A recent post entitled Education and Bike Riding is typical of his writing and thinking. Here’s an excerpt.

If education is meant to play a similar role – a partially simulated reality to prepare students for the “real world” – it seems a highly successful education would have two features we almost never see:

1 – It would be incredibly short

2 – It would be very hard to tell when it ended

If the goal is to prepare for life – i.e. to make education unnecessary – the faster the simulation can transition into the real, the better. And if living well is the aim, it would seem odd to spend a lot of time learning how in a simulated world and then abruptly be sent out into the real world without dabbling in it with increasing frequency until it began to replace education.

This of course is similar to my thinking over the years. Check out the whole post, it’s really good stuff.

I take that as a truism that every human endeavor has a context among everything else. Nothing exists on it’s own. Even education. I am sure that some school administrators like to think of their schools as their personal kingdoms. When the doors close they have absolute control. To a certain extent that is true, but that doesn’t mean that control is consequence free. Here are some recent headlines I have come across. I’ll try to link them together into a larger picture.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs – This article talks about how human productivity over time has been increasing but until recently has been accompanied with an increase in the number of jobs required. In 2000, that trend stopped. Productivity kept increasing but the rate of jobs created has leveled off. Why?

(H/T MIT Technology Review)

There are several reasons for this.

1. Government regulation has made labor costs increase. (ex. Obamacare)
2. Automation has hit an inflection point where whole new job categories are now candidates for replacing at cost effective rates. A robot doesn’t need benefits.
3. The US Federal Reserve bank has kept interest rates at near zero for a historically long time. This means companies can borrow money at very low rates to pay for automating their business models.

So what effects would this cause in the economy? Because interest rates are so low, people are not getting any interest on their savings. This discourages older workers from retiring and since they are living longer, healthier lives they have that option. Are we seeing that? Very much so.

Survey: Many Older Workers Not Planning On Retiring Soon, If At All

This trend is even affecting Higher Education.

Working Way Past 65

“At the height of the financial crisis, it was unclear how diminished 401(k)s and general economic uncertainty would impact retirement trends for baby boomer professors. But new data suggest that professors are either significantly – or indefinitely – putting off retirement, and not just for financial reasons. Experts say the trend is forcing institutions to rethink traditional faculty models.”

So what happens when older faculty don’t retire? Well, in many Ph.D fields, your main source of employment is in academia. If those jobs aren’t opening up, then you will see a drop in enrollment in some fields that depend on that, such as Humanities.

Humanities Fall From Favor

This will cause tuition income for higher education to fall. Couple this with a poor economy and state funding will also be trimmed, which is also happening.

So what is the solution to all this? Well, usually when people are hungry they tend to take risks, and become entrepreneurs.

America Falls Behind in Creating Rich Entrepreneurs

Oh that’s a problem.  So what is causing it? Aren’t people hungry to improve their lot in life?

H/T Weeklystandard.com

Could it be that people are having their basic needs taken care of and so aren’t taking risks anymore? Is that the only reason people aren’t starting businesses anymore? Well there is also a lot more regulation. Regulate means to slow down and prevent.

(H/T WSJ)

Cause and effect. They still rule everything in society, even education. Of course this is just one interpretation of the headlines. Only time will tell if I am right.

I recently joined Amazon Prime. If you don’t know what that is, you pay one price and for a year you get free 2 day shipping on most items plus a whole bunch of on demand video content. I got it primarily because I have a 5 month old and having the fast shipping for small items is useful to me. Even so, I have been exploring the instant video library. Overall, I already have most of it on Netflix but unlike Netflix, if you find a video you can’t get on instant video, you have the option to buy it right then via Amazon’s store. Admittedly, this isn’t a new concept but it’s very seamless.

Often times when you go through these video libraries, you will find videos that are not exactly the latest and most popular ones. Nonetheless there are markets for them. This got me thinking though, could education be like this?

Imagine an online repository of education content. This content will be lessons aggregated from providers from around the world. Many of these lessons such as basic concepts will be free. Some will be subsidized by the government or by private providers. For example, churches might provide religious lessons for free. You can try these lessons out and see if you can learn from them. If you like it, you can purchase more lessons for a small fee. If you don’t like them, there will be many other providers teaching essentially the same thing. Find one you like. The nature of this content will run from just recorded live lectures to online live sessions at certain times, to machine generated lessons, to complete semester based courses at major universities. For many of these courses you won’t get any credit but there would be an option to buy the assessment from a variety of providers. Some assessment providers would have a different reputation and therefore open up more doors in society. For example, you might be able to take a course from Harvard Business school, but until you buy the assessment it might not be as much use to you. Who knows?

It’s important to understand the technology to do this exists now. What would need to change is the economics of higher education, and I think that will happen soon.

As always, I invite comments!

Apple Event

1. Apple has added some new features to their iOS7 that used to be provided by third party apps. This of course puts many of those companies out of business. Remember, Apple is essentially a closed system by design. Still, as long as they keep selling products, developers will keep making apps for them. It’s a battered wife syndrome.
2. Apple has connected Siri with more services. I’m still not impressed until they open it up for third party app makers. Apple can’t compete against the rest of the world together in terms of innovation. This makes sense though when you remember that Apple is a hardware company not a software company.
3. Nearly everything they talked about was evolutionary in nature, not revolutionary. That’s fine but won’t keep Apple in the tech lead for much long. Their slogan is “Think Different”. This year is was “A Little Better”.

E3

1. Microsoft and Sony unveiled their new consoles and talked quite a bit about them. I don’t really like game consoles because I’ve never been comfortable using game controller. It is notable though that both consoles can do quite a bit more than just play games. They are really just a massive hunk of computation and graphics always connected to the Internet. They would be a very good platform for certain types of online learning but they aren’t mobile.
2. There are a proliferation of open source game consoles now. The tech is getting so cheap that this becomes practical.
3. Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize this. Their XBox One is going to be $500. That’s quite expensive and is actually undercut by Sony’s PS4 at $400. Price matters, especially when PC costs are dropping rapidly.
4. The games are getting to be very realistic and yet aren’t totally photorealistic yet.

Imagine a learning environment that has this level of quality. Almost exactly a year ago I posted the trailer for Assassin’s Creed 3. Here’s what Assassin’s Creed 4 will look like. Wow!

As I said last year, this is how to learn about history.

The topic was about is the school system evolving and if so, is it evolving fast enough. My opinion is no, it’s not evolving. As a system it is setup to promote standardization, which by necessity discourages any sort of genetic variations. Any permutation in the system provokes a response. Sometimes it is the teacher’s union squashing charter schools. Every 8 years it is a new federal program to yoke the local systems into a nation standards system. Still, that’s not what I wanted to write about. (see The Guidance System Of Education)

I am now 40 . This means I am twice as old as a typical college student. I am officially of a different generation than them. However, this isn’t just me saying “kids these days don’t understand nothin!”. I wonder if there really are differences in our brains caused by technology.

You see, our brain is what is called a neural network. These are different from regular computers in that they are specialized in adapting to whatever conditions they have to deal with. With prolonged exposure to certain stimulus, the brain will become specialized in responses. There have been brain scans which show even certain areas of the brain will be different sizes depending on what a person’s occupation is.

When a child is very young, say before the age of 4 they have brains that are very very flexible. We call this neuroplasticity. As I understand it, this means that very young children’s brains will adapt very easily to new things. This is why we don’t have an accent in our first language. We learned it when we were very young therefore learned it perfectly. When you pick up a language later in life, you almost always have an accent because we can’t adapt as easily anymore.

When I was a kid, I had a TV with 3 channels plus maybe 2 UHF stations. If you wanted to find out a fact you had to get out an encyclopedia or go to the library. It was really a different time and therefore my generation’s brains developed differently. With the massive influx of information our kids are now exposed to, could it be evolving their brains? Will they be a slightly different species in 20 years? Maybe.

I found this really cool TED talk that sparked my thinking.

Among recent college graduates who majored in English, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; for philosophy and religious-studies majors, it was 9.5%; and for history majors, it was also 9.5%, according to a report this month by the Georgetown Public Policy Institute that used data from 2010 and 2011.

By comparison, recent chemistry graduates were unemployed at a rate of just 5.8%; and elementary-education graduates were at 5%.

Because of the ability of such information to become more widely known, students have adjusted their plans accordingly. As of 2010, only 7% of college students chose a humanities degree. Why? Because they want jobs.

“People say you should do what you love,” Mr. Lytle said during a break from his job giving tours of the Ivy League campus Wednesday. “But the reality is that it’s kind of a tougher economic time, and we do have to worry about living after graduation. I don’t want to be doing what I love and be homeless,” he added.

(H/T Wall Street Journal)

Most educators who talk about reform like to talk about teaching, and tests and technology. I like to talk about economics because I have come to realize that money is what drives all the other things. In good times, nothing tends to change. In bad times, reform becomes not only possible, but necessary. So should be scrap the humanities? Well, I get to that in a moment but really the decision won’t be in the educators hands. The students will decide. As I have said often, what will happen if 10% of incoming freshmen decide to stay home? Nationally humanities related majors have fallen from 14% of all students in 1966 to 7% in 2012. What is crazy is that most of that decline happened in just 5 years in the early 70s. What happened then? Prolonged economic bad times plus societal unrest following the Vietnam war. Same thing that is happening today.

Despite all of this, I am a supportive of learning about humanities. If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you will know by now that I don’t like wasted resources. I think it’s a huge waste to get a humanities degree in exchange for say 100,000+ dollars in debt. Despite this I think there is a lot of value in liberal arts courses. A person will be a lot more rounded than if they just take computer science classes for example. As our economy goes through a series of massive disruptive changes, a bit of philosophical rounding would be quite useful.

It’s important to restate something here. The people who are choosing not to take humanities courses of study aren’t going it because they don’t like it, they are doing it because it costs way to much. If college was 10% of the current cost, I bet many more people would take it. Not only that, but more people would take courses just for the joy of learning. To make that happen, the economics of schooling must radically change. They will, but I’m not sure all the colleges will be willing to adapt.

There are many technological storm clouds of change on the horizon approaching education. Economics is the wind driving them along. A bad economy hastens their approach. Get ready to get wet.

Nonetheless, humans have exhibited the ability to create emotional attachments to all sorts of things. Pets are a good example. My two cats mean a great deal to me and I believe they feel something for me too. We also develop an affinity for cars, and other sorts of inanimate objects. We refer to ships as “she” in the US Navy and “he” in the Russian Navy.

As you may have noticed, one of the key technology trends I am watching this year is Machine Generated Content or Machine Learning. This is enabled because I believe that sensors and a computer’s ability to understand them are at an inflection point. Computer vision, biometric sensors, audio transcription and many other abilities are rapidly approaching practicalness. We will see this in more and more IT related fields, which as a side effect will start replacing humans in some jobs.

So back to my original topic. Can computers emote with humans? Or at least fake it enough that humans won’t notice the difference? Well, the first thing that has to happen is computers have to be able to read body language and facial expressions. Here is a very cool (and a little creepy) video that shows exactly that. (H/T Gizmodo)

Apparently they are using the current Kinect camera system that comes with the XBox 360 game system. The next gen Kinect coming this fall with XBox One will be 4 times more accurate apparently and be able to track multiple people at once.

Imagine this then on your computer while you are taking online classes. The virtual teacher will be able to tell how the student is doing by paying attention to the same non verbal cues a human teacher will see. The difference is there is a 1 to 1 relationship here. The virtual teacher will be able to suggest the student take a break, explain the lesson again, or even engage in small talk. Will it replace teachers? I’m not sure if this is enough but it is a big step in that direction.

(cc) Wikimedia Commons

People who talk about disruptive innovation often use the news business as an example. It used to be that the major news papers were the end all of news in the US. They were very profitable and stable institutions. No more. Today, pretty much all newspapers have declining circulation and plummeting revenues. Not only that, but their whole mission has been disrupted by the Internet.

With all of these storm clouds over them, the newspapers are making changes. One that caught my eye lately was from this story. (H/T The Verge)

The Chicago Sun-Times this week laid off all 28 of its staff photographers, and has reportedly begun training its remaining reporters on “iPhone photography basics.”

Such a lot to glean from that first sentence!

1. The newspapers doesn’t need full time photographers. They will use a combination of their own reporters and free lance photographers.
2. Laying off the full time photographers allows for more flexible resource allocation. You only get them when you need them.
3. Cameras in cell phones have advanced in quality so much that it is now practical for a reporter to take pictures of stories with their phones. This drastically decreases the costs of each photo (when you factor in the cost of a professional camera and photographer).
4. Replacing very expensive technology (pro camera) with a much lower cost one and replacing expensive labor (pro photographers) with lower cost ones (reporters) is the essence of disruptive innovation.

So can any of this apply to education? Well let’s see.

1. Both are in the business of imparting information to consumers.
2. Both rely on specialized labor (teachers, photographers) and expensive equipment (schools, cameras).
3. Both are being affected by cheap technology.

Admittedly there are lots of differences in the examples but I still think we can use this as food for thought. I’m expecting a lot more schools to outsource teaching via online courses. I’m also expecting a splitting of the role of a teacher into an online lecturer and in classroom facilitator.

I grew up building Lego and my son will too. I just realized that with 3d printing you can actually build Lego compatible parts can’t you? Eventually you will be able to embed electronics into 3d printed objects, which will really kick off a revolution in electronics.

Anyway, these sorts of toys are exactly what will help prepare children for this century.

By the way, the plural of Lego is…Lego. Who knew?

With the rate of technological progress now we are finally starting to see problems humanity has always had starting to be solved. For example, people have lost limbs since they were cavemen and the best we have been able to do it replace them with a prosthetic that is unresponsive. I came across this amazing video that shows a mind controlled prosthetic arm. (H/T Gizmodo)

Now that is amazing! A constant theme on this blog is that people just don’t understand how fast things are progressing now. They think that 10 years from now we will have computers in classrooms and they will be faster of course but will have the same basic capabilities as we have today. This is not accurate because progress isn’t linear it’s exponential which is hard for us to grasp.

Keep in mind the iPhone has only been out for 7 years. How far will that technology go in the next 10? Keep an open mind and don’t rule anything out.