A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students Are Still At Risk

Check out the new report published by the group Edin08 – whose goal is made education the center of political debate for the ‘08 election cycle. http://www.edin08.com/anationatrisk/

Disappointing reading but places the blame squarely where the biggest problem in education reform is located – Political will. And I don’t mean just by candidates but also by the public. I greatly admire the people who go into teaching – especially considering that the best of them can get much better paid and socially respected jobs elsewhere (society in effect takes advantage of their good will if you look at it from a market standpoint). Imagine the quality of teachers we would have in our schools if we as a society felt that education was as important as the other professions. Consider engineering. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm. The lowest median salaries as of 2006 was in agricultural engineers at $66K. The median salary for secondary teachers http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252031.htm is $47,740. But they get the summer off you say – well that is true of some but many have professional development that they do during the summer. Others work on curriculum for the upcoming school year, some just recover from the prior school year. Yeah – teaching can be a little wearing on you. Still the point to be made is that teacher salaries are not competitive. And one of the reforms suggested by “A Nation At Risk” was to extend the number school days and school hours.
Which would necessarily demand an increase in teacher pay. Well, I am ranting. The point is that if teacher salaries were competitive to other professional salaries, the quality of the teachers would necessarily rise. More importantly, the stature of teachers in the public eyes would rise. Positioning teachers to be able to better demand increase quality professional development. Also, the signal to young people would be that education matters. Why else would our society pay competitive salaries unless education doesn’t matter. Which raises the true of where we are. Students are very bright and catch onto the meaning behind things. Right now, our society clearly doesn’t think that education is as important as making money so why should students? Money alone won’t cure our ails in education but it should would improve the quality of people we can draw upon to improve the system.

A Few Great Books

The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Sciences of the Artificial – Herbert A. Simon

Cognitive Bias and War

A nice article shows that cognitive biases favor hawks. Of course, there may be good reasons for a hawk to be right. The point though is that they will be perceived more persuasive than the argument will merit.

Why Hawks Win by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, Jan/Feb 2007 Foreign Policy http://fparchive.ceip.org/story/cms.php?story_id=3660

In 30 years we may have a good model

I heard an interesting piece of information from Kristen L. Huff at the College Board during an AERA session. She said that there was a cognitive map made for density which took five years to construct. I’m thinking that we may eventually be able to develop cognitive models in 30 years of sufficient complexity to model 21st Century Skills. But we simply don’t have the time. ETS may believe it won’t take so long given their new “Cognitively Based Assessments of, for, and as Learning”. It gives me insight into the fact that we can’t wait 10 years to perfect this test – we just don’t have the time. I think we do need to have something ready within two-four years. Imperfect yes but a leap ahead.

What is measured

“A normal curve is representative of measures of human activity. It is not representative of human activity.”

A quote that I came up in reply to my friend Kersti while talking with me about statistics.

Purpose of Learning

The purpose of education is to help people understand and deliberately use learning as a tool in purposeful ways to expand and nurture our human potential.

generative
consciousness

Discussion with my friend and colleague Kersti Tyson

How To Change the World – Social Entrepreneurship – The Ashoka Foundaiton

Audra – A colleague of mine forwarded this initiative “Young Men at Risk: Transforming the Power of a Generation”  http://changemakers.net/en-us/forum/25 and it reminded me about the Ashoka Foundation: www.ashoka.org. Many of you already know about it but for those who don’t already know: Here is a little info:

“Vision
Ashoka envisions a world where Everyone is a Changemaker: a world that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges, and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and drive change.

Mission
Ashoka strives to shape a global, entrepreneurial, competitive citizen sector: one that allows social entrepreneurs to thrive and enables the world’s citizens to think and act as changemakers.”
A book about some of their work has the modest title “How to Change the World”
- a good read. http://www.amazon.com/How-Change-World-Social-Entrepreneurs/dp/0195138058 Website: http://www.howtochangetheworld.org/
References to Ashoka in book http://www.ashoka.org/node/966

What Ashoka has done in some of their initiatives is travel to regions and ask people who is doing work of significance to local communities. They collect index cards on the people and eventually focus in on those doing the best work. They then fund them to take some time from their regular work (and pays them a salary comparable to their existing wages) during that time to scale or more fully develop their project – this could be rural electrification or water, health services, etc. Really great targeted funding on a scale that has huge local impact.

P.S. Ashoka was the name of a great king in India who”unified the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BC, renouncing violence and dedicating his life to social welfare and economic development. For his creativity, global mindedness and tolerance, Ashoka is renowned as the earliest example of a social innovator. “

New Skills and Ways of Being – The Next Generation

The belief that we are at the limits of human evolution restrains our potential. Connie Yowell with the MacArthur Foundation is funding ethnographic studies of children’s use of technology to determine if new ways of thinking or being are developing. At least according to my understanding of what John Bransford mentioned from a trip they were both on to Singapore.

I can imagine one possible scenario where young children engage in a behavior that is unique to their generation. I recall tutoring at student who had to stop around eight simultaneous IM conversations he was engaged in at the same time. Was there something more occurring rather than just time sharing between verticle conversations? Was there a horizontal presence of community that existed within the students mind and co-constructed with their peers that could not be done live with a group of people. I recall meetings where adults simultaneously listen to what is being said as well as research knowledge regarding the conversation, send emails, and participate in the conversation (I am guilty? of this myself). But I think that something much more substantive may be occurring that with my experience I can’t grasp. It would interesting to think about what research would be necessary to demonstrate a qualitative difference in what young people engaged in their highly parallel IMs and what I or say a teacher does in our typical multi-tasking experiences.

And if there is something different, then how do we identify the productive nature of that activity (if there is) and in turn develop learning experiences that value that skill and encourage its development?

Socio-Cultural Evolution

“The Outsourced Brain“

It does raise that calculator issue – and challenges us to reconsider again what do I or we really need to know?

Persistent enmeshed computer/connection. I keep thinking about the wireless eyeglasses that I will someday (10yrs) replace my computer. Actually just thought of a new name for it – “google goggles” Of course, all your normal computer functionality would be available. Probably would still need keyboards given that socially we don’t accept everyone taking their notes using voice recognition. On the other hand, we could be annotating recordings of meetings for our future reference – video traces integrated into wikis, organizers. Imagine 3-D clouds of knowledge, projects, knowledge, etc. – SLOODLE on steroids.

New ways of offloading memory? Memory is aided by speed – we recall things based upon our varied connections – when we talked with people, where we were located, who is referenced by the article, what class we were talking, what paper we were writing. Again, imagine if you could rapidly scroll – along different branches of context to see the variety of attached papers with your notes – not sure what this type of navigation device would look like. Then how would we use the memory freeded up by this.

A genetic model for developing new human intellectual capabilities. Andrew Morozov put forth a great theory in our Foundation of Cog Psych class – that the mental capacities of people have evolved as the tools we have developed allowed us to offload more basic mentally demands. What new capacities will we develop to take advantage of the new functionality we can outsource? Just as people used to take adult capabilities and believed that development was just a linear development of those individual capabilities, perhaps we have projected backwards historically that our mental capacities (beyond procedural thinking arising from new knowledge) were like the old development theories – historically we had the same mental faculties but in a limited fashion. What if the evolution of human mental development was also along the genetic (Piaget / Vygotsky definition of genetic) lines that we take for granted in childhood today? If so, then what does that imply about what may evolve. Perhaps, Connie Yowell and the ethnographic studies MacArthur is funding will not just discovering new ways of working with knowledge and expression among children but also new mental capabilities that mark new genetic evolution in mental functioning. I still have this imagine of a student I came to tutor one day who had about a dozen Instant Message windows open at the same time and had to end conversations rapidly with them so we could begin. Perhaps it is more than just parsing of attention but a new way of integrating conversation or being in community?

Drue…

Blog Etiquette – developing my own

 

Next topic – Who can I put in my Blog? What can I say about them? How much permission do I need from them?….I find it interesting that I am having difficulty finding an answer to this question online. Yeah – found some help at about.com.

I get a sense now that many conversations that people have are of a semi-private or private nature. I feel hesitant to attribute things to individuals, yet I want to attribute to people their ideas, writing, etc. I often have really good conversations with people and get ideas from them that I probably will want to write about. Clearing it with them makes sense. Sometimes people have ideas that they don’t want to share – their are being incubated. I am reminded by an interview with Maya Angelou where she talks about how she incubates ideas first before she is able to talk about them.Seems like it is a good idea for me to start reading other blogs.