Tag - education

Thundering indictment of our school system

March 6, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I think I read John Gatto’s Teacher of the Year acceptance speech about 3-4 years ago, but somehow I happened across it again today.

This is subversive, dangerous, powder-keg stuff! It’s also great thinking and writing.

I don’t know how true it is, but it feels true, smells true, and seems to answer a lot of questions that today’s problems in today’s schools raise.

I defy you to read it without changing your opinion of schools.

A couple of excerpts:

The products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

And …

Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that.

And …

Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.

I googled Gatto’s name, and found he has a website and a foundation.

The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman

February 24, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.

It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.

Ten forces that flattened the world:

  1. Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and creating the idea of one world market/community
  2. The dot-com bubble, with all the over-building of investment and infrastructure that resulted
  3. Common data languages and computer interoperability standards
  4. Open source software and community projects
  5. Outsourcing of work (kickstarted by Y2K)
  6. Offshoring of production (especially China)
  7. Supply-chaining – the science of coordination
  8. In-sourcing (hiring companies to perform traditionally internal company processes)
  9. In-forming (more and better data freely available for all
  10. “The steroids:” computing technology that is digital, mobile, personal, and virtual

The triple convergence:

  1. global, web-enabled collaboration: sharing of knowledge and work
  2. business process reorganization to take advantage of technologies: flattening of hierarchies, consolidating like functions, virtual companies, etc.
  3. China, India, and Russia joining the world markets at about the same time

On political and economic systems:
“Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”

On China:
“China has more than 160 cities with a population of 1 million or more.”

“China is a threat, China is a customer, and China is an opportunity. You have to internalize China to succeed. You cannot ignore it.”

On international job competition:
“When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you [kids] is: ‘Finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”

On change:
“No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”

On staying competitive in the global job market:
“Average Joe has to become special, specialized, or adaptable Joe.”

On being in trouble:
“One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries … when memories exceed dreams, the end is near.”

Want to be @ NECC

February 10, 2006
John Koetsier
news

The National Education Computing Conference NECC 2006 keynote speakers were just annouced.

It hasn’t hit their website yet, but apparently Nicholas Negroponte will be there to give a speech about his one laptop per child project. NECC sent out an email about it this afternoon:

ISTE is pleased to announce that Nicholas Negroponte and Dewitt Jones will deliver the keynote speeches at NECC 2006! Both these innovative men will share their vision of how you can transform yourself, your school, your district … the world!

Tagging, fuzzy data, & fuzzy surveys

January 11, 2006
John Koetsier
news

I’m engaged in a fairly major research effort right now. We’re trying to understand some business conditions a little better, and are using a variety of tools to try get a handle on it.

Oddly enough, I also happen to be taking a graduate course in research at the moment.

And I’m wondering about research methods, mostly because I’m investigating something that I don’t want to assume that I know anything about. And when you’re doing that, the standard survey will not work.

Think about it: a standard survey has questions and lists of potential answers. To create that, you need to know (or think you know) at least a large fraction of the possible universe of answers. In my case, I don’t want to assume any of the answers.

So I’ve constructed three one-page “surveys.” They’re basically short-answer questions. And I’m wondering if I can apply a sort of fuzzy analysis to the answers that I get.

My inspiration comes from tagging. Tagging is the opposite of taxonomy. Taxonomy is a science of classification: phylae, categories, rows, matrices. Slots that you create and slots that you fill. A place for everything and everything in its place.

To me, tagging is a much more organic beast. It grows exponentially. It accepts that fact that something things don’t fit into just one category. In fact, many things fit into many categories. It’s an inherently scalable way of dealing with complexity – because in the tagging world, you don’t have to manage that complexity. You don’t have to beat it into intellectual submission, understand it, categorize it, or make it all make sense.

You just do it … and “it” builds “itself.”

I’m wondering if we need to develop new ways of analyzing and modelling datasets that are (self)organized by tags. Maybe they already exist. Maybe a hundred postdocs are already hot on the case.

I hope so, because I’m going to be getting a lot of fuzzy data. And I’m planning on tagging it and putting it in a shaker and seeing what comes out.

The Linguist Update

January 7, 2006
John Koetsier
news

This is months out-of-date, but I figured I should mention that I’m no longer affiliated with The Linguist.

I did some work for Mark and Steve Kaufmann as a consultant, operating under my Sparkplug corporation.

But about 4 months ago, it just became too much: work, family, home, blog, and business. Plus, I’m working on my masters in Educational Technology at UBC. So I simply told Mark I was too busy, and finished out the month contract I was working on.

My name still appears in some places on the blog I created for The Linguist … but it looks like Mark has changed my account information and all the articles that I wrote are now “posted by Mark Kaufmann.” My guess is that this was simply to not confuse visitors to the site with the name of a person who no longer does any work for The Linguist. Still, it leads to some interesting combinations of post author and post body.

In any case, it was a lot of fun, and I wish Mark and Steve nothing but the best. They’re quality people, and The Linguist is a great way to learn English.

What is good research?

January 3, 2006
John Koetsier
news

As I mentioned recently, I’m taking ETEC 500 – a course about research methodology – in the UBC Master of Educational Technology program.

One of the first assignments is to write some thoughts, without having read the course text, about what good research is. Well, I can do that without any problem, since I just ordered the book from Amazon. Used, by the way, and about a quarter of the price at the university bookstore.

So: what is good research?

One: important
Well, first off, I think good research has to be about good issues. In other words, it needs to be about something interesting, relevant, and important. If it’s not, what’s the point?

(Oh, tenure – I forgot. Sorry.)

Two: honest
Secondly, it simply has to be honest. What I mean is, the researcher doesn’t have ulterior, hidden motives. Maybe it’s a little old-fashioned, but research should ideally be something that gets us a little piece of that capital T truth. The research certainly can adopt a position – that’s known as a premise – and seek to prove or disprove it. Realistically, the researcher can probably not avoid doing so. We all have our biases. But, as much as possible, prejudices should be public.

Three: accurate
Third, good research is accurate. It’s carefully conducted with integrity and reported with a high standard of professional ethics. In other words, the researcher is not fraudulent, like Hwang Woo-suk, the scientist who falsified stem-cell research at Seoul National University.

Four: reviewed
Fourth, good research is peer-reviewed. That might be in a journal, it might be at a conference, and these days, it might be in an online forum, but in some way other scientists who are knowledgeable in the field must have a chance to critique a study.

Five: ???
That’s about all that’s coming off the top of my head. What else should be here?

Learning increases resolution

January 3, 2006
John Koetsier
news

Very good post here by Kathy Siera on how learning about something increases not only our understanding of it but also our potential enjoyment of it.

Excerpt:

Learning music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change our products–we have to change how our users experience them. And that change does not necessarily come from product design, development, and especially marketing. It comes from helping users learn.

Interesting corollary: learning more about something also increases our ability to absolutely loathe it. Like Microsoft Word, for example.

Back to school

January 2, 2006
John Koetsier
news

It’s the new year and the kids are going back to school tomorrow.

So, ironically, am I.

I’ve been taking a bit of a break from my masters program at UBC, but decided that now was the time to pick it back up again. I’m taking a degree in Educational Technology … the artsy science of how to use technology to enhance education.

Next up: ETEC 500 (research methodology).

It’ll be a partial review from what I picked up in a Psych class while taking my bachelor’s in English at SFU, but there’ll be plenty new there too.

Ugh. Now I have to buy textbooks.

It may be a course on educational technology, but economic models die slowly, most of the time, and the dead tree as knowledge transmission device is still alive and well in academia.

Leaves of grass, as Walt would say.

Remember Sun-Maid raisons?

November 15, 2005
John Koetsier
news

Turns out that one of the kids picked up this while trick-or-treating a couple of weeks ago:

sun-maid raison package

Brings back memories …. that’s exactly the kind of package of raisins I used to occasionally get way back in elementary school. Not that my mom ever bought them. But sometimes other kids would share, or I’d get them – like my kids now – for Halloween.

Seems like another lifetime!

It’s Alive! Premier Family Matters calendar

October 26, 2005
John Koetsier
news

It’s a big day … we’ve recently launched our new calendar-creation site, and today we had our first orders!

The site is an incredibly simple way to create a quality wall calendar with your own photos … and benefit schools as well. (Each calendar bought means $5 goes to a school of your choice.) You also get to put your own events, birthdays, and custom notes into the calendar.

The US site is here, and the Canadian site is here.

One of the really cool things is that we’ve made heavy use of AJAX technologies to make the experience fast, rich, and simple.

Check it out … and if you’d be willing to test it and maybe even blog it, I’d be happy to send you a code to do one for free. (We’re especially looking for testers on various flavors of Windows and Internet Explorer.)

SFU Alumni Day

October 2, 2005
John Koetsier
news

Teresa and I went to our Simon Fraser University’s alumni day yesterday; the university was also celebrating its 40th year of existence.

Babysitters were hard to come by, so we took the kids and it actually worked out quite well. Gabrielle snapped this picture of us – yes semi-bald is my new look:

sfu 40th

SFU’s AQ (Academic Quandrangle) is still the same as ever: big, grey, and angular. But now there’s two (not to mention the really cute kids sandwiched in the middle):

SFU academic quandrangle

This is ostensibly SFU’s foundation stone, located in the somewhat-contaminated contemplation pool in the center of the AQ. (The kids found a dead mouse floating in it, along with assorted other non-scenic intruders.)

sfu foundation stone

Here are Gabrielle, Ethan, Aidan, and me, on top of the ziggurat or step-pyramid shape also inside the area of the AQ:

outline of family on sfu ziggurate

The roof of the mall, under which the ceremonies, such as they were, and the BBQ, such as it was, were held:

sfu mall roof

The sun occasionally showed its face yesterday; I caught him peaking out of the clouds.

clouds, sky, sun, occlusion

Overall the day was fun, but more for showing the kids SFU than anything else. We didn’t see anyone we knew (we graduated in 1994, so that was a while ago, but the kids were suitably impressed with the size of an institution that has something like 25-30,000 students. It was also interesting to see all the new construction at Simon Fraser – and there’s a ton of it.

Henrico County, Macs, PCs, and Education

September 17, 2005
John Koetsier
news

PCs are cheaper, right? That’s why schools should buy them?

Hmmm …

The results from last year? IT service calls to the high school tripled from the year before. The IT office had to hire another full time tech and contract with an outside consultant to keep up with tech calls. After factoring in the cost of software to prevent virus, malware, and adware infection as well security software to prevent students from messing with the systems the Dell computers cost US$19 apiece less than the Macs the school system would have bought. That, of course, doesn’t count the extra personnel.

That’s part of a pleasant reverse migration story. Here’s a piece of another:

”It all sounds very familiar (my district has it its own Dell mess following heavy Mac use). Recently, one of our totally Wintel centric IT guys admitted that ‘we have wasted millions’ on all this Windows crap.”

Yay.

Education is always a few years behind business in terms of technology adoption. Maybe the realization that PCs are not actually cheaper in spite of initial appearances is taking a few years to seep in as well.

Alan Kay Dropped by HP; a Million Jaws Drop Too

July 21, 2005
John Koetsier
news

This is unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

I attended a keynote by Alan Kay at a National Education Computing Conference a couple of years back, in which he talked about some of the things he was doing with the Squeak programming language with kids, and it was just amazing.

This guy is a true genius, he’s famous, and he’s incredibly personable and articulate.

If you can’t find a place in your company for a guy like that, there is an enormous problem with your company.

Schools can fix anything, right?

July 18, 2005
John Koetsier
news

There’s this peculiar notion in Canada. The US too.

If there’s a problem, somewhere in society, it must be fixed. It must be fixed by the government. And it must be fixed by the government through schools.

CBC ran a story today about a politician who is trying to get schools to teach swimming lessons. Sounds like a good idea.

So did “just say no to drugs.” So did sex education. And when kids were hungry, schools seemed like a good place to feed them. And if parents weren’t teaching kids proper hygiene, schools had to do it. Need driver training? Schools can do it. Bad behavior? Teachers can help. Parents aren’t home at night? Guess we need after-school programs.

You name it, there’s a school-based program for it.

I pity educators. I really do. Considering the sheer number of auxiliary programs that schools have to – by law or fiat – squeeze into their limited instructional days, it’s a miracle kids learn anything about reading, writing, math, history, geography, critical thinking … the foundation stones that yesterday and today define what it means to be educated.

We keep hearing about how things are bad in schools. Kids aren’t learning what they’re supposed to be learning. Could the answer be as simple as that we’re just throwing way too many things against the school wall, hoping some of it sticks?

I think it’d be great if all kids learned how to swim, and no kid in North America ever drowned for lack of that skill, ever again. But are schools really the answer to all of our society’s problems?

So much for planning ahead

June 18, 2005
John Koetsier
news

OK.

You go to elementary school. Then middle, high, and you enter university. You get a bachelor’s degree, and then, amazingly not having had enough of school yet, you go get a master’s degree.

Now you’re closer to 30 than you are to 20, you’re just about as educated as education can educate you. You might think you would have a clue what you want to do. You might also think that you’ve spent a few spare hours, here or there, figuring out what you want to do with your life after school.

Or not.

Educational Technology: Scenario

April 11, 2005
John Koetsier
news

I’ve wanted to post some of the papers that I’ve written as a part of courses that I’m taking while working towards my Master of Educational Technology degree at UBC … and here’s the first installment.

It’s a scenario: how will education be different in 5 years? I chose to be a little optimistic, and wrote it how I wanted it to be, not necessarily how I think it will be.

I’ve excerpted a section – read on to see it – and also posted the file in PDF form ….

Read More

Read More

Schmoozing in Moose Jaw

April 11, 2005
John Koetsier
news

I’ve had a little hiatus here for the past 3-4 days: I had a sudden trip to Moose Jaw, which is about as far into the Canadian hinterland as it sounds, though not quite as far as you can get.

Getting into and out of the city was interesting, consisting of a hop from Abbotsford to Edmonton to Regina, and then a shuttle ride into Moose Jaw.

For some reason, the Education Research & Development Institute (ERDI) decided to have its spring session in Moose Jaw. ERDI is an organization that you pay a lot of money to in order to come and talk to a bunch of top school administrators, usually superintendents, about your new products and services. Then they give you their opinion: it’ll sell, it won’t, add this to your product, take that out, or: what are you smoking? We went there to get some feedback on two new initiatives, and got it in spades – mostly positive.

The interesting thing about this ERDI is the number of companies attending is up, way up, and the number of technology companies is skyrocketing. Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM were all there, and there were a number of other smaller players as well, all pitching new products and programs. Very interesting.

I hardly had a chance to see anything in Moose Jaw: I arrived Thursday night, presented at our panel Friday morning, and flew out early Friday afternoon.

I did take a brief stroll at night and what I saw of Moose Jaw is actually pretty cool: historic in places, hip in others:

downtown moose jaw

On the way back to Regina (you fly into and out of Regina, the nearest ‘big’ city – Moose Jaw is about 45 minutes driving west), we saw thousands and thousands of snow geese. The name is especially appropriate, because, at a distance, they looked exactly like snow and ice:

snow geese

Oh, and just because everyone is probably wondering … in fact there is a huge plastic moose on the road into Moose Jaw. Unfortunately I couldn’t grab a pic of it, as we were speeding along the highway going the wrong direction.

Ah well. That and the fact that it was actually quite a bit warmer in Moose Jaw than in Vancouver will be my two abiding memories of the city.

Moodle, an open-source learning management system

March 17, 2005
John Koetsier
news

I’ve recently installed and configured Moodle, an open-source learning management system (LMS). It took about 5 minutes – unbelievable.

The testbed Moodle is for a course I’m taking, ETEC 510 (Educational technology 510), which is part of the University of British Columbia’s Master of Educational Technology program.

(You gotta love the “Untitled Document” page header on that link … for some reason those who work to bring technology into education almost invariably have the lousiest websites.)

In any case, Moodle is a very cool application that has significant functionality. For those who are interested, my installation of Moodle is right here.

I’ve just started to put a course on it that will be further developed as part of a project that a group of us in the class will be working on. If there’s anyone out there that would like to play with an LMS, drop me a line and I’ll likely give you an account with teacher privileges.

(You can get demo access at Moodle’s site, but nothing will be saved for any length of time there … I think they flush the database daily.)

Odyssey of the Mind

March 14, 2005
John Koetsier
news

My daughter Gabrielle participates in Odyssey of the Mind, an organization that promotes fun learning in groups about technical issues.

Odyssey of the Mind is a school-based, world-wide program that promotes creative problem solving for students from kindergarten through college. Under the guidance of a coach, teams of five to seven students learn creative thinking and problem solving skills while finding innovative solutions to a variety of technical and performance problems.

Last week, she had a competition at Heritage Woods high school in Port Moody, BC.

Heritage Woods is a brand-new high tech school – in fact, I met the principal, Doug Shepherd, while he was working on getting the school designed and built. Every classroom has a LCD projector, and while funds ran a little short, plans originally included one-to-one computer with laptops or tablets.

Technology aside, the school is fairly amazing. Built on a mountaintop, the Arthur Eriksen-like architecture warranted a few photographs:

The front of the school is fairly non-standard. No bricks here:

school front

Somewhat modernistic bike storage:

school, bikes

The main school hall is university-like … almost a forum. It’s lined with offices, shops, and eateries:

school, hall, forum

More corners and angles:

The sports field has an amazing view … you kind of feel perched on the mountain:

sports field

Oh, and the competition?

Gabrielle and her team had to build a balsa wood structure that could support a lot of weight while only massing 15 grams itself. (Apparently the world record is something like 800 pounds.)

Unfortunately, her classmate laid the crusher board down too fast – the crusher board that would have supported the weight evenly on the balsa structure. Crash!

Ahh well – next time!

My 8-year-old bookworm daughter

March 8, 2005
John Koetsier
news

Gabrielle, who’s 8 years old, is re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia, a compilation of something like 7 books totalling close to a thousand pages.

narnia, reading, girl, gabrielle

She’s a major bookworm, and I shot this image to capture the moment. But the truly incredible thing is that she first read the series at 6 years of age. Unbelievable.

Of course, at that time she was being home-schooled. Now she’s in a regular school environment and is not progressing nearly as fast as before …

Memories of Florida …

March 2, 2005
John Koetsier
news

Going back through some of my photos from my recent trip to FETC, I came across some that I had to publish ….

single arch

I’ve seen quite a few McDonald’s all over North America and Europe, but I’ve never seen a ‘golden arch.’ As far as I know, it’s usually the ‘golden arches.’ This poverty-stricking Mickie-D’s is somewhere in central Florida … probably around Lakeland.

There’s a boat ramp right around that same area …. with a sign that tells boaters that they have reached (oops!) the end of the ramp:

end of the line

My hotel, the Hilton Grand Vacation Suites right near Sea World in Orlando, had a walkway around a little lake left in the used-to-be-swamp-before-it-became-hotel land … and some enterprising dude thought he’d engage in a little guerrilla marketing:

guerilla marketing

Too bad the entire effect is spoiled by a lousy Geocities web address!