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Facebook's Solution To 'One of Education's Biggest Problems' Is a Dashboard
theodp writes: Gushing in July that Facebook engineers had solved one of education's biggest problems, Melinda Gates perhaps set up Segway-like expectations for Facebook's education software. And while The Verge sings the praises of what appears to be progress-tracking dashboards that connect students to mostly free 3rd-party lessons — not unlike Khan Academy or even the 50-year-old PLATO system — it's hard to get jazzed based on the screenshots (1, 2, 3) that Facebook provided in a .zip file accompanying its announcement. The "personalized learning plan" dashboards are a joint effort of Facebook and the Meg Whitman-led and backed Summit charter schools. In a nice circle-of-tech-CEO-education-reform-life twist, the first Summit high school opened in a building in Redwood City after students attending the Bill Gates-touted and backed Silicon Valley High Tech High charter there were evicted to make way, and the Gates Foundation is now spending $8M to bring HP CEO Whitman's Summit charter schools — and presumably Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personalized learning plans — to Seattle children.
I'm not sure if this is a total load of bollocks, or if it doesn't actually say anything at all.
posted by theodp it's 50-50.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Gushing in July that Facebook engineers had solved one of education's biggest problems, Melinda Gates perhaps set up Segway-like expectations for Facebook's education software. And while The Verge sings the praises of what appears to be progress-tracking dashboards that connect students to mostly free 3rd-party lessons — not unlike Khan Academy or even the 50-year-old PLATO system — it's hard to get jazzed based on the screenshots (1, 2, 3) that Facebook provided in a .zip file accompanying its announcement. The "personalized learning plan" dashboards are a joint effort of Facebook and the Meg Whitman-led and backed Summit charter schools. In a nice circle-of-tech-CEO-education-reform-life twist, the first Summit high school opened in a building in Redwood City after students attending the Bill Gates-touted and backed Silicon Valley High Tech High charter there were evicted to make way, and the Gates Foundation is now spending $8M to bring HP CEO Whitman's Summit charter schools — and presumably Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personalized learning plans — to Seattle children.
I refuse to believe this paragraph was written by a living, breathing human. You are Eliza's great-grandson and I claim my £5.
And the state Supreme Court just ruled that charter schools are Unconstitutional in Washington state.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/wa...
Screenshot 3: Looks like whoever created the Demo Student data was an ICP fan. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvmvxAcT_Yc
Do you see it now? The end is near!
we don't need no stinkin' dashboard.
And their demands for accountability. Accountability is at odds with good teaching. Parents are the reason kids are not learning.
We're entering a future where only affluent children will be able to get educated, and the poor and large portions of the middle class will have a shrinking pool of options available.
Charter schools are BS. Tech in the classrooms are BS as there is NEVER a budget to maintain it. Standardized testing is BS.
What works? Traditional teaching. One teacher with a small class size (think 25 students) who can give them individual attention and relate to them. It really is that simple.
But, there's no money for the tech industry in traditional teaching, so they have to invent new ways to turn it into a cash-generating enterprise.
The article summary was a bit of a hash, but a per-student dashboard that customized learning and displayed progress made would be a pretty great step up from the Mass Education we have today, that ignores student interests or rates of learning on various topics.
As a parent who would not not want a dashboard like that to keep track of what students are doing well and poorly in? Report cards do that but with less frequency and thus opportunity to correct problems as they arise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What they're trying to do is actually make a stable, scalable web service using Windows. It's like putting a man on the moon!
That is the only problem in education and has always been.
There are two things that are going to be a reality. One is that students are going to receive personalized instruction. Most schools already expect this is some way, but it is cost ineffective. Automation through software will make this personalized instruction possible, and while the technology is improving, it is far from adequate for some subjects. For instance physics is increasingly taught through exploration and modeling. Just letting some students listen to a lecture and other students read and then pass a multiple guess test does not teach physics. Students have to go through certain labs. The personlization might be how a lab is set up, which still requires significant human intervention and discussion with a live professional, though eventually an AI might be able to do it. Second, despite what the luddites say every student is going to have a computer and every student is going to need to learn to use it. While there are some jobs that require limited computer literacy, those jobs are going to become fewer. I mean everyone says how great education was in the 50's but what did they really need to get a well paying job? Not as much as today. As students get computers, they will be used to personalize when possible. Otherwise they will be used to teach kids the skills they need to get a job.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why are we subject to this kind of bullshit? Come on slashdot. News for nerds not news for turds.
This may help in a private school where they have selected great, motivated teachers and all of the students are driven. They were going to do well without this tool anyways.
It's not going to make a difference in the classroom with an unmotivated teacher, the kids are doing their time, and the goal is to get the students to pass the standardized tests so that the school can get it's funding for another year. A lot of problems with education are societal and creating a dashboard doesn't deal with those. You need to create safe environments for the children with a parent/guardian who can provide the necessities without working three jobs. Then get teachers who are motivated, well trained, and well equipped. Then worry about stuff like this.
Of course tech companies want trained worker bees pouring from high school classrooms around the world. Ask yourself what is the biggest expense for these companies- of course; workers! How can they reduce that expense to satisfy their investors? By reducing payroll costs. How to do that? By increasing competition for jobs to the extent that new hires will be happy with minimum wage. And the way to do that is to assure that millions of adequately skilled programmers emerge from high schools every year.
(I haven't mentioned the cheap foreign labor pouring into the US, thanks to the efforts of these same corporate 'visionaries'.)
I suggest that this is a very poor career choice for American ten year olds. Most programming will be automated. Small code segments from large projects will done as piecework by the lowest bidder in an online exchange. Demands on coders will increase, rewards will fade. The aspiring 'code warrior' will have become a starving code monkey and there will be no money in it for anyone but Wall Street and marketers.
...omphaloskepsis often...
They've modernized Montessori. This is no different than what our son did at his Montessori school. He had a personalized lesson plan that he was involved in creating, weekly goals that were tracked in a notebook, and was held to state standards. They even took the state tests at the appropriate age for each grade level.
Or, in the case of your typical business executive: one dashboard. Business executives sure love their dashboards. Every walk of life should have one. How does anyone know what's going on without a dashboard?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
And what they are forced to teach. I mean, if you are teaching creationist nonsense, then you really do not have any other real problem besides selection of teaching material (and that teachers are willing to tech it instead of finding other jobs). Technology addresses zero teaching problems. Technology only addresses the issue that some companies want to make even more money.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It looks like project planning methodologies like Agile are making their way into education, for better or for worse.
It wasn't until late highschool and college when I started getting a syllabus which described what I was expected to learn, the ordering, etc. It gave a nice overview and flexibility to work ahead which allowed for slacking off later.
Magically, taking a shallow tree structure and turning it side-ways makes it revolutionary. Well, de Carte revolutionized geometry by creating the Cartesian plane. Maybe education really is that simple, but we've overlooked it.
In their own industry Silicon Valley companies spend a fortune to get the best software engineers. The firms know full well it is the quality of their employees not software tools that determine success. So instead of fiddling around with computer screens why not spend money just to hire the best teachers?
In simple terms educational quality is far more dependent on teacher quality rather than the chalk or computer systems used.
Sometimes I think computer types think software is hard but everything else is easy because I can write a program that does it.
You got to laud the congruity of it all.
What do you offer to modern kids with nanosecond attention spans? Nanosecond-spanning flecks of education floating in a content-free broth of pap jazzed with lots of gee-whiz flashbang eyecandy, and we'll call all those who pop out the far end of the assembly line "educated".
Good luck competing against the rest of the world, which consistently wins at all the contests that measure real problem-solving infrastructure-constructing abilities and intelligence. Wonder who will take point now? Chinese, Russian or Indian generations? Cause I don't see these generations of purportedly "smart" kids building the likes of an Apollo Program, a D-Day or anything remotely as complex.
People have passionate and very divergent opinions, for good reasons.
But I think we can all agree on one thing when it comes to designing education policy for our kids: Meg Whitman, Mark Zuckerburg, and Bill Gates should have no part in it.
My advice: get out of the way and let the student learn. Make all education materials available to them from day one, K-12, let them learn at the pace they are capable of. For the handful of students that lag behind the minimum level they should be at (based on age alone), provide them with tutoring. For the students that go through so quickly they will complete the entire available coursework, provide them with mentoring for the field(s) that interest them.
The worst thing that ever happened to me in school was not being permitted to continue learning at the pace I was capable of. My 1st grade teacher refused to let me continue on to 2nd grade reading material when I finished the entirety of the 1st grade material, and my parents refused to let me skip the 3rd grade when the opportunity was finally offered to me. Both events destroyed my interest in education to the extent that I spent grades 3-12 "coasting" through school until it was over with.
As a kid I would have loved a personalized dashboard, if I could view it myself. Knowing where I was in relation to other students (say a national average, not directly against my personal classmates) would have been a great encouragement. It might be because I'm a boy and the gender differences in learning and motivation but the competition was a big thing for me.