the war, but not seriously considered by Davis or others in his administration.[23] Though an acrimonious and controversial debate was raised by a letter from Patrick Cleburne[24] urging the Confederacy to raise black soldiers by offering emancipation, it wouldn’t be until Robert E. Lee wrote the Confederate Congress urging them that the idea would take serious traction. On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed General Order 14, and President Davis signed the order into law. The order was issued March 23, but only a few African American companies were raised. Two companies were armed and drilled in the streets of Richmond, Virginia, shortly before the besieged southern capital fell. Several African American soldiers, free and enslaved, served with the Confederate Army during the war, but the Confederate Government failed to recognize their contributions until this late time.

Nanny standards creep

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Posted on 13th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Nurture | Testing and assessment

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Two articles featured this morning in The Chronicle of Higher Education are about the creeping of government nanny standards into colleges.

The first article is not open to general readers, but you can get the general idea from its title: “In Return for Federal Dollars, Obama Demands Results From Colleges.”

The second article is open to all readers. Here is some flavor:

Responding to what they call unfair scrutiny from state and federal regulators, representatives from online colleges discussed a self-imposed quality-assurance framework at today’s Presidents’ Forum in Washington, convened by Excelsior College.

But state officials said they are still concerned that self-imposed standards are not good enough and that online programs are not consistent in providing students with high-quality education. . . .

As the internet rapidly matures in coming months and years, these nanny standards form yet more schooling firewalls for the delivery of open learning from the internet. These nanny-creep-firewalls will undermine educational effectiveness for both the colleges who get stuck with them and the governments that demand them.

The most recent post on this blog describes how the new HTML.5 will facilitate delivery of study materials conforming to what a student is ready to learn. This individual assessment of what to learn next is based on at what level of the subject the student has already engaged in previous websites. This fundamental new way to set a standard for what to study next is totally separate from the perceived lockstep standards of either the college or the government. The assessment HTML.5 will generate totally accommodates the learner.

The day is coming when standard setting nannies will need to prove their relevance in the new venue of online response to a student’s level of inquiry. It seems sort of silly for a nanny standard to test a student on algebra in her first college year, when the internet is sending her more basic math knowledge based on her past visits online. Or really silly to give the same algebra test to a student in her class who is exploring calculus and trigonometry based on HTML.5 selected resources where he is spending time.

Serving a pupil what to learn next

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Posted on 11th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Testing and assessment

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Although couched in negative context that spook privacy fears, kudos to the New York Times for putting a HUGE new step toward open learning (though learning is not mentioned) on its front page today. Here from the article is the gist of what the new HTML.5 that is the subject of the article does:

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data. That could include a user’s location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

Let’s change the the above quoted paragraph to get a look at what the new Web language can mean for a student when she goes online to learn some more about a subject, say Egyptian history:

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, history expert websites and Egyptology museums could, experts say, see weeks or even months of study data for the student visiting their webpage. That could include a user’s previous pages visited about Egypt, time spent on such pages and whether the student had clicked there on simple or challenging links, blogs on Egypt she has bookmarked, tests and her scores for previous online assessment, other related e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

For education, this can mean that very different webpages about Egyptian history will respond to individual students — based on what they have looked at in the past. A second-grader’s data would tell the search process that her recent visit was to a childlike tutorial on pyramids. A high school student’s data would include a previous visit to the Metropolitan and British museums’ collections on Egyptology. Today, a Google search for “Egyptian history” would return the same list of recommended websites, in the same order, to both students. With HTML.5, a Google search will return a list of simpler websites to the second-grader and more enriched and advanced Egyptology online material for the high school student.

Quoting again from today’s New York Times article:

“It’s going to change everything about the Internet and the way we use it today,” said James Cox, 27, a freelance consultant and software developer at Smokeclouds, a New York City start-up company. “It’s not just HTML 5. It’s the new Web.”

For education, HTML.5 means serving a pupil what to learn next. This very powerful individualization of dynamic knowledge cannot be experienced without online access. A mobile internet browser will put the new HTML.5 Web into a student’s hands.

Fix the schools? “We need to help Daisy”

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Posted on 10th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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A Washington Post Opinion piece this morning makes two things plain: the leaders of massive failing USA public schools have no new ideas, and any kid can tell you what is really needed.

This WaPo featured article is actually titled: “How to fix our schools,” and signed by the top individuals running the biggest districts where 2.5 million children attend and school failures are rampant. We are getting here, a “manifesto” from the heads of school districts in New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and others.

If you are the parent of young children whose schooling will play out over the next decade, how could you read this article and fail be crushed by what it means for your kids? There is nothing new suggested. What is suggested has been tried and proven virtually impossible to accomplish. The theme is we need to get rid of bad teachers and attract good teachers. There is no whisper of blame for the bureaucratic and vested interests who control the schools (and control the jobs of the authors of the article).

The video interview embedded above of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the D.C. Public School system, accompanies the article. Extremely revealing, in the interview at 3.40, is her description of taking her daughters, ages 8 and 11, to see the “Waiting for Superman” movie about American public schools. Rhee says that after seeing the movie — which features five students combatting problems with public schools — the Rhee daughters reacted by worrying about the specific kids, not the system. They kept saying, their mother reports: “What are we going to do about Daisy? Can somebody help Daisy?” Rhee tried, she goes on to say, to explain to her daughters that each individual child in the movie represents millions of real kids. How does that answer her daughter’s question?

Out of the mouths of babes: “Why not help Daisy?”

The theme of this blog is to advocate that Daisy take schooling into her own hands. Here is how to help Daisy right now:

1. Get her a mobile browser that is her own device and that has 24/7 wireless connectivity to the internet. A laptop, tablet, or smart phone accomplish this step.

2. Give her some assistance on learning how to use the open online websites and networks to learn real knowledge. Force her school to let her use her mobile as she wishes at school, as long as it is not disruptive.

These two steps are something we could actually accomplish very quickly and cheaply for millions of kids — while those power people at the schools go around the teachers-need-to-be-better circle once again. It is even possible that the pressure of having students able to learn using sources outside of school may actually pressure the education establishment into making real changes.