Android, iPad & iPhone to eclipse desktop internet in 2011 (maybe)

from today's NYT:

"(Gartner) analysts anticipate that as soon as this year, mobile phones and tablets will eclipse desktop and laptop computers as the primary ways that people access the Internet."

And in schools???

Hahahahaha!

(link to come, I'm reading a "real" newspaper, or at least a paper one. And yes, I know the photo shows a kindle, not a real tablet, but I took it yesterday on BART [b4 I saw the news;)]

Perils of messing with the supply of teachers in Indonesia

Two great teachers in the highlands of Papua (a remote place)

A quick note in response to Rob Van Son's rich post on the edutech debates (I'm traveling, I'm using my phone for this post, it could be casual). Mr Van Son generally suggests that it's impossible to increase the number of effective teachers worldwide because: 1) millions of them would be needed; 2) paying their salaries year in and year out would require a massive shift in funding priorities; 3) how could they be trained in a timely manner.

The following post might provide another way of looking at the information in Mr Van Son's otherwise hyper-Informed post. In many countries, rural schools have few students [ok there are a lot of factors in play in these situations]. Small numbers of students is one reason that multi-grade classrooms are so strongly supported by donors, and by some ministries of edu.

Analysis of this situation in Indonesia suggested that many classes in rural areas were unsustainably small. And that teachers in those schools were poorly educated and trained. These observations led to the 2005
"teacher law," requiring that all teachers have a 4-year degree and promising that those teachers would receive double the current pay (with an additional 50 percent increase if they agreed to a posting in a REMOTE [not rural, most of Indonesia is rural] area). 

These teacher-focused measures demonstrate how unintended consequences can mar even the cleverest efforts. 

Enrollment in schools of education is rocketing because the potential pay for teachers (especially if you sign up to work in a remote area [another story, which I hope someone else addresses]). One professor explained to me that his school would graduate about 200 Teachers in 2009, but none of them would be placed in government schools.

Part of the problem is that management of the schools themselves is split between the central government and the provinces (as a result of radical decentralization following the end of the Suharto dictatorship).nas in many systems, the central govt simply can't trim its teacher corps as it would like.

But the simpler problem is also the grander problem: by increasing teachers' pay, MONE increased the supply of new teachers, while its efforts to increase class size (and decrease the number if teachers overall) has effectively reduced demand for teachers. If these new graduates were commodities, we'd call the phenomenon an inventory surplus; as it is, we can call it policy-generated structural unemployment.

For a great and far-more-detailed analysis of this problem--and a good example of impact analysis of policy in general, see "the economics of teacher supply in Indonesia" by Dandan Chen of the world bank.

More on twitter, txting & tablets in school

I missed the money quote in the post below. And that is:

"...the Kineo can only access websites that are pre-programmed by an administrator or teacher, and its messaging capabilities have been disabled to make sure students use it for learning, not texting."
Made by the writer of the article, Dennis Pierce, editor of sSchool News.

"learning, not texting"! So check out this bit, also sent by C L:

Use of Twitter is linked to higher grades, study finds
According to a new study published in The Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Twitter can bolster student engagement and grade-point average.
The study followed 125 pre-health majors at a midsize public university. Those using Twitter, says Rey Junco of Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, the lead author, had an average G.P.A. half a point higher than their counterparts in a non-tweeting control group. They also more frequently participated in class, sought out professors and discussed course material outside of class.
Twitter was used for discussions, questioning professors in and out of class, receiving feedback and reminders, and reviewing course concepts reduced to terse fundamentals, all via laptop or cellphone.
Students seemed to find the medium a less intimidating way to express themselves in large lecture halls. “Twitter was a useful, low-stress way to ask questions,” Mr. Junco said.
As one student wrote on Twitter: “One of my favorite parts of the day is when I’m sitting in Bio lecture and a tweet has been sent out through the class account and everybody looks at their phone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/world/asia/10iht-educBriefs10.html?src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/world/asia/index.jsonp

iPad/Android lock down (vs unlocked tools for schools)

Do we want our kids learning with "information appliances," or with the robust, flexible and powerful tools that are available? That is the question, or at least that's the question posed by Brainchild with their new Android-based table PC, the kineo.

According to Dennis Pierce of eSchool News, "Perhaps best of all for educators, the Kineo enables school leaders to specify the applications that students can use on the device by “locking down” apps they don’t want students to use." And from the same article: "“A teacher can have full confidence that when her students are working on Kineos, they are on task and won’t get into trouble,” said Brainchild President Jeff Cameron...." 

Well, yes, perhaps. But this is really a question that's begging for research. Do appliance-style learning devices (such as the Kineo) deliver better results in classrooms than more flexible, consumer-oriented products (e.g., iPAD)? Under what conditions--in terms of teachers' capacities, classroom management models, curriculum constraints? And what competencies? 

Here's a student quoted in the same article: 

“The Kineo … is like a portable textbook with study guides, calculators, [and] movies that is handy and portable, that you can pretty much bring anywhere instead of using textbooks and big bulky computers,” said a student at Manatee Middle School. “I have a lot of trouble in math, and this device is just so helpful with that, because it has study guides and it lets me just practice all the things that I need.”

However, as Claudia L'amoreaux sez in an email about this bit of sophistry, "it's the learning-not-texting mentality....uh guys, anything that motivates kids to write thousands of messages a day can pro'ly be used for 'learning.'"

Well, BC has posted a bunch of research, but AFAIK it's comparing nuts to bacon--"conventional math instruction" with instruction augmented by BC software and tools. I dunno if this solves anything in relation to purchasing decisions, except, again, to purchase (something) or not to purchase (something). 

Voices from Tahrir Square on Twitter via SayNow tech

You can hear from Egyptians directly about the events unfolding in Tahrir Square and in the Mubarak regime. Google, Twitter and SayNow (in decreasing order of market capitalization) have combined to enable Egyptians to call 3 numbers. SayNow enables Egyptians to dial one of three international numbers, leave a voice message, which is logged instantly on the #egypt hashtag.

You can also hear the (mostly Arabic language) "tweets" at twitter.com/speak2tweet 

Very cool. Very, very cool.

You can read more about it in today's New York Times.