A New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at the College Level →

Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

But there are obvious downsides. Click through to read more. 

Warning: This is a New York Times link. I normally have a policy against posting any content from the NYT because of their poorly implemented, broken paywall and overly restrictive copyright policies on people who share their work online. 

"Elias Aboujaoude, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, notes that our ability tailor the Internet experience to our every need is making us more narcissistic. He observes, “This shift from e- to i- in prefixing Internet URLs and naming electronic gadgets and apps parallels the rise of the self-absorbed online Narcissus.” He goes on to state that, “As we get accustomed to having even our most minor needs … accommodated to this degree, we are growing more needy and more entitled. In other words, more narcissistic."

— The Internet ‘Narcissism Epidemic’

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theatlantic:

The Touch-Screen Generation

Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to accommodate that now-common tableau. Add to that our modern fear that every parenting decision may have lasting consequences—that every minute of enrichment lost or mindless entertainment indulged will add up to some permanent handicap in the future—and you have deep guilt and confusion. To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

Read more. [Images: Erin Patrice O’Brien]

Cheating or collaboration? Do students really not know the difference? →

Such a fascinating article. Share this with your colleagues-it’ll start a conversation. Here was one of my favorite parts:

Cheating and defenses of it appear to be rampant, even in the best schools in America. Harvard recently experienced its largest cheating scandal ever; half of the nearly 300 students in an Introduction to Congress class were suspected of cheating on a take-home final last year.

Students justified their collaboration on the exam, saying that any similarities in test responses were because they shared lecture notes and conferred with one another and the teaching assistants.

In defense of the student conduct, Slate’s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote:

In this case, it’s the test’s design, rather than the students’ conduct, that we should criticize. In allowing students to consult a wide variety of sources, the Harvard exam was looking to assess something deeper than how well they could memorize and recall facts. Judging from some leaked questions, the test seemed to be designed to measure how students could think about some of the contradictions inherent in American government. (An essay question began, “Do interest groups make Congress more or less representative as an institution?”) But if you want to determine how well students think, why force them to think alone?

Harvard didn’t agree, forcing many of the students to withdraw from the university for a period of two to four terms. (Here is a good Harvard Crimson piece on the internal debate over the university’s actions )

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15 Ideas That Really, Really Screwed Public Education Up

Wow. This was a challenging and controversial read. Here are the first three from the list: 

1. Focusing On Curriculum And Assessment Rather Than Learning Models And Support

This is likely the worst idea public schooling has taken on. The idea here is that by using a standards-based, outcomes-driven, direct instruction model, that real-life content can be parsed without neutering it, understanding be anticipated, and that data can be gleaned and resources shared to improve learning for all. But this only served to homogenize learning in a way that made the world of school entirely different than the world they live and use information in every day.

2. Scripted Curriculum

This is perhaps the most symbolic adoption by public schools struggling to keep teachers and students “on the same page.” For now, let’s skip the desire to have all teachers and students “on the same page,” and focus instead on the idea of a set of learning experience planned in another state by a corporation with zero knowledge of the lives and cognitive identities of students. This falls closely behind #1.

3. Growth

Growing from one-room schoolhouses to sprawling campuses with as many as 5,000 students seems like a natural “development,” but was a recipe for disaster. Size obscures nuance, numbers challenge personalization, and transfer is difficult to coach.

5 Examples of How the Languages We Speak Can Affect the Way We Think →

A fascinating article over at TED.com. It was eye-opening to learn more about the impact of language on our worldview. I’ve included one example below.

Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

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a crime reporter at The Mercury in Pottstown started a “Wanted by Police” gallery (on Pinterest) The results have been astounding.

“We’ve actually seen a 57 percent increase in our warrant services, and we actually got more people based on our tips and our calls,” Richard Drumheller, Captain at the Pottstown Police Department, told NPR.

"

— Local police post mugshots on Pinterest, leading to a 57% boost in arrests - The Next Web (via interestingsnippets)

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theatlantic:

Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes.)

The stress comes, Marder theorizes, from the kind of personal versioning that is so common in analog life — the fact that you (probably) behave slightly differently when you’re with your mom than you do when you’re with your boss, or with your boyfriend, or with your dentist. And it comes, even more specifically, from the social nuance of that versioning behavior colliding with the blunt social platform that is The Facebook. Behaviors like swearing and drinking and smoking, the study suggests, are behaviors that you (might) do with friends — but not (probably) with your boss. And, more subtly, language that you might use with your friends — in-jokes, slang, references to Breaking Bad — probably won’t track when you’re not with your friends. The awareness of that discrepancy — Facebook’s tendency to disseminate even highly targeted social interactions — leads to stress.

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]

Fascinating.

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Explain it to me like I’m five.

(via xkcd: Up Goer Five)

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emergentfutures:

Rapture of the nerds: will the Singularity turn us into gods or end the human race?

A gathering of experts on artificial intelligence becomes a search for deeper meaning

Full Story: The Verge

The title’s a little sensationalistic, but the question is a good one. One of the three “big ideas” about technology that I share in some of my presentations is that within about ten years we’re going to be able to buy a consumer level computer with the same processing power as the human mind. Based on the current pace of technology, about a decade after that we’ll have the same processing power in our cellphones. Which leads me to the questions that keep me up sometimes:

1. What are we going to do with a brain-powered cellphone?
2. What does that device do for us?
3. How will that change our lives?

And the really important question that I think is overlooked far too often: When will Skynet take over?

decomposingclassroom:

gjmueller:

“Are we asking our students to collect dots or connect dots?” asks author Seth Godin, who wrote the book Stop Stealing Dreams. In this TEDxYouth Talk, Godin enumerates eight things that will change in the Digital Age. The nature of homework, memorizing facts, and the end of compliance as an outcome, are just a few.

What is school for?

Oh man, so powerful. It makes me want to go up to all the teachers I know and ask them what school is for.

(Source: blogs.kqed.org)

Why Learning Should Be Messy →

A must-read, and probably the best article I’ve seen in a few months.

Why hasn’t project-based learning picked up yet? There are a few reasons. First, the model of education says principal Chris Lehmann where kids sit in rows, read textbooks, and hear lectures has lasted so long, because it never goes that wrong. “It’s boring as hell, but most principals don’t yell at their teachers if they walk by their classroom and all they see is a quiet classroom with kids reading the textbook. No one gets in trouble.”

“If you go into a classroom,” says Lehmann, “where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”

Second, the way students attempt to learn via projects does not work. Tulley says, “It amounts to kit-based experiences in 45 minute periods. ‘We’re going to do a biology kit.’ We already know that those recipe like exercises do not stimulate creativity.”

I also spoke with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur on this issue as well. He says, “You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on. The word ‘hands-on’ is overused and abused.”

The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity. Through a scaffolding strategy, they help us make sense of what we have learned. Still, teachers must understand that learning is uncomfortable, messy, and complicated.”

censu:

Leo Caillard

ART GAME

This recent work is a reflection on the problem of our new digital world. Currently, at any stage of its creation, any idea or concept is digitally adapted. What will be retained in the future? What will happen to all of these billions of megabytes we stock on computers? In 10 years? In 500 years? Colliding the esthetic of modern minimalist Apple products with the classical architecture of the Louvre Museum, the viewer is forced to assess the question of new creation in our modern society.

It’s a pretty clever idea. I’d go see it if I could.

Apps That Can Make Science Come Alive!

A similar app but perhaps more commonly associated with science classes focuses on frog dissection. This has been a controversial subject for many years with many pupils and teachers objecting to the practice. The use of the app removes the moral arguments over animal dissection in the classroom while providing all of the learning processes associated with the process. Frog Dissection not only brings the process to life, rewarding pupils for good work in following instructions in the cutting process, it provides added details and information about the frog’s organs. With quizzes at the end and additional information about frogs, this is an example of an app going above and beyond what would have been expected in a classroom environment.

The reduction of mess in the classroom that these apps provide will also ensure that they a winner with everyone in the educational process, including the cleaning staff!

These apps can be used by pupils on their or in pairs or small groups so there is the ability to work collaboratively. In fields like science, collaborative working and bringing different opinions together can be of great benefit so this is definitely an area of work that deserves to be examined further.

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laughingsquid:

One Memento, A One-Shot Digital Camera App

A positively fascinating project. The user gets one chance to take one photo that’s automatically uploaded into a digital archive that officially closes after the 250,000th photo is received.