CourseSmart and Dumbing Down Teaching

I had to wince to make it through this article and visibly groaned when I read this:

Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading – NYTimes: “CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.

In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia’s, are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind.

Eventually, the data will flow back to the publishers, to help prepare new editions.”

As a teacher, I definitely understand the well meaning intention behind something like CourseSmart. I use Khan Academy a great deal with my 7th grade students for similar intentions.

However, the reason I use Khan for reinforcing math skills we’re discussing or for enrichment is to increase a student’s “number sense” and basic quantitative reasoning skills. We have conversations about their work on Khan, we do track progress a little (though it’s not used as the basis for a grade) and I am able to see where a particular student might be struggling, bored, competent or proficient on certain math skills that we’re covering. It’s a handy tool just like worksheets or pencil and paper. In the end, my job as a teacher is to converse with each student and see where they are in their math work on an individual basis. Khan along with many other tools helps me do that more authentically. I don’t “helicopter” students but want them to realize that they can take charge of their own learning for learning’s wonderful sake.

Khan, Code Academy, iTunes U, Coursera etc have made me a much better teacher over the last three years because I fundamentally believe that conversation (meaning more than verbal but conversation in the truest sense of the word possible) with an individual student is still the best test.

Nonetheless, what CourseSmart is doing from a teaching point of view is taking something like reading and making it into a quantitative model of “engagement.” Rather than a student being able to engage with material that suits them best, they’re being pigeon holed into an algorithmic expectation of highlighting and note taking in a way that up-ends the teaching process. Services like CourseMart are yet another example that boxed one-size fits all education at any level does not work.

Plus, the connection to corporate edu is so disturbing. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have become the Facebook and Google of education with their takeover of the education cloud.

Trying to Fix What Is Not Broken

Sad and true across the landscape of education (public and private)…

“Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’” – Washington Post: “My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom.

Links and the Persistance of Memories

Doc Searls riffing off of Dave Winer’s post about the history of podcasts here…

Doc Searls Weblog · Why durable links matter: “We can find these historic details because links have at least a provisional permanence to them. They are, literally, paths to locations. Thanks to those, we can document the history we make, and learn from it as well.”

As usual, Searls says some incredibly important things (and gives some great links such as Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost) in a small space.

However, as a middle school teacher I constantly try to reinforce the idea of not just “portfolio spaces” (each of our middle schoolers has a blog that they get to design, set up, create etc) and why links on blogs and personal spaces are so important to the health of the web. It’s a difficult concept for anyone to understand. Why worry about links to things when we have Google for information, Facebook for social, Instagram for pictures and Spotify/YouTube for music?

Doc points out the best reason possible… permanence. The “HT” part of HTML and HTTP are important signals as to how and why the web exists. To be able to look back and learn or reflect on information that we create as we encounter this new digital landscape is so important.

For example, I didn’t know Allen Stern personally but he was a rather important figure when I started to get involved in blogging and what has become the social web. His blog CenterNetworks was a constant source of both information and traffic for my own marketing blog (CostPerNews) at the time. I was saddened to learn of his death late last night and went on a trip down memory lane to see what I could find from my own linking to Allen. Sadly, most of it has eroded by my own actions over time. I’ve started blogs and either sold them or abandoned them. I had to rely on the wonderful Archive.org WayBackMachine. However, I wish I still had that content that I produced by linking to his work or thinking on what he thought up first.

Instead, I’ve posted in walled gardens that cease to exist or are inaccessible to the outside web. I’m more guilty than anyone for relying on services like Twitter or Facebook to deliver content when I should be posting info, ideas, pictures etc on this space and then letting those services aggregate as needed.

So, learn from my mistakes.

Create your own blog. Live on that blog and let other services slurp your content in as you intend.

Create a real and lasting digital footprint.

Leave a legacy so that your kids’ kids can read your portfolio or your blog just as they can read the paper versions (if you please).

Create a healthier web.

R.I.P. Allen.

Skycons and HTML 5

Pretty awesome…

Forecast: “Eventually, it dawned on us that, given the animations we had elsewhere in the app, the Climacons simply felt too flat, too static; we therefore set about making our own set of animated weather icons that felt more alive—but not so much so that they distract—which are the icons you now see on Forecast.

We are calling them Skycons, and they are now open source on GitHub.”

Nifty to see HTML 5 implementations really gaining traction in all sorts of ways that wasn’t possible just a few years ago. This and things like WebRTC, the future is bright for the web outside walled gardens of Facebook et al.

BTW, if you haven’t checked out Forecast.io you really should.

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

Zoinks…

Andrew Weissmann: FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power.: “Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (‘the chat feature in Scrabble’) to Gmail and Google Voice. ‘Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,’ he said.”

Forecast for the Web

Dark Sky is one of my favorite iOS apps and a recommendation I always make for people to check out when they ask what to put on their iPhone.

However, now that I’ve made the move over to Android, I’ve been missing the beauty and simplicity of the great weather app. So, I was excited to see that the makers of Dark Sky went to the web and developed Forecast.

It’s pretty stunning and best of all it works on the web. Which means it works fine on my Nexus 4, my Nexus 7, my Chromebook or my Macbook.

Between that and sites like Feedbin for RSS reading (currently testing out), I’m excited to see developers moving back to platform-agnostic development of great platforms on the web.

Rush’s Favorite Apple RSS Feeds

Sounds like someone likes their RSS reader. Based on his RSS subscriptions, it looks like Limbaugh and I are at least reading a number of the same Apple-related feeds.

Never thought I’d have more in common with Rush than Google.

El Rushbo’s Favorite Apple Tech Blogs – The Rush Limbaugh Show: “Rosie in Lake Havasu, I went to my RSS reader and this is really tough because I’ve never mentioned any of these before. I can’t mention them all, but since you said Apple, that helps narrow it down. In no particular order, here they are: iMore.com. That’s run by a guy named Rene Ritchie. I think he’s out of Canada, but this site, in addition to keeping you up-to-speed on everything happening with Apple, will offer you excellent tips on using Apple products, both the mobile and desktop. MacDailyNews.com is also fabulous. AppleInsider.com is great. World of Apple is okay. There are a couple of others that are not specifically Apple, but they are Apple centric. They cover a lot more than that. One of them is called loopinsight.com and the other’s daringfireball.com. We’ll link to all of these at RushLimbaugh.com on our website. Rosie, if you weren’t able to write them all down, they will be on our website. You’ll be able to find them all. But there are tons of them. I mean, they’re all over the place out there. One of them, cultofmac.com, they’ve got people on that one, very snarky who rip Apple to shreds at the same time. So if you’re interested in that, if you want people who do that too, then that’s a site that you might want to check out now and then.”

Spoken like a true web geek.