למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Republican Party of Texas (RPT) Communications Director Chris Elam said the “critical thinking skills” language made it into the platform by mistake.

the plank should not have included "critical thinking skills" after "values clarification". ... It was not the intent of the subcommittee to present a plank that would have indicated that the RPT in any way opposed the development of critical thinking skills.

This is a song... you know, they're all songs, right? What are you gonna do? One song to the next, that's it folks. Don't look for anything else.

Lately I have seen so many variations on sites to make quizzes, flashcards, and sticky notes, I am beginning to feel guilty even sharing them. It’s almost as bad as passing out printable worksheets over and over and over. I don’t want any teacher to think that “integrating technology” means nothing more than using an online quiz or flashcards for assessment or practice. Yes, these tools have a place (everyone needs to start somewhere), but they are no closer to harnessing the true power of technology than tying a horse to pull your car.

I am on a mission to find more easy-to-use tools that go “Ooooooo” and are not simply electronic versions of what I did in school decades ago.

TED -- in the form it is presented online to the masses -- is not about doing. It is about watching. Listening. Consuming. Maybe leaving a comment or sharing a link to improve your TEDCred score. Yes, there is a wealth of interesting information and lots to think about. Personally, I find many of the lectures to be inspired. But we shouldn't confuse an inspiring lecture and provocative ideas with "learning".

And much of what we have called "lessons" over the decades really aren't lessons at all -- they are consumables. They are short narratives consumed by students who are then asked to fill in bubbles that demonstrate that the student either was paying a modicum of attention or that the student has good natural deductive skills in parsing the quiz-maker's craft.

Let's consider the things that TED Ed asks the learner to do: watch a video, take a multiple-choice quiz, write brief constructed responses, and read through a bibliography. If I took the name TED out of this scenario, I would suggest that many educators would say that this format is exactly the type of traditional assessment that project-based, inquiry-driven, personalized learning is at odds with.

Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.

Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, "only get us so far," said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, "we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments" such as the biosensors.

Still, if the technology proves reliable, it may in the future be used to assess teachers, Robinson acknowledged. "It's hard for one to say what people may, at some point, decide to do with this," she said.

These bracelets, as I understand it, would be worn by students to measure how engaged they are, how bored they are, how they respond to their teachers. If they are bored, it won’t look good for the teacher. If students who show a high level of engagement, the teacher will get credit. The teachers too will wear the bracelet, to find out how engaged or bored they are. If this technology works, it will provide a foolproof tool for teacher evaluation. Or that’s the idea behind it.

I’m sorry. I think this is madness. Is there a mad scientist or psychologist advising the Gates Foundation? ...

This stuff crosses the line from legitimate research to investing in technologies to control and manipulate people by monitoring their emotions.

One thing that’s been very clear in working with our schools this year is that they just love their data. Data, data, and more data.

An increasing amount of the precious little time available outside of actual teaching seems to be taken up with organizing and analyzing data on the kids. And to facilitate all that organizing and analyzing, our schools have adopted (or in a few cases, have been forced to adopt) the concept of “professional learning communities".

Much of the focus of their meeting seems to be not on learning (professional or otherwise), or collaborating, or on forming communities, but on building “common assessments”, a phrase that boils down to everyone teaching a particular grade level or course giving the same tests to their kids at the same time.

The better to gather more data with – a vicious and never-ending circle.

What was most evident to me was the driving force behind all of the great stuff being developed: DATA. In this world of monetizing education data is King. It is what business understands.

Now before everyone gets their backs up, let us consider another possibility. Let us consider that maybe the merging of the mantras of education and business are not working out together. Maybe “Content is King” merged with “Data is King” does not add up to a learned individual. Maybe the focus on content, so that education can be easily assessed by Data is really the wrong thing that we should be analyzing. Maybe, how we teach, is a much more important element in learning than what we teach. Maybe the data is totally correct about what it is assessing, but what it is assessing is not what we should be looking at.

The point is that the right questions and conclusions need to be applied to the data.

They believe that we need Data to analyze, and adjust, so that we may move forward.

... it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is.

Claims about the power of new electronic devices to “revolutionize” schooling are a dime a dozen. Yet, if they are nearly worthless, why have smart people said them over and over again?

There are far more electronic devices in schools than when Seymour Papert wrote in 1984. Students use cell phones, personal computers, and tablets at home and in school. Ditto for teachers. Classrooms have been equipped with interactive whiteboards. So why is Arne Duncan calling for a “fundamental re-thinking of how our schools function?”

The reason is that while there is much hardware and software in classrooms, how teachers teach and students learn have remained remarkably stable over the decades.

What technology enthusiasts, however, forget, neglect, stumble over - pick a verb - are the multiple purposes of tax-supported schools in a democracy. They and many others futurists err - my choice of the verb - in equating access to information with becoming educated. Even worse, these very smart people ignore the crucial and historical purposes public schools have served in a democracy.

Tax-supported public schools have been and are social, political, and moral institutions whose job is to help children and youth acquire multiple literacies, enter the labor market well prepared, vote, serve on juries, contribute to their communities, think for themselves, and live full and worthwhile lives.

When I first learned about the site, I eagerly e-mailed it around, saying it could be a useful tool. But now all of sudden it's supposed to be reforming education?

When KA was just a YouTube channel with several hundred videos, I didn’t mind. There are plenty of other teachers putting their lessons on the web, too. It wasn’t until there was misguided national attention to propel KA as the “future of learning” that I decided to speak up.

The point of my post is to critique Khan’s misconceptions about teaching and learning, not about actual videos (though it is hard to separate the two). It’s rather embarrassing that Google, Gates, and O’Sullivan are pumping millions of dollars to someone who doesn’t know anything about how people learn.

Technology is doing to education what it's done to countless other industries: disrupting it…. Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it's moving to a global, interdisciplinary model.

To go from making videos for your cousins to promoting a new model for education in a few short years is amazing.

But it's also the best thing that can happen to this space. It needs more smart people who care.