Personalized Learning: the Best Education Or the Worst? 143
theodp writes: In an exclusive interview with Education Week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about why he is shifting his K-12 giving priorities to personalized learning. While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' which presumably includes Zuck, make him 'incredibly pessimistic' about the future of public education. That Zuck — like fellow personalized learning cheerleaders/funders Bill Gates and former U.S. Education Chief Arne Duncan — seemed to be unaware of studies on personalized learning studies that date back to the '70s is troubling. But people don't "Like" 40+ year-old Ed.gov papers, so Zuck could be forgiven for not seeing them and, as a result, believing that the personalized learning plan dashboard his Facebook engineers knocked out truly is the ground-breaking solution to 'one of education's biggest problems' that Melinda Gates cracks it up to be.
Personalised (Score:1)
Personalised is the way to go. It doesn't matter how much is spent on public if there's even one psychopathic bully shitting on it all. And there's often a lot more than one.
Re:Personalised (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well. There is simply no way that a one-size-fits all bureaucracy can educate as well as a system with tools that allow teachers to tailor activities to individual children. The problem is that personalized education is a much harder problem than many believe. It is easy to make an app that adapts the math problems assigned to a student's performance. But it is much harder to produce group learning activities that match varied skills. And if you put kids each on a single computer which is 'personalized', you can be sure they will learn less than if they are working together learning the social skills and executive function needed to succeed in the world. Eventually we'll succeed in personalizing teaching of social skills, executive function, reading, and math. But it is a hard problem.
In many ways the problem is like artificial intelligence. It is a much harder problem than people thought. But that doesn't mean that it is impossible and as parts of it are solved it slowly changes everything.
Re:Personalised (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, all the studies showing problems with personalized learning are simply showing that we had not yet figured out how to do it well.
No, we know exactly how to do it *well*. Each student's parents just need to hire an individual full-time tutor for their kid, who can then teach them in whatever way best suits that individual kid.
The problem is that we haven't found a way to to it *economically* or *practically* for all those students whose parents can't afford to hire an individual tutor.
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The problem is that we haven't found a way to to it *economically* or *practically* for all those students whose parents can't afford to hire an individual tutor.
But we have. The problem is, that it leaves certain kids "behind" and we've pledged "No Child Left Behind". So instead of getting the most out of everyone, we fail to get the minimum out of way too many. Some kids aren't going to succeed, regardless of how much effort we spend. The problem is, we can't just leave them behind either.
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In my limited experience, the best special ed programs mainstreamed as much as possible.
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This ignores the huge benefits in some situations of working together in small groups. Nothing in education is so simple.
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This ignores the huge benefits in some situations of working together in small groups. Nothing in education is so simple.
Nowhere in that formula does it say that kids won't sometimes be working in groups.
Do kids with private tutors sometimes learn in groups? This is a factual question with an answer. You seem to be arguing that you believe the answer is that no, they do not. I find that hilarious, as there is thousands of years of evidence that they do in fact work with their peers; the tutors often find value in this, and it gives the other tutors a bit of a break. And for public schools, there is only a couple hundred years
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That doesn't scale very well. There's a limited number of good teachers, and I'm willing to bet it's a lot smaller than the number of children needing education. This means that, if we applied this system, most kids wouldn't get good tutors anyway.
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That partially depends on what you mean by "well". A big part of education acculturating the children to the culture that they are going to live in. Personalized education is likely to splinter the groups and fragment the culture even more that is already happening.
Unfortunately, the current education system was designed to turn out factory workers...and there already isn't much need for that. But there still is need for glue to hold the civilization together. So shared common experiences are necessary.
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Far out, man.
Funny thing, through an individually tailored program of public school, tutoring, home schooling, online schooling, school-sponsored extra-curriculars, non-school-sponsored extra-curriculars, community organization participation, church going, scouting, going to college, family time spent learning and interacting, travel, educational shows, and spending time with friends just goofing off, my kids have all learned how to read, write, do math, sing, play sports, play musical instruments, act, cre
You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know who said, "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know," but this is not the conclusion a great number of intelligent people automatically arrive at.
Re:You know... (Score:4)
Well Angelina Jolie said that we should listen to Zuckerberg on this...
Seriously though, it's not just human but also animal nature to "worship" the successful. While that used to be the big alpha male who always won his fights, and through humanity turned into the chieftain or the king who also always won his fights (after all, God shall protect the right)... in today's world we no longer value fighting so much, so we worship the ones set on a pedestal before us ("famous" people) and the ones who make a lot of money. Is that right? No. But it's how human brains are wired.
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The problem is nobody listens to you unless they agree; they're more likely to listen if you're famous or have some kind of credential.
I've found these problems where I'll explain how markets or how macro-economics work and people will go, "... okay, yeah. I get that. I still think you're wrong, even though everything you said is obviously correct."
Favorite example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, a particular form of basic income (I have a complete tax plan, including
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Quality of life doesn't equate to wages... Nice try though on the Citizen Dividend.
The problem with "money" and "wages" is that those game tokens don't have the same economic value to everyone.
Wealth denominated in cash give people a certain amount of freedom and independence in our current society which makes some people happy. But that isn't the total equation. For example, why do rich people want to run for political office. They eventually realize some things that money can't buy and they want those
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Actually, you missed it; but only barely.
Money is not wealth. The buying power of money constantly converges on a measure by which all money spent in a reasonable recent period (e.g. 1 year) equates to all products produced and sold in that period. That means one year of total income equates to one year of production-consumption.
All the stuff made divided by the whole population tells you how much there is to go around. If there's 1,000 people and 1,000 pounds of rice made per year, everyone can have
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* Such a plan does reduce taxes on consumer take-home pay, increasing take-home pay per dollar wage-labor paid by the employer (including taxes), thus making *everyone* richer; *but* it's an expensive waste of money to give "our hard-earned taxpayer dollars" to drug dealers and lazy bums. (X causes Y; I like Y, but I don't like X. More politics.)
This is most likely the one I would have responded with if I we were having a conversation and I hadn't thought about what I was going to say. I still dislike the notion of paying societal parasites. Wouldn't your plan still work if we didn't hand out money to people who don't contribute to the system? Why is it necessary that the parasites be given a free ride?
If you can give them facts and figures they can understand, you can make them acknowledge those facts and figures are right and your conclusions are correct, and then immediately make a logically-disconnected statement about how they don't believe it anyway.
Frequently it's because I still feel like there's som
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I'm interested in your Citizen's Dividend idea. Is there a place I can go to learn the details?
I still need to write a formal description; but I've blogged about chunks and abstract ideas [slashdot.org]. The sheer amount of detail I've got scribbled down in notes is ... it's not like you can fix a problem by throwing money at it. I mostly talk about financing plans--cut off the cost of welfare (55% of the marginal income taxes) and replace it with a Dividend funding source (17% of AGI income tax); distribute that to every natural-born, adult, resident, American citizen; pay it as a non-refundable tax credit to a
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* In practice, things like welfare drug tests determine almost nobody (like 0.01%) is actually on welfare and on drugs, without drops in welfare enrollment. Most states implementing welfare drug tests repeal them due to the cost being in massive excess of the savings.
Interesting. I didn't know that.
As for the rest, it sounds promising. But I'm a paranoid and skeptical sort. Would it be possible to test and prove your system in one state before implementing it for the whole country? If so, then which state would be most suitable do you think?
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Not likely. My system is highly sensitive to wealth: once you've reached a certain level of wealth (which is predicate entirely on technological development--how much stuff can you actually produce per person?), you have enough to go around that tapping it for a basic-needs-level income is cheaper than most simple alternatives. You can compare the cost of welfare versus a competing Dividend [wordpress.com] against spending in 1950 [theatlantic.com] and spending in 2003 [theatlantic.com]. The difference is more staggering when you realize the average 195
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About your view on global warming:
1. The 2K limit isn't a matter of how high the temperature can go, it's a goal, since above 2K things are going to get seriously worse. (So far, I see no reason to believe that we're not going to shoot right by.) The climate changes are also going to be much more drastic than just a little warmup.
2. You're selfish. That's not a real good basis for society, or a response to a threat.
3. You've been reading general articles, and ignoring what climate scientists sa
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You're selfish.
This is just name calling. Also, you left out the part I mentioned where I believe we must balance the budget in order to deal with AGW.
You let yourself be sucked along with propaganda, presumably because it's more comfortable that way.
An ad hominem attack.
However, you seem to have an opinion based on what you've seen and read...
Yes. That's true. How else should one form an opinion?
but you appear to be unwilling to think beyond that, to what's really going on.
Why don't you tell me what's really going on?
Now, if you went through this and had no real opinion, that would be fine. However...
So you felt like you needed to adjust my opinion on the matter? Thus proving what I said about self-righteous motivations and vegans.
Q: How do you know who's a vegan?
A: Oh, they'll let you know.
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"Selfish" is putting your own desires above others. You said that you had serious limits on what you were willing to put up with, which qualifies. The Federal budget is a completely orthogonal issue.
You also don't know what "ad hominem" means. I'm starting with your bad conclusions and surmising how you got them. Saying you were wrong because you were a propaganda dupe would be ad hominem; saying you're a propaganda dupe because you're wrong, and how you're wrong, isn't.
As far as what is going on,
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So, wherever you're wrong, you can't see it because you tricked yourself into believing that your thoughts are magical and so you can prove negatives. Complete fail. You didn't even convince me to be interested in checking your numbers, because I already know they're a steaming pile of garbage. Anything that claims to be proven right because the biased phrasing of the alternate view is clearly wrong... already has me convinced. ;)
Example:
for example: reducing cost of a general market good always *eventually* reduces price as a proportion of both per-capita and median buying power, else we'd have eliminated all employment thousands of years ago--any other conclusion prohibits the creation of new products
What a load of crap that is. No, that not only doesn't prove your poin
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So, wherever you're wrong, you can't see it because you tricked yourself into believing that your thoughts are magical and so you can prove negatives.
I was particularly referring to the postulate that technology, throughout history, has reduced labor time required to produce goods, thus reducing the cost, leading to an eventual reduction to price, leading to an increase in consumer buying power (the consumer spends less on something he was already buying). Someone loses their job for a while, and then later a new job becomes available.
I've had people explain that this *never* happens, and businesses have *always* just taken profit. Jobs lost to techn
Re:You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Last week I told a grad student "grad school is where you learn that you don't know nearly as much as you think you do. A postdoc is where you learn that nobody else does either."
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Last week I told a grad student "grad school is where you learn that you don't know nearly as much as you think you do.
Shit, education has really gone downhill. We used to learn that leaving high school.
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It depends on the field, too. An English major once told me, after graduating and deciding not to be a writer: "The first three years of an English degree they teach you all the rules. The fourth year, they teach you not to follow them because they're just for beginners."
Feynman talks about that in physics lectures; the first few years they teach the students a bunch of stuff that isn't really true, it is just a simplification that is useful. So naturally in a field where it is required to go to graduate sc
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IMO, if you just presume you don't know shit and always look things up, you'll operate as if you knew what you were doing. It isn't enough to read the manual once; the manual should be kept open while doing the work.
Indeed. The manual, the instructions, the job specifications, the prints... why on earth would those be the final option, that you would only consider consulting after exhausting all others?
Regarding the manual or instructions specifically, what must be the makeup of your hubris that you believe the manufacturer would be unlikely to know something you do not?
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Regarding the manual or instructions specifically, what must be the makeup of your hubris that you believe the manufacturer would be unlikely to know something you do not?
Nope, I didn't say anything about that. So I can't help you there.
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Some folks would attempt all alternative options of putting a project together, including trial and error, before reading the directions.
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Sorry you don't know what a Postdoc is.
Nobody in academia lands an academic job right after their PhD. After their graduation, young doctors who want to continue into academia go to a different lab, where they continue to do research, publish, teach and so on. They are supposed to learn the techniques of the new lab and to spread the ones of the old lab in the new place. Usually a Postdoc salary is OK. It is typically twice that of a PhD student. Usually a Post-doc position is quite nice.
After a couple of y
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Of course they have dreams, that is why they are still there.
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Abstractly, it is the inappropriate projection of a local value into a global context, I am good at A therefore I am good at A...Z
However being famous and rich does not mean that you cannot be competent across a diverse range of
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However being famous and rich does not mean that you cannot be competent across a diverse range of topics, therefore we cannot dismiss people's opinions on the grounds that they are "just some guy who manage to climb up on the biggest soap box", we need to consider the value of their arguments without personalizing the issue.
I'll buy that. It's just that I don't suppose we're much in danger of underestimating the opinions of the folks who already have a pulpit from which to preach.
Please just be a bank account (Score:5, Insightful)
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense."
All sorts of things "just make sense" that are actually completely wrong when objectively examined. That's why we do experiments to see if they actually work before rolling them out in a big way. Basing policy on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choice and this is not one of those times where we have no other choice. Maybe he's in the test phase but it sure doesn't sound like an experiment. It's annoying how Zuckerberg (and Gates) thinks that because he was successful in software that it somehow qualifies him to be something more than a bank account for areas of endeavor where he demonstrably has no special expertise or insight. At least Gates no longer has a day job so conceivably he has the time to actually devote to the details of these issues. There is no way Zuckerberg actually has enough time to really do much more than parrot what the people he hired are telling him.
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Policy and standards (Score:2)
We're pretty much experimenting with our kids education every day.
That doesn't mean we're experimenting with the policies surrounding their education every day at a regional, state or national level. Changes come slowly in education for the most part.
Common Core has been a miserable disaster and it was a large-scale, government run, "scientifically backed" curriculum deployment.
Since Common Core has only been in operation for a few years it's a little premature to declare it a "miserable disaster". I'm not arguing for or against it but I think it's going to take a little while to really determine if it works or not. My guess is that if it ultimately works it's going to take a while to work the ki
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When "Common Core" is all that gets taught, then it *is* the "Common Plan". And when it's all they are evaluated on, it's all that will get taught (except for rare exceptions).
So far it has not been a good thing. I've been quite upset by pretty much ALL of the educational changes that have happened since I was in high school. And I can tell you what they were ALL about: Centralized Control. Every change has progressively removed control from teachers, and now even administrators, and placed it at a fur
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In other news, post response to the front page box is not working on the Slashdot. I know this space exploration thing is big, really big, but can we get someone on that??
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Drumpf is just another bankrupt idiot who can't manage his finances.
He's filed for bankruptcy four times.
Being a successful business leader is at least different than being a rich kid who failed at business and then got a good job as a TV actor.
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The correct default state is actually no education. And the burden of proof is upon all forms of education to prove their level of effectiveness. I'd further hypothesize that public education was widely adopted as the norm not because it was proven most effective at teaching, but because it was most cost-effective.
Economics and null hypothesis (Score:2)
You're assuming the current state (public education with a uniform curriculum) is the default state
That would be correct. Any changes are going to be from the current state and any change that results in a regression or stagnation in performance or performance/cost should be rejected.
The correct default state is actually no education.
Nonsense. This isn't drug testing where we are comparing against a placebo to see if it has any effect. Any change to the educational system that doesn't improve on what we already have (cost and/or outcomes) is wasteful. To disprove the null hypothesis requires that a given change (say customized curriculums) will result
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1) The current system was put into place without widespread testing of different possible educational systems.
2) Widespread testing has shown that the standard mainstream system of teaching is unsuitable for some students.
3) You have no widespread testing to prove any of your statements or conclusions are reasonable.
4) You have no idea what Gates or Zuckerberg's daily work life and schedules are, or who does what planning for them.
5) Basing opinions on a hunch is REALLY stupid unless you have no other choic
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Well, to be fair the prior studies didn't show that all conceivable ways of doing personalized education were horrible, they showed that certain particular ways were. And they were right, but this doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is wrong. He may be, I'm not informed enough about his plan to have much of an opinion. I *am* of the opinion the personalized eduction has some extremely strong points, and mass education has some horrible weaknesses. And the way it is currently implement is certainly worse than t
40+ years old studies (Score:4, Informative)
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The problem with 40+ years old studies on computer aided learning is the computing lanscape has changed so much since then they are mostly irrelevant. Even the University of Illinois at Urbana is making the shift offering on-line education.
Online is personalized expect in the simplest of senses; i.e. you get to chose your pace but the content and flow is the same for everyone.
To me, personalized learning requires some degree of tailoring the material to the student; and therein lies the challenge. Doing that get expensive quickly, and we have shown time and time again a lack of willingness to invest in education.
The one area I have seen personalized learning is in special education, where teachers create individualized instruction plans of re
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I've had some personalized learning in the past, when I was studying Japanese. The teacher set out the material to be learned but then offered a variety of ways to learn it. I could choose examples that gave context to help me remember stuff, while others preferred to work more with a dictionary and theory. In the end a few of us got A grades by studying in different ways and ultimately taking the exact same exams (oral, aural and the big written one).
Re:40+ years old studies (Score:5, Informative)
It's not because online education is inherently better, it's because you can offer the same course material to more people without investing into more buildings, additional positions for teachers and mentors or any other infrastructure that actuallyhelps the students. No one cares if it profits the single student, as long as you can profit from more students.
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There is also recent research showing that things like online learning aren't really very good. Universities are implementing it anyway because they're run by business people (like Zuck and Gates) and it's highly profitable, dirt cheap, and in demand. None of those things mean it's effective.
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40 years ago was 1976. The Apple 1 kit was introduced April 1, 1976. So any paper published was most likely written before the authors even knew of its existence. I'm pretty sure no Apple 1s wound up in schools. The Apple II was still a year away. Yeah, things have changed just a bit since then.
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My kingdom for an "edit" button! (Or, more brains.) The papers linked in TFS were from December 1975 and January 1976. So yeah, I'm not saying they need to be totally discarded, but we have tools commonly available now that were nearly unimaginable back then. I mean, it's possible that someone once said "wouldn't it be great if you could have a searchable electronic encyclopedia that fit in your pocket?" but I don't know how long they figured that would take to actually happen or if they accounted for that
Intitution is not data (Score:1)
Intuition is not data and it's usually wrong. You should know better than this Zuck...
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That's the trouble with 'intuitive' solutions. Not only are they unreliable; unlike other lousy sources of data, they are unreliable and emotionally compelling.
Cannot stand alone (Score:2)
What bothers me about "personalized" learning is that at some point, these people will need to interact with others, so there must be commonality. Being able to communicate and share ideas is absolutely vital- and the language behind the ideas and how they are represented are a vital aspect of the idea itself. Personalization may help an individual, but it can hurt in the collective sense, where the people must work with the ideas of others.
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"The most effective way to teach each person is specific to that person"
There's actually very little evidence to support that assertion either. Learning styles, for example, are basically an invention that people thought sounded truthy but has no scientific support.
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In particular, we need to share a common culture (which includes things like having read the same books and viewed the same artworks).
That isn't just wrong, it is dangerous and scary. Plus it is total crap; people in this culture don't read, and they "art" means pop music. No, I don't need to read the same books as them. It is better if we each read the books we want. Maybe that could be a culture? Oh, wait, it already is my culture! Glad I learned it somehow, while reading all the wrong books and looking at all that old art most people don't bother with.
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Well, you have failbook to communicate and share ideas. Right, mr. Zuck?
We'll just personalize it more, just give us all your details and presto! personalized learning.
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Personalized learning doesn't mean private learning. It does not imply separating the children, or keeping ones working on the same subject from doing it together. Those are hand-wavy inanities.
Montessori does personalized learning, for example. And the kids interact more than in traditional schools. Locally, we have numerous different "alternative education" schools that all do more personalized learning, and they all also put more emphasis on cooperation. It may be that the very process of personalization
Why do you think we have classes? (Score:3)
You can't effectively teach 1-10th grade math in the same class. So we age-tier because we think that's a reasonable approximation of skill-tier or just to split it up so you've had all the parts of the curriculum. Or think why you have divisions in leagues, you learn by playing roughly equal levels with a few better, a few worse than yourself but if you're just trivially beating them or being crushed you learn nothing. That doesn't mean I think individual learning is the one true answer, you learn a lot of valuable lessons explaining and being explained to, cooperating, correcting each other and so on. But ideally you'd do that with your peers in skill.
If you have some time dedicated to working individually it'd be a lot easier to create a dynamic, personalized schedule where you are in peer groups with others of comparable skill. Today it's mostly impossible to say follow the class of the grade above you because then you have something else, either you must jump a year in every subject or you're pretty much stuck where you are. Of course there's also other concern like like a stable social group you can develop inter-personal relations and skills with but it's not like you exclusively played with those in your class anyway. In the pauses between classes you'd play with other kids anyway.
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In my public schools many years ago we didn't divide things up by grade but by lesson, so for example a math class would have people from 3 different grades in it; and maybe one younger prodigy.
In English it had the effect that I was never taught most of the fake rules, because I could already correctly pick out the incorrect sentences on the standardized tests. Comprehension meant that I would skip over big parts of the lesson plan. Thank goodness, most of those "rules" aren't even part of the English lang
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Personalized meal service (Score:4, Funny)
I find that personalized meal service - where you provide your specific preferences and dislikes, along with any allergy information and your personal weight and fitness goals, is by far the most effective way to enjoy your meal and maximize your health. In fact, as a billionaire, its the only way I can see to get and keep everyone healthy. It just takes some planning and seed funding to create a few proof-of-concept restaurants that can do just that. After that it should be simple to, for example, provide the exact same personalized service to the entire deployed military forces for their daily meals.
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The funny part is that if those meals were being prepared by computerized machines, it might be trivial to provide each soldier a customized meal.
In the olden days, if I wanted to produce a photo calendar, I had to buy 5000 copies because they had to do a bunch of work to set up a press. Then JIT printing presses became a thing, and that evaporated; now they don't have to change anything at all physically, they just insert a print job in their queue and I can order 5, 50, or 5000 no problem!
I absolutely exp
Tiered Learning (Score:2)
In my own experience, I benefited from moving beyond my peers in mathematics and in language. I could definitely see a tiered learning, where the tiers were broken down by ability and/or subject and not arbitrary age. We constantly test our students, so why not make those tests actually mean something? Then, you get your high school diploma when you actually are able to demonstrate proficiency with the subjects and you're not held back going over subjects that you've already "mastered" just because of yo
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That's my biggest problem with making college available to everyone. If college is available for everyone, a 4 year degree is the new high school diploma... Just more expensive and 4 years of not-working later. We already make a high school education available for free to everyone. And we had to lower the standards for graduation to the point where a high school diploma is worthless. How low will we make the college degree standards until everyone can get one and one will be required for minimum wage jobs?
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Uuhhhhh... the minimum wage jobs are being replaced with robots. Sorry about that. My personalized recommendation for your lesson plan is to read Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut.
If these 18 year old children stay in college, they get closer to adulthood before they're foisted on the world with nothing to occupy their time. Also, "free college" doesn't make everybody want to go to "college." A lot of the colleges that would be attended would be also known as "trade schools." A significant percent of the peopl
an extreme example: (Score:2)
from Wikipedia: ... was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. ... The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker."
"Helen Adams Keller
There are numerous examples, probably even in your community,
intuitively makes sense (Score:2)
While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' ...
So did the theories of a flat Earth being the center of the Universe at one time. Seems to me like this Zucker just wants to teach people what's useful to him and his profit-seeking, investment-capital buddies. There are benefits to (a) a common educational base and (b) a well-rounded one - at least as a base.
Look to homeschooling (Score:2)
Homeschoolers have been delivering "personalized education" for many years. Everything from choosing a complete curriculum and allowing the student to proceed at their own pace, to developing a completely custom curriculum from various sources.
My own child participates in a program called "Classical Conversations" which provides a large chunk of the curriculum, and there are weekly sessions with a small group. Math we are doing via an online course.
FWIW, my child is sixth grade aged, and is doing 7th+ grade
Follow the $$$... (Score:2)
When I was misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded due to an undiagnosed hearing loss in one ear, I spent eight years in Special Ed classes. What personalize learning meant in that context was that the teachers babysat the students and the school district collected the extra money from the state. That was the late 1970's and early 1980's. Since I wasn't mentally retarded (I blew out the annual evaluation exams on the genius side, which the teachers called statistical flukes), I was regarded as being a well-
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The converse is that I consistently tested with very high results. Really, I just test well and learning (comprehension, not memory) was rather difficult for the first half of my life.
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Sorry about your experience. I came so close to your fate, but I guess I was lucky. Well, maybe.
In 2nd grade when I got bored with their stupid slow lesson plan, they transferred me to Special Ed. The teacher there was actually a lot brighter than the other teachers. She quickly assessed my real problem and sent me back. Actually, at the time it was a bit traumatic; the Special Ed kids were a lot nicer, I'd have preferred to stay there and be able to read without being harassed. ;) I felt totally rejected t
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[...] the Special Ed kids were a lot nicer, I'd have preferred to stay there and be able to read without being harassed.
During the second grade I was sent off to a regular class for reading. No one explained to me why I was being banished to this other class for an hour each day. Special Ed class had ten kids, but a regular class had 30 kids. It was an overwhelming experience and I brawled my head off. The teachers gave up after a week. I had a college-level reading comprehension when I graduated the eighth grade, which allowed me to skip high school and go into community college. Until I started my technical career, I had t
A hidden benefit (transparent assignments) (Score:2)
I think that one benefit to personalized learning that is often overlooked is the transparent and clear assignments.
My high schooler was lost in his math and English classes and it was impossible for us as parents to help him at home. The teachers did not use the on-line system at their disposal to share upcoming assignments and due dates. Assignments were only posted on line after the due date and with no information as to what the assignment was.
Upon moving him into on-line classes for English and Mat
My experience with personalized learning (Score:2)
I don't know if this example strictly falls under the category of "personalized learning", but the best learning experience I ever had was in my Navy "A" school, that is, the school where I learned my job specialty; in this case, aviation electronics technician. Considering I began in late 1980, the way this learning system worked was pretty advanced.
I don't know the specifics of how the program was developed, but I believe the Navy, working with engineers at IBM, created the system. They took your person
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I went to MM A school in late 1972. We had workbooks and daily lectures with a test on Friday. Anyone who failed was gone on Monday. If you maintained an A average you didn't have to stand guard duty. I loved my A average. After the last test of the course I was offered a chance to attend nuclear power school. To this day I regret that I declined.
The course work for rate advancement was self paced study books. After six years I made 2nd class. I wasn't good with the military part of being in the Navy but I
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Lots of educational techniques work wonderfully when you try them out on students who are self-motivated and enjoy learning, but fail miserably when applied to someone who doesn't care about their grades, their learning, or anything else that a school could reward and/or punish them with.
Success might be getting misdefined in those cases. Not everybody can be a doctor or lawyer, sorry. And most of them never asked to try. If success is to somehow "teach" uninterested students, as if education was a glass that can be filled by the teacher, then failure is the forever result.
Instead of "no child left behind," maybe we should try, "no child prevented from advancing." And then the ones in the back, make sure they have access, are getting minimal exposure to possibilities, and are having fun.
I k
Lurch Lurch Lurch (Score:3)
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so where did/how Gates and Zuckerberg (Score:2)
get their education? Yes, probably I can google it to find out but my feeling is these smart guys and others were well educated (reading, writing, math, organizing, critical thinking, managing, etc.) but it didn't come from many of these whiz-bang concepts they are promoting (it didn't exist for them). I see it as they got a good education during their childhood/teenager years so they immediately able to absorb high level college courses (unlike many of us had to struggle at JC to catch up of what we didn't
Sorry, but PLATO is to current networked learning (Score:2)
I wouldn't personalize in that way (Score:2)
I'd use conventional classes, but have about seven for speed (up to +/- 3 standard deviations from normal speed of learning) by seven for style of learning, producing 49 classes per subject at any given level. I'd abandon the notion of years entirely and allow people to slip between classes freely. The reason for slippage is not just so that a person can throttle up/down their learning, but it's also because some people are excellent support for others that aren't necessarily in the same stream. You have to
Why school? (Score:2)
Where in the world did we get this insane notion that education should be totally or even primarily outsourced to someone else in a building down the road a ways?
School in its various incarnations is a useful tool, but children learn *everywhere*, all the time. So do adults, if they are paying attention.
How about we focus our efforts on using the best available tools for the right jobs, and stop expecting "somebody else" to do all the hard parts?
Raising kids "right" starts before they're even conceived, and
Calling Mr Stephenson... (Score:2)
I just want a personal copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".
Even if I'm not young, or a lady.
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PLATO/CYBIS/NovaNET were arguably the most influential and widespread. The last commercial PLATO-derived systems only shut down in the last year. There was tons of research done on methodologies and techniques, some of what came out of such research is still in use today, while much has been overlooked. It's always sad to see a group of people approach creating educational systems and immediately start doing things that were tried 45 years ago and refined over a period of decades, which ultimately fail,
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It already is running. 11/70? The initial system ran on Illiac I, then a CDC 1604 CDC, then PLATO IV ran on a variety of different CDC mainframes.
See http://cyber1.org/ [cyber1.org] for more information on the emulated system.
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If computer learning is to work, it needs to start small.
I'd vote for teaching elementary arithmetic.
When I needed a calculus refresher I just went to Khan Academy and found the lessons I needed.
Starting small already happened.
When I was a wee lad, I mastered the alphabet. It was very exciting! Then my mother taught me my first written word: C-A-T. So, so amazing. Magical. And then she showed me the first spellbook I learned from: the Dictionary. This is how you learn what you want to learn about: you guess the first letter from the sound, and then look, the words are all in the same order as the alphabet!
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Have you seen Mark Dice? We have plenty of people in college that have no business being there because they don't know anything worth knowing, while having their heads filled with meaningless garbage (Kardashians, Snookie, Brad Pitt etc)
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As Robert Heinlein wrote decades ago, "Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy".
On the flip side, if you want to conspire to make your kids lives easier than their peers by letting them avoid the challenge they would have getting a decent education in a public school...
Sure as a parent, there is a certain amount of shielding you want to give your kids (say if the local public school was infested with gangs, guns, drugs, etc.), but tracking your kids at an early age to an highly academic (or religious depending on your school) program might better serve your desires as a parent, than th
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Heck, if you really want to make sure your kid doesn't have it easy and has to learn the hard way and become a Heinleinian Uberman, just leave him out the woods to grow up with animals. If he lives, he'll be the smartest, best educated, most self-driven man in the world. If you deny him that opportunity, there is no way for him to overcome that handicap later.
Don't handicap your kids by making their lives easy. If you want them to learn to overcome, at least cut off their feet or something so they don't hav
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the teachers
unions do not care about educating the children - they care only about making life easier for their membership.
Thank goodness for that, it is their job! I support union rights, but I don't like it when unions get involved in things other than collective bargaining and enforcing said bargain. If the teacher unions acting like police unions, the children would be suffering for it.
I read most of Heinlein's books. They were fiction. They said lots of different things. He didn't say that particular thing in a way that brings insight, he only said it in a way that tells you that character's character.
You probably learned
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Is that pronounced like Suck?
Hey, I think we went to school together! I totally recognized your unique communication skills.