Melinda Gates: Facebook Engineers Have Solved One of Education's Biggest Problem

theodp writes: Asked by the NY Times if Silicon Valley is saving the world or just making money, Melinda Gates replied, "I can say without a doubt — because I've seen it — that some of them [SV companies] are innovating in ways that make life better for billions of people." As an example, BillG's better half suggests that a handful of Facebook engineers have solved one of education's biggest problems with their 20% time project at billionaire-backed Summit Public Schools, a small charter school operator. Gates writes, "One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time. Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons. The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids." Some people — like the late Roger Ebert — might not be quite as impressed as Melinda to see Silicon Valley trying to reinvent the 1960's personalized-learning-wheel in 2015!

Comments

Re:Technology to deliver personalized lessons

[cayenne8]

How about streaming the pupils so that those of similar ability are grouped together for their classes. Ok it might not work at primary school level so much as these tend to be smaller often with only enough pupils for a single class per year. However even then you can arrange the class into groups of different abilities.

You can't do that in the "PC" America today, no sir...

You'll get hit right off to bat with shouts of "discriminaiton".....then classism, elitism...and just about any other -ism you can think of.

No, in the US today, we really are trying to not even give merit to those that do excel despite todays education system. I think I read the other day about a high school that had something like 50+ valedictorians...?? WTF? Afraid to hurt someones feelings that they didn't make the cut?

No, today int he US, you can't have any programs that single out folks for success, or even remedial needs...it might hurt Suzy or Johnny's self esteem and we all know that would be the end of the world. No, we have to keep them all together, and teach to the lowest common denominator.

Any separation of the kids by merit or ability...could potentially lead to an imbalance in the racial or socio-economic mix of kids, and once that happens, the SJW's and other types will scream bat shit bloody murder that this is just another example of the man keeping people down and stripping them of opportunity.

Re:Paper

[bangular]

The biggest problems in the school system can't be solved with technology. Technology won't make parents care about their kids. Technology won't stop politicians from playing games with school system tax money. Technology won't stop the textbook publishers from price gouging schools. Schools aren't screwed up because of lack of good algorithms. Remove all technology from schools and revert to pen and paper. The good schools will still be good and the bad schools will still be bad.