I was looking at my Blogger stats and discovered that someone found my site by googling "help i'm addicted to wasting time on the internet." I googled it and asked an acquaintance to do the same (since Google results are personalized), and it turns out my article on Internet time-wasting is hit #3-#5, depending on who searches for it. Nice. Interestingly, it goes down with "i'm addicted to wasting time to the Internet," and doesn't come up if you just google "addicted to wasting time on the internet."
Those who started reading my blog from the beginning know that I started off by explaining an interesting example from an online course on Coursera. To me, online courses are one way of exposing my mind to new ideas that break my preconceptions and defy conventional wisdom. Letting go of long-held ideas is critical to getting anywhere in science. But while I currently treat online education as a fun side project, there is a good debate going on as to what the role of online education will be in general for K-12 and college. Since it's the new thing, everyone wants to know to what extent it will replace traditional classroom learning. In this NY Times article Mark Edmundson, a professor at University of Virginia appears to argue against the widespread use of online education, saying there's nothing you can get from an online course that you can't get from a good book. I largely disagree.
I agree only with his thesis, "But can online education ever be education of the very best sort?" Well sure, it can't be the BEST by itself, but it sure beats the average educational experience in the US. In my opinion, education isn't about learning facts, it's about learning how to make arguments and how to understand and solve problems. And yes (agreeing with Edmundson), this can't be accomplished in a one-way didactic lecture. It needs dialogue and requires students to get to the answer themselves, with proper cultivation from the professor. However, I disagree that this says anything about the value of online education in the grand scheme of things. I don't think online education is meant to completely replace classroom learning, and certainly won't replace the best professors at the best universities. Learning how to solve problems requires some starting facts (and in science, LOTS of starting facts), and those facts should be communicated in the most efficient and organized manner. When done properly, one-way didactic lectures synergize with books (rather than being redundant). And no, I don't find it likely that every teacher individually optimizes the communication of those facts. Furthermore, in many school systems this is so inefficient that they spend all their time lecturing facts and no time on critical thinking. Only a few lucky students get real dialogue learning, since you inherently need small classroom sizes for that. Thus online education, taught by THE best educators (like, the best in the world), would go a long way to improving K-12 education. Then teachers can focus on problem solving sessions rather than lecturing facts.
I envision two parts to future education (both K-12 and college): 1) one-way lectures taught by the very best people who have developed the best ways to explain something. These can be online and available for everyone in the world. 2) actual teachers or TAs that focus entirely on face-to-face dialogue. They don't provide any actual information- they present a problem and work with the students to reason through the problem, using information that they learned in the lectures. They are more like older colleagues than anything else. In college, I often learned way more in small discussion sections than in lecture. Lectures are necessary but not sufficient for education.
In fact, when I served as a TA, there was one module that I didn't know anything about. So what did I do? I studied it just enough to get an intuitive feel for it, and then I just pummeled my students with questions while working through problems. I didn't provide a single answer for them (because I didn't know how to solve the problem), and if they asked a question I just asked a question back. The result? In my student evaluations, they specifically mentioned how well I taught that module. Real teachers don't need to know the answer.
A crime-prediction algorithm takes crime data and balances information on the day, week, month, year, and decade scale to figure out where crime is statistically most likely to strike next in the city. Maybe a certain part of the city sees more crime frequently around the holidays, for example. Humans can't physically process and balance all of the data, so let a computer do it. This leaves more time for humans to do what they do best- interact with other humans. They show up, talk to people, and just by having a presence decrease crime.
Blog of a die-hard conservative Republican who moves to Canada and of course fears Universal Health Care. However, she soon discovers it's great and that more government control = more freedom for individuals to choose. A far more complicated issue than I'd want to address in a Friday Links entry.
Other random links:
If you're still interested in the the use of technology and online education in K-12, check out The Khan Academy. http://www.khanacademy.org/
ReplyDeleteIt started as one guy's library of Youtube mini lecture videos on specific math topics and has expanded into a major organization providing video content and analytics for students. Salman Khan's TED Talk presents a similar view of the future of K-12 education, but in his vision, students watch one-way lecture videos as homework/prep and work through problems collaboratively in class. Seems like a much better use of classroom vs. homework time. I'm pretty psyched about Khan Academy.