Intelligence is a process, not a fixed, gene-determined, thing. This process begins very early on, before we can even really see it, and we therefore often confuse these early, invisible stages with some sort of innate giftedness. Then we test kids and report the results as innate differences — this one is gifted, this one is not. This one has extra promise; that one does not. We send the “gifted” ones to good schools with small class sizes, better-trained teachers, better infrastructure, better relationships with parents, and higher expectations. We send the apparently-unpromising kids to under-funded, teach-to-test schools with minimal expectations.

And then we tell ourselves that we live in a meritocracy. Jennifer Senior’s piece helps expose that fallacy.

via The Myth of the Meritocracy – David Shenk.

In an effort to inspire K-12 students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, as well as careers in the field, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has formed a strategic alliance with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit dedicated to building interest in STEM-related education via innovative means.

The cornerstone of the alliance is a pilot program to teach robotics to K-12 students after school. The MIT Alumni Association has said it will leverage its members, many of whom are leaders in the international STEM community, and their extensive contacts in hopes of recruiting many of them as FIRST coaches, mentors, volunteers, and sponsors.

via MIT and FIRST Ally To Encourage STEM Education Careers — Campus Technology.

Dang it, I wish I was 5 years old again!

“…the new rules require those who teach grades 5-12 to earn baccalaureate degrees in the subjects they teach. This creates a better balance in teacher preparatory programs between coursework on how to teach and subject-specific training on what they will teach.

Dr. James Fraser, senior vice president for programs for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and professor of History and Education at New York University, said, “The proposal to require every future secondary school teacher in Indiana to complete a full discipline-specific arts and sciences major makes very good sense. A solid major in the discipline to be taught is an essential minimum to truly knowing the content one aspires to teach.”

via The Two Million Minutes Blog: Indiana Makes Bold Move in Teacher Certification and Licensing.

This makes me want to move to Indianapolis!  While school systems in other countries, especially India, China, Singapore, Korea, etc, have made huge strides with rigorous academic standards and high proficiency, I think the place the American education system can create the most value is by tightly binding concepts to real world application.  I think this is another variation on the way some universities hire professors with industry experience and encourage industrial-academic cooperation.

Dry. Difficult. Irrelevant. That’s how students in CS39N described computer science CS and programming BEFORE they took the introductory course.

Fun. Easy to learn. Can relate to it. That’s what they were saying eight weeks into the class.

It’s music to the ears of Dan Garcia, Brian Harvey, Colleen Lewis B.S.’05 EECS and George Wang, who are on a mission to establish a new introductory computing course at Berkeley that will alter the way young people perceive the field. Called “The Beauty and Joy of Computing,” the two-unit freshman/sophomore seminar teaches non-majors basic programming skills while exploring big picture topics such as abstraction, world-changing applications and the social implications of computing. The course is supported by a $50,000 grant from Lockheed Martin.

“Beauty, joy, passion and awe—all of us in computer science see and feel these things in computing,” says Garcia, an EECS lecturer. “But we’re making a terrible first impression. Traditional introductory courses are syntax heavy, and students struggle as they slog through the details of Java programming. Where’s the joy and creativity in that?”

via Oh! The Beauty and Joy of Computing — UC Berkeley College of Engineering.

Here is what I like to think: that Charles Ives wrote that piece as a lesson for me and people like me. His ego was such that he showed how good he was not by dazzling us with a complexity that creates distance and separates him from us, but with clarity that says, “You too can do this. It is accessible, within your grasp.” He exercised the power of his position through generosity and teaching, not through authoritarian behavior that obfuscated any path that might connect him and those who aspired to be like him.

Four questions that hopefully tie this back to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek context:

1. How aware do you think most people are of what they are capable of?
2. How aware are you of your own potential? Really?
3. Is there any gift your management or colleagues can give you that is more valuable than what Charles Ives gave me—i.e., help you to realize that your potential is far beyond what you had initially imagined?
4. Consequently, is there any greater responsibility for you as a manager than to make that gift to your colleagues and employees, and make doing so a cornerstone of your organization’s culture?

These are questions none of us can leave unanswered.

via Don’t Set the Bar Too Low – BusinessWeek.

Imagine a teacher who simply decides to focus exclusively on getting extremely good at explaining the problems in one particular chapter of a popular textbook. Let’s say that they develop movies and games and anecdotes and all sorts of stuff to make the problems in that one chapter just totally come to life. 10 years ago there was no market for that. Today, there are whiffs of a market. 10 years from now it will be really obvious that there’s a market. And that teacher will create a great livelihood by simply getting incredibly good at being able to teach a micr0-chunk of content and then scaling that teaching across millions of people.But now here’s where it gets really fun. If one teacher can support himself or herself teaching the problems out of one chapter of one textbook then it’s easy to imagine thousands of teachers doing the same thing. And now as a student it gets really good. Because for every subject/textbook chapter, etc. you have someone who is world-class available to teach you. It would be like going to school and having a teacher in every subject who’s as knowledgable and passionate as Al Gore is teaching about climate change or Richard Feynman is explaining physics.

via A Manifesto for EduChange on the Eve of Hacking Education | The eduFire Blog.

Jon Bischke at Edufire is doing and writing some amazing things.  He’s someone I’d love to have lunch or drinks with the next time I’m in San Francisco (Jon, if  you’re reading, it’s on me!).  Best of luck to a guy who’s changing the world.

“That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.”

via Op-Ed Columnist – The New Untouchables – NYTimes.com.

That was the appeal of the trading card game model.  It’s great as a business because you can offer people exactly as much engagement as they want or can afford (with online, there are even ways to engage players that don’t have or want to spend money).  But it’s also a great medium for education.  Aside from the obvious approach we’re taking of putting science heroes on the cards with facts and blurbs about their lives, actually playing the game teaches math and critical thinking skills.

A recent article called “Why Dumb Toys Make Kids Smarter” told a story about just that point.  The author Po Bronson’s wife said while his son was small that he wouldn’t be allowed to play violent video games or Pokemon.  They stuck to that pretty well until his friends started playing and he got hopelessly pulled into it.  The parents were still reluctant until he learned showed fast math skills from calculating damage and resistance and improved reading skills to find out what’s on the cards.  Then, just as quickly as he got into it, he dropped Pokemon as soon as he found about sports a few years later.  The parents were originally worried about their son getting obsessed with a game, but eventually found out that it’s in kids’ nature to be obsessed.

The only problem I have with the article is the title.  The dumb/smart contrast in the title is nice, but the author never defines “dumb” toys.  I kept looking for the meaning, but had to figure out that “dumb” was a euphemism for non-educational.  Dumb in contrast to feel-good toys like Baby Einstein.  Let’s stop this tendency.  In order for something to be called educational, it should be engaging, reward practicing, provide feedback, and teach something.  Pokemon fit the bill, video games fit the bill, and let’s hope GeekStack does too.

Flat World is set to announce on Thursday that over 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges are going to be using their digital, DRM-free textbooks in the Fall semester, up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the Spring.

Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. At an average cost of $100, textbooks command the highest cover prices in publishing, outside of only some art and coffee table books. Demand is artificially inelastic as students are indentured to cost servitude at the whim of college professors who blithely assign titles a student must own if he or she hopes to do well in a given course. Now, multiply that by 4,5, or even 6 courses per semester and you are talking big bucks.

By comparison, Flatworld has a pricing scheme that starts at zero for online access via a browser and $20 for a PDF, which they believe will be the most popular format. Printed versions of their textbooks cost up to $60.

Perhaps best of all: textbooks are available a la carte, per chapter.

via Open Source Textbook Company Now BMOC At 400 Colleges | Epicenter | Wired.com.

I believe education and health care are the two industries with the most inefficiency to unleash.  There’s such a wasteful value capture by the incumbents, but health care is so highly regulated that it’s unlikely to get more efficient any time soon.  The educational-industrial complex is much more open (who thought those words would ever be uttered) and it will get attacked from above by things like Flatworld and from below by things like GeekStack.  As people are more motivated to learn and have cheaper, more plentiful resources for learning, we’ll see a big change in the way people value and consume education.

Indian Math Online is a web-based learning system developed with the principles of mathematics as practiced throughout the education system in India.

Well, like OHSU, the official blurb leaves something to be desired (unless you’re already familiar with the Indian educational system, in which case this is ’nuff said).  The New York Times explained IMO a little more clearly:

The site’s curriculum is based on some key differences between math education in India and the United States, Mr. Compton said. Math homework in India consists of math problems that students work through, as opposed to the United States, where homework is heavy on reading about math topics in a textbook. Math teachers in India have college or graduate degrees in the topic…

Indian Math Online gives students a diagnostic test for their grade level and then breaks down the results by topic area, such as factors or prime numbers. It sends parents a report showing the topics in which their children are strong and weak and sends students learning modules full of practice problems. It will soon add online chat and live tutoring from math teachers in India for an extra fee.

By testing specific subject areas, Indian Math Online picks up weaknesses that a typical school test would miss…

I haven’t used it yet (my older daughter just turned 3 and the site starts at 1st grade) but I know from 2MM that Bob Compton cares about education and has seen a better way.  I already had one eye on him, now I have two

I think that just as marketing is moving from mass to personal, education will make a similar shift over the next couple of decades.  Pre-Internet, anyone wealthy enough to hire private tutors, pay private or boarding school tuition, and live in the best school districts could give their kids a good education.  With projects like Indian Math Online, Wikipedia, GeekStack (of course), and others that I hope to uncover and partner with over time, the limiting factor won’t be money but interest.  If a parent or child (or adult, let’s not discriminate!) wants to educate themself, I want them to be able to cheaply and easily be able to do so.

So thank you Bob Compton!

UPDATE:  After rereading the NYT article and looking at the IMO site, I think the value is not necessarily in the Indian method of teaching, but rather in the customized, personalized lessons with fine-grained feedback.  This allows deliberate practice, something that is hard to get in a mass produced, high student-teacher ratio education system.  That is a lot more important than whether it is Indian, Chinese, Brazillian, or Russian.