I'm not sure what you mean by "primary information path".

What does the model classroom or school day for a student in grade school look like for you?

The only caution I would make is in assuming that technology needs to be the way to get things done. Technology is process-based. Having processes means that someone has decided there is a single best way of doing things. I caution against falling into that trap where people are involved. Is there a general method that may work for many? Probably. But we should not ignore that we are talking about individuals here. The reason why big education fails is because it tries to treat every student the same: it uses the same inputs, measures using the same tests, etc.! If we want different results, we can't think in the same way.

I also point out that I don't agree with the idea of having a different teacher every time. Every individual has different teaching styles, mannerisms, etc., and these take time to adjust to. Especially in elementary education, children need a single stable source to look to. This helps not only with learning, but with discipline. I can't endorse the teaching by committee approach. Even personally, those have been the WORST educational experiences I've been associated with.

While having an A,B,C,D or E clicker does represent some feedback it's certainly a baby step in the direction of actually involving technology in education.

I do agree that human contact is important, but today's children are amazingly adept at interacting with technology, and the ones that aren't need to learn to keep up. With the technology we have, a room full of 30 people watching whichever teacher they happen to get present the material is not the most efficient way to do this. The teacher may have different delivery methods planned but how she adjusts this to match the needs of 30 different people is beyond me.

If we can develop programmatic instruction for the primary information path, then the teacher can actually spend their time with one-on-one interactions with the students.

yessir! . most of these business school grads just
want to do "drive-by" consulting, unloading a bunch
of advice and leaving. . just stirs up the stew and
fixes nothing -- distracts from fixes in progress!!! -- j
.

For literature and other languages, I've seen multiple-choice questions about different parts of a text. I don't think it's an effective way to teach students how to read or write; it's just the easiest way to measure their answers.

I've been following your and William Shipley's thread. Recently (around here, anyway) new technology has started to be implemented into schools. It's a system of remotes or "clickers" with one of them being assigned to every student. When a teacher gives an exam or quiz, the students press the A, B, C, D, or E button on the remotes. All the responses are automatically uploaded into a website where the results are gathered and analyzed immediately. The program tells you which questions which students missed and (if the teacher imputed the standard into the system before the quiz started), then they can know which piece of the lesson the kid isn't understanding. In that same class period, the teacher then has the option to re-teach or to pull those kids who need extra help to go over the lesson again in a different manner. A large amount of students and thousands of different pieces of data isn't necessary; it can also be done on a small scale. It's fast, inexpensive, and gives you the data you want--if data is what you seek. There are pros and cons to data-driven education, too.

On another note--particularly in the elementary grades, which is what I am addressing--I do believe a child needs to physically interact with a teacher. A video is one way to explain information, but in order to cover every kind of learning method, a person-to-person meeting can best facilitate that. A skilled teacher can check for understanding as she instructs (it can seem off-the-cuff, but someone who has planned well can have different delivery methods already pre-planned) and can change her method of delivery on the spot if she sees the students are missing something. Interacting with peers and learning how to communicate in different social settings with a diverse group of people is also valuable.

I agree that the advances in technology can and should be used to introduce efficiencies into education. My concerns are mainly in being able to provide quality education to as many students as possible. I think that for what would probably constitute the majority of students, a "most effective" lecture approach as you are suggesting would work. I believe that if one supplemented that with an alternate take on the material which was geared toward a specific learning type (and each student would need to be screened to identify their preferred learning method) you could then hit 90% or so. Then I think that there are some students who would require a more personalized approach via mentors, etc.

I'm sorry I was unclear, I'm glad you spurred me to look up the talk. I am intrigued at the idea of building the best possible lecture and showing it to all the kids rather than having 100,000 teachers do it off-the-cuff (or at least from notes).

Although, it's possible that based on some evaluation of individual student's learning styles and interests there might be a set of lectures that could be picked from.

I'm very interested in Khan Academy and how that develops. As you can guess, I don't think delivering lectures is what teachers should spend their time doing.

So here's the part that seemed to link to what you were after:

"So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class. This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments. The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer. The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer. Now, if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively."

That's pretty much what I thought: they had to first get a basic data set and then after an initial beta from the students, they could add material to help with specific test questions. It might be "instant" to the later students, but until there was a critical mass of incorrect answers there was nothing there but simply the notation of an incorrect answer.

As I have done some study into improved testing methods, one thing that stands out to me is that there are typically three different methods by which students acquire information: auditory, visual, or kinetic. A lecture format typically tends to appeal to the auditory learner, and (if accompanied by slides or demonstrations) to some degree to the visual learner. But the kinetic learner actually needs the hands-on practice right there to grasp things. To me, an effective delivery is going to incorporate all three.

My son uses Khan Academy for his mathematics study and it fits very nicely. It provides an animated lecture demonstrating the concepts just like a teacher would on a blackboard and then gives the students a chance to practice right there until they can answer five questions in a row correctly. For the hard sciences, this seems to be quite effective. I haven't seen how it approaches English or literature, so I can't comment on those yet.

My comments were from memory, the actual TED talk that I was remembering is:

http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_w...

I am intrigued by the idea of 'best lecture' that multimedia can give you. We have almost 70,000 elementary schools in the U.S. This means that every day as many as 100,000 teachers (more than one class per school). Go into the classroom and try to tech a lesson in a system that was developed when we couldn't afford books for all the students. Some will do well, some will not. Is this really the best way to do this?

I thought you mentioned earlier that they had to have tens of thousands of results to compare it to in order to do the grading. How can that be returned immediately until there is a base to build from?

(Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand how the process works)

It was real time. The point was to assure that the person following the lesson was able to master the material rather than simply score them.

Well said. The best companies I ever worked for were the ones where profit-sharing extended to every single person who worked there - not just management. Southwest Airlines (didn't work for them) is a current example and HP (used to work there) used to apply this method. In my entrepreneurship classes, they called it "skin in the game" and that's exactly what you're talking about: ownership and investment.

Interesting. Do you know how long it took to return the results? That was one thing I really liked about the adaptive tests: you knew as soon as the test was over how well you did and what you needed to study more of.

If you are depressed about "the future of learning" at the university level, then contact me about a refreshing difference. I will gladly exchange value for value at Florida Tech, the new Patrick Henry University. We are not state-supported and non-tenure-granting. A couple of times the subject of tenure came up at the Faculty Senate. Most of us, including me, shot that down. We came here to avoid that. We have a hard time competing at the graduate level with the world's best because most of us don't go to the government trough. We go to industry or to our own pockets (more often the case in my case) to fund our research for the most part. At the undergrad level, you will not likely find a better place for your teenager's education, especially if that teenager is more interested in engineering and science than in a "liberal arts" education like Hillsdale College.

well you do share the invention with the university :)

I stand corrected as I reread your post; my apologies.

I did not say O was bright, I asked if he is bright, or rather indoctrinated. We are fed so much about his Ivy League degree and how smart he is, but no proof of it being so, a facade. He also claims to be a "Constitutional lawyer", but is not even a lawyer, as that was taken away because he cannot even be truthful. He honestly could not tell how many states in the US, right at a news conference - that is NOT bright, especially for the President of the USA..

you insult my intelligence when you state the 0 is bright. the only thing bright about him is his teeth, notice how they are the fore front of him in every photo op he takes advantage of.

That's an astoundingly sensible combination. For the most part, universities keep the actual inventing and the business work segregated into separate faculties, so you're stuck in undergraduate school for up to 8 years if you want to qualify in both. My alma mater offers limited conjoint degrees, but nothing like this.

I was with this article until I got to Dr. Bass' comment
about this::: "recentered, more project-focused world."
as a graduate of that world, from a plant whose workforce
numbers about 4,300, it's the project orientation
which is hurting us.

the problem is that people consider the workplace
a "thing," and they mess with it using temporary
sessions called "projects." . what is needed is
ownership, rather than consultancy. . when you
stick around to see, touch and feel the results
of your "project," there is learning. . lots more
learning than they taught in school. . the people
teach you -- those whose lives you are influencing.

ownership or permanency is like accountability:::
you lie in the bed which you helped to make, and
see how it feels.
it could be good to polish your talents with the feedback
of intimate, direct, no-nonsense knowledge. -- j

p.s. but, of course, sticking around after the
"project" diminishes the "elite" status of the
consultant whom these colleges are trying
to create -- someone more than 50 miles from home,
with a briefcase. . and yet, people from the head
shed at a plant like ours acted like consultants,
as did the separate engineering division, the
separate safety department, the separate
industrial hygiene department, etc. . poor
internal harmony comes from these separations.
assignment to a production department cures
this -- including real supervision, with pay and
benefits controlled "jointly" -- one helluva challenge.
.

the college experience has NOT remained the same for the past 100 years in actuality (reality). In the past 40 it has not gone down hill but off of the cliff. My proof is right in front of you just look at what goes on in colleges; universities everyday. The student body is a product of government grade schools and there they did not learn anything and that is what they bring to what ever school of supposed higher learning. And the professors insult the term professor. Learning does not exist now so how can it suddenly at some point in the future start up again. don't let the trees get in you way while you looking for the forest.

How about elimination of government indoctrination centers (public education )and encouraging young people to figure out what to learn based on what they think they will need to thrive. It won't happen in my lifetime but I do regret wasted time in most of public grade and high schools. I learn more about history from Netflix and the hitler channel as they call it. I learn new technology from YouTube these days

There is the assumption that education is the goal of college. Their own survival may force change, but indoctrination, at all levels, has been the goal. The CFR made as much clear to Reagan when he wanted to drop the Dept. of Ed. Is that really likely to change? Did Obama become bright, or did he become further indoctrinated, that he was able to came out of an university without knowing how many states the US has?
We need more of what used to be called vocational education, not everyone needs years of college. However, the liberal arts courses still have value in helping students communicate and understand various groups of people and what they need done and why. A computer programer, must be able to communicate with an engineer or an accountant or they are worthless. We have too many CEOs who are so in love with their own indoctrination, that they cannot see beyond their own noses. I attended a college which included several mandatory interdisciplinary courses, where a an era or subject was studied from the subjects of science, math, art, and literature. I also has a professor who told students he could not give them knowledge, but he could show them how to find it for themselves.
.Maybe the market will cause change, but it is likely to still be a flawed change, with too may powers who want sheeple?