Week 24

Teaching Tools

We need a collection of teaching tools that will allow everyone to publish education related material from their own personal computer. I think everyone would agree these tools must be open source. Next, it should be decided what are the "capabilities" (to use a military term) that a teaching toolkit needs to have?

First off, off the top of my head 1) a way of publishing video, in a way that lets recorder to switch from "talking head" mode to "capture my desktop" mode. 2) teacher would have to be proficient on creating OpenOffice presentations (or be able to do the equivalent using LaTeX for math related fields), so toolkit has both.

3) For hard science related teaching, there must be a scientific computing package, as well as a symbolic math package. Seeing how George Lucas' Industrial Lights and Magic has been using Python language for years on graphical processing, my bet would be a Python related package would be grand here. There are great packages for visualization that will let teachers creating content in specific domains as well. Teachers in civil engineering can create a 3D model using these tools and publish them online.

We need someone to think about these issues and get paid for it, I just saw an Innocentive project that gave me an idea; You can create project that pays for ideas as well as finished products. So a think-tank or an education non-profit can create a project for around $10,000 and collect all ideas submitted. Winner (or top 10) earn the prize.

I would be interested in any cooky ideas coming from the losers as well.

Tools are very important. Sure a toolset could become a "moving target"; changing as the technology changes, but there can be alternative toolkits competing so people choose one over the other.

Github could and should house the teaching material toolkit source code.

Incentives: Why would a teacher create a nice 3d model and share it online? What in the marketplace would encourage them to do this? Ideas needed. How is payment handled?

T4 Was Good

I saw Terminator Salvation today; it was an enjoyable movie. McG has done a good job. He managed to push the story forward with enough interesting characters and twists, taking all involved 'out of their element' and putting them into situations, exploring what they would do to overcome those difficulties. Superb. 'The universe' created for T4 was interesting too. [spoiler] You have mototerminators, hydrabots, etc. essentially representing army, navy, air forces in real world, with the only difference being that in T4 these forces are completely controlled by machines.

I like the fact that John Connor isn't just some military leader barking orders left and right; he is a kind of a hacker, a tech dude, snatching a mototerminator when he needs a ride, sharing gems of knowledge about how to disable a terminator, knowing his enemy inside out.

But the best part of all was seeing Ahnuld the Terminator "back" in T4. I was like: "Is this the real Ahnuld?". He looked very young, sort of as his T2-self; I did some search and it turns out those images were taken from earlier Terminator movies and inserted into this movie using some CGI magic, and for the body work they used another "bodybuiler turned actor" from Austria no less; so a combinaton of all of that made Arnie the Governator come alive. Those scenes weren't long though, director made sure Arnie outer layer is blasted with some sort of heat weapon so that only the metal insides remain, no more Arnie CGI after that point. It was a nice touch though.

Before I saw the movie I was worried about the reviews and previews hinting that it would be some kind of hi-tech Mad Max; T4 certainly has elements of that, but there is also more to T4 than short-haired version of Mel Gibson runnin around in a motorcycle. You could argue sometimes the movie becomes a Transformers knock-off, but I don't think anyone can claim ownership of the "huge killer bots gone wild" genre - Terminator was there long before anyone dared to tread, so it can do any robot oriented action scene it pleases while still claiming authenticity.

But let me say this; the Terminator universe and story base is so rich that you could make 10 alternate versions of T4 if you wanted to. Imagine the technologies you could let humans have, let them discover so they can utilize them.

Another wish of mine is that final Terminator trilogy to accomplish what Matrix trilogy could not; waging an all out war against Skynet and in the last installation, showing us its total destruction brought about by humans. That would be a satisfactory conclusion.

Did You Know?

https://youtu.be/EOpA9kNb3fk

Curriki

On Twitter I just recevied a reply from @Curriki who mentioned that most of what I wrote about in my post is actually what they are doing right now. The site is curriki.org; worth taking a look. I browsed little bit and will look in detail later. Also, other links I've stumbled upon while following #hackedu are;

Union Square Ventures #hackedu meeting: The transcript from the meeting. I've found it interesting that education can now be disaggregated, broken into pieces giving each piece to a different group, person. Right now educational institutions give the education and a degree (credentialing) at the same time; however credentialing could be given to someone else perhaps, and teaching could be peer-to-peer. Rob Kalin's story was great too. In art school he makes himself a fake ID and goes to MIT classes next door. If you think about it that way, education is really free. He just didn't get credentials for it. His credentials are his companies he built after he got that free education. So, who cares?! Great stuff.

Why Don't Students Like School?: Great article on the psychology of learning. The theory that we do not actually prefer "thinking" if we do not have to, was an interesting theory. Most people prefer "remembering" an earlier solution for a new problem. Here my 3rd Wave brain was screaming in my head "and/but almost all problems are new problems now due to arrival of new technology". The changes in this day and age are just too great to rely on old solutions. So we have to think more. Education needs to reflect this.

Some Reading related to #hackedu

Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst? Damn. That really is possible. Why shouldn't wee see education just like any other part of the economy? If so then, yes, here is a "way" of doing things that is clearly overfunded, highly subsidized, hence forming a bubble, and it can burst! I hope it does (soon).

Old Education, Old Research: This is not related to education per se, but it's sister subject: Research. Does old way of research encourage unethical behaviour? Good question to ask.

US Public Ed Like GM in the 80s: No kidding. Similar to the "bubble" analogy above, this great article questions why education isn't more personalized. If iTunes can suggest you new songs, why can't your education offering be more personalized according to your style, habits, and skills? Great slam on the existing educational system, and I thought the GM analogy which was an industrial era giant itself, was very apt.

Hacking Education by A VC: Just a great article. I am going to be re-reading it soon.

What Would Google Do? Google University? Why not? The sentence cracked me up too; like "what would Jesus do?" :) It shows the status attained by Google in the tech-world I guess.. The article was full of great ideas.