I have talked at length that in order for learning to occur, you just need a source of information and someone willing to learn it. You don’t need a student wellness center, a dorm, a cafeteria, nor a Deputy Associate Dean of Diversity Coordination and Facilitation (I made that last one up. Or did I?). (see The Empty School: A Thought Experiment)

I have also talked quite a lot about how anything information based that is organized along physical proximity lines is going to be broken up and reorganized. I call this idea the Theory of Disaggregation. In my mind, there is no reason why schools should exist in a location. They should exist as an idea online but not a physical location.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to see an edtech startup like PopExpert. (H/T Techcrunch)If you are trying to learn something you can learn a lot yourself online but sometimes you just want to talk to an expert right? PopExpert is a new site where you can hire experts in a number of fields who will do a live video chat with you to teach you something. It’s still starting up but I imagine things like this will be huge in the future. Imagine you are fixing your toilet. You see something you don’t understand. You can try to do a web search for it, but if all else fails you can connect up with an expert for a few minutes to give you advice. They can even look at your problem via video.

Any industry that is primarily information based can use this technology. As I see it, this adhoc, peer to mentor relationship system is very disruptive to the ways we have learned previously. Awesome.

Are you ever totally consumed by something? Young people these days seem to be totally involved in social media, video games and other forms of entertainment. I’m sure every teacher wishes their students would be even 1/10th as interested in their own educations. Well, there are some students who are like that, but they aren’t in school…

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story called What Professors Can Learn From ‘Hard Core’ MOOC Students.

Some of the people in the article are taking as many as 7 MOOC classes at once.

Nearly 100 students using Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, have completed 20 or more courses. And more than 900 students have finished 10 or more courses, according to the company. That means taking several courses at a time, and racing through as many lecture videos and robot-graded assignments as possible to collect certificates that carry no official credit.

Note that last part; they get no official credit. That’s weird. If you don’t get credit then why do it?

Most are driven mainly by curiosity rather than the desire to show off their certificates to any potential employer, and none has paid for a verified certificate.

There are several other things I found interesting because I have speculated about such things before. First, curiosity drives learning. (see Driven By Curiosity) Second, they are more concerned with their professor than the university offering the course.

When the students talked about the MOOCs they’ve taken, they usually mentioned the professor first. They sometimes couldn’t remember the name of the university offering the course.

I wrote about this already. (see When Teachers Become Rockstars)

Another things the students commented on is they like to have text instruction rather than video because it is easier to go back and find content they want to review. This I think will change when there are accurate machine generated transcripts.

Finally, the article asks the question are students learning as much in MOOCs as they would in a traditional course. This is a bad question. A better question would be what is the rate of return on the investment in time and money? The students are learning a lot because they want to learn it. They are doing it in an environment that is low pressure because a bunch of money isn’t on the line. Turns out, I wrote extensively about this too. (see Searching for a New Model For Learning – Part 4 )

Disruptive innovation doesn’t come down from the top, it comes up from the bottom, like this. Awesome!

There are a handful of technologies I consider society changing in the next 5-10 years. An example of these from the past 10 years is the smartphone. One of these transformative technologies is augmented reality. This is a blending of the Internet with the real world. I think of it like a sixth sense for people in that they will have expanded memories and will be able to be knowledgeable about virtually anything, when needed.

This video is an interview with someone who seems to share my opinion on how big this technology will really be. Enjoy.

(H/T Singularity Weblog)

It is common knowledge that the rate of innovation in technology has been accelerating over the past few decades. Actually it goes back much further than that but let’s keep things simple. So why has the rate of innovation been accelerating? Because the major innovation now is in software, not hardware. Let me explain.

It used to be that we lived in a hardware world. If you bought a machine, it had buttons and dials on it that allowed you to control it’s operation. If a new feature was invented for that machine, you had to buy a new one. This meant that new innovations had to propagate slowly through society as people naturally replace their stuff. A good example is to compare a smartphone with a dumb phone.

Evolution of the Cell Phone

A dumb phone can only do what it has buttons to do. A smartphone can get apps and do many things. A smartphone is actually a computer that can also make phone calls. For the iPhone, Apple didn’t just release the hardware, they also released a lot of software tools that developers can use to make apps. Likewise, when Google released their Google Glass hardware, they also released a software development kit so people can start making apps for it. Then when a new app is released, everyone can update literally overnight. You don’t have to wait till people buy new phones for new features. It’s amazing.

So this enables innovation at the speed of the Internet. A side effect of this is sometimes new innovations can take advantage of existing hardware unexpectedly. I have written a lot lately about the Age of Big Data. This is where computers start to understand the world around them and therefore can digitize what they see. Much of this can be done with our existing hardware so it can just creep up on us. Here’s an example.

I read this article in Fast Company called The Fridge Has Eyes: Cara Gives Anything With A Camera Powers To See Faces, Age, Gender, and More. It is about a startup company creating a product called Cara which can interpret video to be able to derive meaning from it. Mostly this is used to watch people. From the article, here are some of the uses people want to use it for:

In a car, one request proposed, real-time facial detection could monitor a driver’s attention, alerting him if he falls asleep.

In a fast-food restaurant, it could track how many people are standing in line.

In a house, it could help control the temperature based on who is home.

In a bar, it could keep tabs on the gender ratio (though startup SceneTap already does so using a similar technology).

It could even make a toy smile back.

So this is pretty cool so far but this last quote is also significant.

What separates Cara from IMRSV’s previous billboard technology and others like it–and makes it a potential game changer–is that any developer with any webcam can use it for $39.99 per month.

That’s cheap and it can work with any webcam. So how long until an educational company comes up with a system that uses cameras in the classroom to take attendance, and determine who is paying attention? Maybe it can also assess comprehension based on the expression on somebody’s face?

This technology is coming quickly and it won’t take buying a new machine to do it. It might just happen overnight.

(H/T Dilbert)

I agree there is probably a correlation between ADHD and the other things with creativity. Too bad so often it is snuffed out with medication in schools. The comic below is a fake Calvin and Hobbes but is very sad nonetheless. We have to find a way to deal with children with learning issues to help them develop to their fullest potential. I don’t see how you can do this in a classroom.

Fake Calvin and Hobbes

When I started this blog back in Jan 2010, I was trying to investigate how education will change based on new technology. However, when I work on a big problem like that I tend to expand my view to look for root causes. This lead me into the ideas that our education system should reflect the society it is in, and that society has changed a lot since the current education system was created. The biggest changes in society I believe are being driven by my theory of disaggregation, which I define as how society is being reorganized from one based on physical proximity of resources, to one based on information relationships.

I’ve written about 855 posts so far and so when an idea comes along that I haven’t thought of I feel like I missed something. I also get excited. Here’s what I missed.

(cc) kiss kiss bang bang

First came Kickstarter. It is a website that allows people to propose projects and have people contribute funding to help get the project started. What makes this different is it takes the role of a bank or investor. Next came Bitcoin. This is a digital currency. People can actually buy them and they go up and down in price but they are not controlled by any government.

This past week came news of Amazon.com creating their own currency. You can buy Amazon Coins with real money and then buy Apps and such on Amazon.com. This isn’t really that big of a deal because it’s just an abstraction of real money. You can see this any time you go to a video game arcade (yes they are still around). When you go there you buy Tokens from a machine. It helps hide the real cost of the games.

But what finally blew my mind is this story from Singularity University Beyond Banks? Peer-to-peer lending is on the upswing, Google dives in. It’s a great article that talks about new businesses that allow people to lend money to other people without the intermediary of the banks. I mean, why not? Turns out, like Amazon.com proved, you don’t have to have a store to sell things. Perhaps you don’t have to have a building to be a bank? It’s the disaggregation of finance and somewhat blindsided me. Still, it makes perfect sense according to my theory.

As the big banks add more fees and offer zero interest rates, perhaps people will start moving to alternatives? We will see.

(cc) Will Montague

If you use a school network to access the Internet, chances are you are subject to filtering of the sites you visit. Some schools do this very lightly and only block explicit sites. Other schools are very heavyhanded and even block Facebook and Youtube. This may go back to our desire to overprotect our children I suppose. (see Are Schools Producing Fragile People?) No matter what the reason, those days of filtering are finite in number. Samsung has given a preview of 5G network technology. They claim speeds of up to 100 times faster than 4G when it comes out in 2020.

Having been around technology for a long time I doubt the speeds will actually roll out that fast but even so, it should be a substantial jump in performance. I find that 4G is fast enough for most of what I do today but of course applications will always emerge to take advantage of the increased performance. What matters is that even 4G is plenty fast enough to do web browsing from your phone or tablet in a classroom. This gets around school web filtering.

2020 is 7 years away, which is longer than smartphones have been around. Imagine what they will be capable of by then. They will have a direct, high speed connection onto the web and schools won’t have any say in where the student goes. Instead it will be up to whatever morals the parents have instilled, which is the way it should be.

I have written several times now that colleges are digging themselves into a big hole with their investments in expensive facilities. This generates huge fixed costs that aren’t easily gotten rid of. I mean, most businesses can sell off assets in order to adjust to reduced customer demand. How does a college divest itself of a student union, or a million dollar fitness center? In fact the only real area you can cut in colleges is labor costs. Thus you see the determined assault on tenure. This sets the stage for cost reductions if finances go south. This also explains the experimentation with MOOCs. It’s preparation for outsourcing teaching.

I came across this article called Colleges Paying the Price for Expensive Facilities. It has some nice quotes but this one from Jeffrey Selingo the author of College (Un)bound is really interesting.

“Well, they … [improved facilities] in the last decade when enrollment was going up, when money was free-flowing, you know. Most parents were using their homes as ATMs to pay for college, because of the housing market. And now suddenly those bills are coming due, and the problem is that the students are either not there or they’re unwilling to pay the money to fund those things.”

As I have said repeatedly, each college class of freshmen has to make a choice to attend school. A drop of only 20% will blow a big hole in a lot of college budgets. Beware.

First, an update on a story I posted yesterday. I wrote about how Nordstroms was testing a system where they tracked people’s cell phones around one of their stores. They claim it was to just determine where people went in order to determine traffic flow. That may be but they stopped the trial the day after the story went public. Still, I’m sure this sort of thing will happen in the future. It may not be done via cell phones but technology will make it possible nevertheless. They have cameras everywhere already, so maybe image recognition technology will apply here? We will see.

Now for the main topic. I read this story in Psychology Today from 2004 called A Nation Of Wimps. Right off the bat, what a great title. The article talks about how parents and society itself has tried very hard to shield children from any kind of hardship. As a new parent myself I can understand the urge to protect our children but are we doing them a disservice in the long run? Here’s a few choice quotes from the story.

Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. “Kids need to feel badly sometimes,” says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. “We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.”

Yes exactly. I remember my failures from my childhood and can say they have an impact on my behavior even today. We learn so much from failure. We learn how to deal with stress, how to overcome adversity, and in a lot of cases we learn self reliance. It makes people not as fragile. When you make steel, you need a lot of heat.

So what is the effect of this according to the article?

With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they’re robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth.

That’s harsh but aren’t we seeing that in society today? It seems to me that young people are much less ambitious overall than previous generations. By this I mean they are willing to give up their goals if it means it will take hard work.

Teachers have certainly noticed this over time. It used to be that if a student got a bad grade their parents would get on their case. Now often the parents get on the teachers case! Perhaps this explains the rampant grade inflation showing up in colleges?

(H/T NYTimes)

Perhaps that also explains how college campuses are more like 4 star resorts than schools? Or schools that produce multi million dollar gyms?  Is this what is required to keep these fragile kids happy?

So here’s my 64 dollar question. What if this is all intentional? Who benefits by a citizenry who collapse at the first sign of adversity? How about the government? If kids are conditioned to always turn to somebody when something doesn’t go their way, who do they turn to when they become adults? It can only be the government. This reminds me of a website put out by the President last year during the campaign. It is called the Life of Julia. In it, at every point in a fictional woman’s life, she gets to the next part of her life because of a government program.

I don’t want to get too political here. I just believe that everyone and everything does things to help themselves. It’s called enlighted self interest and it governs human behavior. Government is no different because it is driven by people. It wants to get bigger in order to “help” more people. Government is in charge of K-12 school, therefore to a large extent can determine what gets taught. Colleges have more freedom but have to adapt to the kind of students they get from K-12. Perhaps our kids are being made fragile in order to be dependent? Who knows for sure. All I know is I want my son to grow up able to fix his own problems and to be adaptable to and ever changing world.

I am very interested in your thoughts about this, especially from any teachers. Have you noticed a change in durability in the kids over the years?

I’ve been writing this blog since Jan of 2010. I try to write every day but I am not always able to lately with a new kid at home. Still, I have written about 850 posts so far. An interesting side effect I have been noticing is some of the technology I have been writing about is now coming true, or at least is starting to come true. Therefore I am going to start blogging some updates about technologies I have written about.

First, in A Data Driven Society I wrote quite a lot about how we are getting better and more effective surveillance tools. These tools are then being watched by computers and going into databases. This will allow governments (and private companies) to collect data on people in order to predict trends. I speculated on the rise of private surveillance networks. Well, turns out we are starting to see the prototypes already.

For example, Nordstroms is tracking cell phone signals as they move through their stores. They say they are only watching traffic in their store, and this is I’m sure true, but it’s just the start.

Could there be more added to this system? Oh yes, it’s already being tested too. (H/T Newscientist)

Eye-tracking gadget knows just what you’re longing for

“No more sneaking peeks at toys in the mall: SideWays, a new eye-tracking device, will catch you at it. As soon as you walk up to it, it automatically starts tracking what you peer at – which could allow shop owners to show you adverts on a video screen for products that you seem interested in.”

This is just the start of a possible zero-privacy society in which your every move and action is tracked. (see Implications Of Computers With Senses)

Another technology I have been following is augmented reality. I was also particularly interested in the recording capabilities of head mounted cameras. I had mentioned that society does not have any rules to deal with this. This year Google has begun their Google Glass project, which allows recording at any time.

Turns out the backlash has already begun. Controversy grows over Google’s Glass project

If Google Glass takes off, they fear, people will experience life, quite literally through the lens of Google.

The backlash is taking many forms. In Seattle, which coincidentally happens to be the home of Google rival Microsoft, the dive bar 5 Point emerged as the nexus of the opposition after it became the first establishment in the world to ban wearers of Google Glass. That war cry has also been taken up by the website StoptheCyborgs.com whose stated aim is “fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time,” and which offers Google Glass ban signs as well as stickers and T—shirts.

It claims that the device will make hidden cameras ubiquitous, that people will have no way of knowing if they are being recorded, and that merely having the device in operation will furnish Google with an inordinate amount of detailed data about the user.

“There are serious consequences for human society. There will no longer be any distinction between the ‘digital world’ and the ‘real world’. People will make decisions and interact with other humans in the real world in a way which increasingly depends on information that Google Glass tells them,” the site claims.

A few years ago all this was science fiction and yet here it comes for real. The important take away here is all of this technology is going to come to the classroom. How schools react to this will determine if they will become more relevant or less in preparing students for the world outside the classroom.