למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer deserves to be.

Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, they are capital equipment to be used by teachers to save time and labor. In assigning certain mechanizable functions to machines, the teacher emerges in his proper role as an indispensable human being. He may teach more students than heretofore — this is probably inevitable if the world-wide demand for education is to be satisfied — but he will do so in fewer hours and with fewer burdensome chores. (The Technology of Teaching, p. 69-70)

In a report published in February, Pearson suggests that AI could make learning “more personalised, flexible, inclusive and engaging”. Such systems do not replace teachers, but allow them to act as mentors rather than lecturers.

The job of teachers will definitely change with the digitization. Studies have already shown that algorithms used to customize leaning to individual pupils based on their progress and understanding can be more effective than a human teacher. While this may be a boon to school districts desperate to find qualified individuals to teach, it may also eventually reduce the role of classroom teacher to that of proctor or babysitter — or eliminate it altogether.

Even outside the AI community, there is a broad consensus that technological progress, and artificial intelligence in particular, will require big changes in the way education is delivered, just as the Industrial Revolution did in the 19th century.

His sole example of MOOCs, in which college professors (more likely adjunct staff are doing the actual work) assemble a collection of readings and videos for students to consume in a specific order, is certainly all about presenting data for the invisible student on the other side to absorb.

But is that “teaching”?

Maybe I’m just a traditionalist but I’d like to think that all of those professions, especially the art of teaching, will always require a human touch to do well.

I have concluded that the underlying philosophy of Canvas (and OEI in California) is to remove the information literacy requirement for online learning.

The Online Education Initiative (OEI) is a collaborative effort among California Community Colleges (CCCs) to ensure that significantly more students are able to complete their educational goals by increasing both access to and success in high-quality online courses.

It is a clear return to 4th grade "computerized learning", the kind that takes place in a lab. Pupils sit at stations, and the software guides them step-by-step by pressing as few buttons as possible. With visual and touch-screen interfaces, this is now even easier. Complete a small task, get instant feedback, press 'Next'.

The fact that such interfaces prevent branching, distributed, or complex learning is considered to be a feature, not a bug. All information is "chunked" for easy understanding and assessment.

With the development of private web spaces like Facebook and Google, companies came to control the interfaces, simplifying even further what we needed to know to use the tools, and pruning the content we could access easily.

As instructional designers remove more and more of our responsibility to construct these pathways ourselves, the "best practices" encourage computerized learning goals such as chunking, instant feedback, and tightly controlled pathways at the expense of discovery, integration and community.

We have successfully trained an entire generation not to think while using an electronic tool. We may no longer be able to expect them to do so for the sake of their education.

The use of predicitive analytics to design "personalised learning pathways" (what a euphemism!! – it couldn’t be LESS personalised!) removes any creativity from the learning process, shuts down opportunities for productive digression, and worst of all, takes the wonder (in both senses of the word) out of learning.

Recent efforts to “improve” online course “integrity” have led to various rubrics, standards, and evaluative tools, wielded by administrators and instructional improvement teams. These assess the “quality” of an online course. The ones I’ve seen, and the faculty I’ve talked to who have been subject to them, note that the rubrics clearly prefer the Online Class A model: content-based, simply laid out, clearly expressing not only expectations but overall outcomes. Complexity is seen as “cognitive overload” and is discouraged.

Although the teams and projects deny that the intention is to standardize online classes, to make them “cookie cutter”, that is the likely result.

Many, many students complain that their online classes are impersonal, that they feel like they’re just learning from a computer instead of a person (and in the case of instructors who adopt course cartridges, that is often true). Students come to believe that this is what an online class is – a list of tasks to be completed and graded, rather than a learning experience.

We are being told that the days of “cobbling” our own systems together are over, that we need to join the “community” of large initiatives designed to create more accountable and approvable online classes.

We must step down from our role as innovators and join the parade, marching together. We must realize that it is time to, in a word, simplify.

Do we wish to encourage that sort of simplification for our students, when employers have made it clear that what they want is workers who can actually learn? Are such industrial models appropriate in a post-industrial world?

I began to wonder why doctors so easily integrated new devices–either as early adopters or even “laggards”–into their daily encounters with patients while it has been a long slog with getting computers integrated seamlessly into daily lessons.

Any answer to the question has to take into consideration the differences between the practice of teaching and the practice of medicine. Teaching is a group process, one adult working with 15-30 students at a time while the latter is commonly one-to-one. Moreover, the age-graded school gives teachers located in self-contained classrooms a degree of autonomy; yet the structure also isolates them from colleagues. It is hard for teachers to collaborate within the school, much less the district level, and to become part of a culture where constant improvement is the norm, not the exception.

There is a very strange tendency in technology writing to take any successful business and view it as a universal acid. All of the commentators and tech media go on an obsessive hunt across every sector: THIS MUST APPLY EVERYWHERE!! is the mantra. So we get “Uber for [insert sector of your choice]” pieces everywhere. I guess they’re easy to write, and people seem to like reading them.

I believe there is someone out there who is on the verge of creating a sort of UberEd, and it is almost certainly not a university president or federal lawmaker. Instead, it’s an entrepreneur who grasps the importance of putting students first who stands to start making waves in higher education.

now every person with a computer can become a global code reviewer

If you know what you’re looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, inquiry is impossible. Put simply, if you’re a learner in a new discipline then you don’t know what it is you need to know. So it is very difficult to bypass institutions that are constructed to help you overcome this very problem.

getting a taxi is simple, getting an education is complex

In large part, what we’ve done is create systems that are designed to make teacher quality irrelevant. Curriculum specialists, sitting in offices at boards of education, design curricula that are “idiot proof,” spelling out in excruciating detail how the lessons should go. The idea, borrowed from Adam Smith, Henry Ford, and F. W. Taylor, is that if you create a smart system, you don’t need smart and dedicated teachers.

On day fifty-three of the school year, Ms. Jabbari joined all the other kindergarten teachers in the Chicago system in teaching the letter B to her students. The binder she used identified the section of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to which that day’s lesson plan corresponded, and provided step-by-step questions and conversation starters.

Script for Day: 053
TITLE: Reading and enjoying literature/words with “b”
TEXT: The Bath
LECTURE: Assemble students on the rug or reading area. . . . Give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. . . . Say, “Listen very quietly as I read the story.” . . . Say, “Think of other pictures that make the same sound as the sound bath begins with.”

The script Jabbari followed was twice as long as the book she was reading.

When she began her “literacy block” at 11:58 one Wednesday in May, she opened the textbook to Section 1, “Pets Are Special Animals.” Her mentor, veteran teacher Marie Buchanan, was sitting in. When Ms. Moffett got to a line about a boy mischievously drawing on a table, she playfully noted, “Just like some students in here.” Mrs. Buchanan frowned. “You don’t have to say that.” When Ms. Moffett turned to a page that suggested an art project related to the story and started passing out paper, Mrs. Buchanan commented: “You’re not going to have time to complete that.” After the lesson, Mrs. Buchanan pulled her aside. “You have to prepare for these lessons and closely follow your teacher’s guide. We’re going to do this again tomorrow, and you’re not going to wing it.”

I can’t measure learning, only the symbolic artifacts of learning.

When I look to society, I see an awful lot of people behaving as if they’ve learned nothing from history. So instead I hope that they learned what they needed, whether or not I was able to assess it.

But I like content!

Why do we diss content in favor of connections? I like connections, I learn from them, but only when I bring something to the table. What do I bring? What do my students bring? Understanding of, or questions about, content. Content is what we’ve read, seen, heard.

But what is the role of the facilitator/teacher/professor where we are using learning subjectives, where learning isn’t measured and where content is actually other people?

It is unlikely that students suddenly without a teacher would fight among themselves for control, however. Instead, they would likely seek another leader. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly, in committee meetings, classrooms, and local government. Many people do not want to inquire – they want to be told what to learn, what to think. When we open up the curriculum, they are lost and frustrated without enough guidance.

a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific. Ultimately, a reform that will make teaching systematic and effective.

Yet policymakers assume that micro- or macro-decisions driven by data will improve student achievement just like those productivity increases and profits major corporations accrue from using data to make decisions.

In assigning certain mechanizable functions to machines, the teacher emerges in his proper role as an indispensable human being.

Now the designers of computerized tutoring systems are beginning to make sensing and responding to emotions a key part of the process, and they’re finding that users learn more as a result.

Skilled human tutors likely arrived at these insights some time ago. Our computers are just now catching up to what good teachers have done forever: make students’ feelings part of the lesson.

But rather than fundamentally change school – rather than ask why so much of the job of teaching entails “burdensome chores” – education technology seems more likely to offload that drudgery to machines.

I’d love to hear far more discussion about “schooling” and far less about “learning.”

"I do not believe in the institutional structure of public schooling anymore," Elmore said, noting that his long-standing work at helping teachers and principals professionalize their practice is "palliative care for a dying institution." Elmore predicted "a progressive dissociation between learning and schooling."

His comments reflected his concerns that technology, and the networked learning that is emerging in the 21st century, is a key reason for the collapse of institutional schooling....

Anyone can teach! Who needs a degree. Just need to know how to make and post a video.

a) what should an education degree or a teaching certificate require when increasingly anyone with a connection can be a teacher of content, and, b) more importantly, what changes when the world begins to accept a definition of “teacher” as someone who knows “how to make and post a video”?

There are lots of people who I really believe would love to do away with the idea of schooling. And if they can maintain test scores and content consumption as the goal, they might just do it.

What bothered me the most was the following statement: "Educational videos on YouTube represent a return to the essence of what education should be." Putting it bluntly, THIS... is a load of crap. The essence of education cannot be distilled to watching videos - I don't care who makes them.

• האם משתמשים בטכנולוגיה רק מפני שהיא זמינה?
• האם הטכנולוגיה מאפשרת למורים ולתלמידים לעשות "דברים ישנים בדרכים ישנות"?
• האם הטכנולוגיה מאפשרת למורים ולתלמידים לעשות "דברים ישנים בדרכים חדשות"?
• האם הטכנולוגיה יוצרת חוויות לימודיות חדשות ושונות עבור התלמידים?