IBM to open research lab in Nairobi: Focus on services (water? sanitation?)!

From Reuters, news of IBM's Nairobi Research Center is a little unclear. Will the center focus on e-governance-kinds-of-things? Or on the housing, sanitation, water, electricity (SCHOOLS) that so many Kenyans need?

U.S. computer services company IBM and Kenya have opened a research lab they hope will save the country billions of dollars by developing technology to improve delivery of public services.

...

Ndemo said while it was hard to quantify the savings from the resulting research, automating various government services would save billions of dollars. "There are several registries, which if we completely automated, our estimate is that we can plough back to the Exchequer up to $10 billion by simply creating efficiency through higher productivity," Ndemo said.

IBM, which has a presence in more than 20 countries on the continent, said the single biggest challenge facing African cities was improving services such as water and transportation.

NY Times reports that this move is a signal that IBM leadership believes Africa will be a growth region over the next few years. On the other hand, the move could be seen (perhaps more accurately) as a hedge.

STEM — Why doesn't the "E" stand for "Evolution"?

Here are the results from Gallup's latest survey of US ignorance. Forty-six of us believe that god created humans as is; 32% will buy a time-based process (evolution) but with the gudenance of god; only 15% of us believe that natural selection is the sole driver of the evolution of things living to their current states. 

As Scarecrow points out at Firedoglake, perhaps the percentages on this poll give us a better assessment of the US education system than students' math scores in their Race to the Top.

And based on these scores (not broken down by age), there's no race, we're not nearing the top. We are complicit in raising a generation of the misinformed. 

Conectar igualdad: A principal in Argentina makes the _standard_ case for tech

From the blog the young and the digital comes a short statement from the principal of a Buenos Aires secondary school on the impact that the Argentinian 1:1 initiative, Conectar igualdad, will have on her students:

When I asked the Director how she hoped Conectar Igualdad would impact her school she did not hesitate.  Speaking through a translator she explained that the availability of the netbooks and the chance to gain a least some basic computer literacy—the use of spreadsheets, word processing—would convince some students to continue their education.  In fact, many of the students persuaded their parents to attend this school precisely because the netbooks would be available.  Conectar Igualdad has promised to give each student who finishes school a netbook.  The opportunity to connect learning to young people’s digital lives is often regarded as a source of motivation to further develop a learner identity. Like many other parts of the world some of the most economically disadvantaged communities in Argentina view technology as essential to getting a quality education.

Unless I'm missing the boat (always likely), the upshot is that technology in schools supports a motivational play: Kids will be more enthusiastic about learning if they use technology; enthusiastic and tech-enabled kids will, furthermore, stay in schools because there's a netbook in their future if they complete secondary education. 

Terrif. (I'm not arguing with the truth of tech's motivational impact. Or about the need for motivation.) 

As a long-term strategy, using technology to increase motivation is, well, not very long-term.

As the cost of tools comes down—as it has, sufficiently to enable the MOE of Argentina to dangle netbooks as bait—the scarcity-based value of those tools to the students will diminish in lock-step. (Try dangling a mobile phone in front of those kids. They can already see phones in their futures, so you won't get much of a bump.) 

OK, maybe a short-term strategy is what's called for.* But at the end of the day—or the end of the program—you're still likely to have massive educational inequality, with students in poor areas attending schools with under-performing teachers, irrelevant curricula, lousy instruction and little learning. And the "enthusiasm gap" will have widened again while you've spent what you can spend on a short-term fix.

*I'm aware that Conectar Igualdad also offers free online courses to students, PD to teachers and a few other supports (learner management software, anyone?). But there's nothing (so far as I've seen) to suggest that CI plans anything other than to increase the appeal and efficiency of schooling that's currently failing kids. Real change is hard, but real change is essential.

Update on Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 1:13PM by Edmond Gaible

1.7 million netbooks distributed to date. Just for grins, add two zeros to 1,700,000 and you've have a guess at the program's capital costs (170,000,000 for the math-disinclined, and that's not TCO). Hmm.

Update on Friday, January 20, 2012 at 2:30AM by Edmond Gaible

WHAT MIGHT CONECTAR IGUALDAD DO INSTEAD (OR AS WELL)? 

The main problem—at least per the principal interviewed in the post—is that kids aren't completing secondary school. The netbooks increase motivation to stay in school, but they don't make a sustainable approach. Here are some other ideas: 

1 - Launch a school-to-work type program that focuses on getting disadvantaged high-school graduates into the work force. (I know that Argentina's economy is challenged. But perhaps some of the $177 million spent on laptops can be redirected to subsidize graduates' wages and training.) 

2 - Launch a special-scholars program for promising graduates, providing them with admission to a top-flight university and paid tuition. 

3 - Set up an online community for teachers that connects them to 1) each other; 2) OERs to address otherwise unbridgeable content gaps and practice gaps. A terrific choice would be to replicate the ConnectedPD program offered by Monterey Institute of Technology in Education (MITE) under the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC). 

Personalized learning: Pearson is leading investor in Knewton

Pearson Education, the largest education company in the world, has invested heavily in Knewton, a company that has a focused on development of Adaptive Learning Platform (tm); Knewton's algorithm (etc) will be integrated into Pearson's series of titles for higher education—the MyLab series that addresses math skills, reading, writing skills. 

What's this mean? And what's it mean for education in developing countries? 

I'm not at all positioned to give anything other than a partial analysis. However there are a few points that are salient, even to me. Note that ALL of these points are offered under the assumption that that Knewton algorithm and software provide effective, personalized learning that enable university students to build foundational skills and in some instances (statistics? math?), develop higher-level math-operational skills—that the product works as advertised, in other words. 

(And note that the most recent "What works in math" review addressed Carnegie Learning's "Cognitive Tutor" software, a product that competes, broadly, with Knewton math products. The What Works Clearninghouse reviewed 24 studies and states that the CL product "was found to have no discernible effects on mathematics achievement for high school student." Let us say charitably that the jury is out on software-based adaptive teaching and learning.) 

Implications, general

• The term "personalized learning" will be co-opted by machine-mediated learning in higher ed and possibly in K12. (Pearson and Knewton are exploring potential developments there.) 
• Colleges and universities, already feeling the pressure of money (or lack of same) will cut staff, hiring fewer lecturer-level / graduate-student staff to teach first-year courses. (As someone who put himself through graduate school teaching undergraduates to write, I'm somewhat dismayed by this. But I'll try to remain objective.) 
• Even in entry-level or remediating courses, machine-based personalized and adaptive instruction isn't going to provide the critical thinking skills that are also essential for success in college disciplines. (And let me posit here that critical thinking in humanities and social sciences are analogous in math to a combination of conceptual and applied skills—in other words, we solve problems in all areas via a combination of high-level [conceptual or theoretical or structural] understanding and concrete/practical understanding.) 

Question, general 

Again assuming that the software provides the intended impacts:  

• Will the Pearson / Knewton combine lead to more disadvantaged students either entering college, especially in STEM-related fields? 
  
  
• Will university curricula skew even more toward competency and skill-based learning? 
  
  
• What will the impact of reduced opportunities for entry-level university teaching positions be?

And now, a few items on developing countries (where I might be on more solid ground in terms of the germaneness of my speculative approach)... 

Implications, developing-country education
And in this section, we add the further assumption—a reasonable one, IMHO—that costs of ICT access will decrease while access to ICT and the quality of the experience of using ICT both improve dramatically over the course of the next few years....

• As access to ICT increases in universities, the Pearson/Knewton combine will be successful—in part because the skill levesl of entry-level teachers will be questioned. 
  
  
• Fewer expat graduate students (attending universities in developed countries) will finish their programs—as a result of reduced teaching opportunities—so that gaps in available teaching skills (see above) will increase. 
  
  
• Matriculation rates into developing-country universities will be challenged by increased opportunities for machine-supported e-learning at private developed-country and "stateless" schools. 
  
  
• Overall competencies among first-year college students will increase over time, however a "boundary-layer gap" will emerge among first-year graduate students (see above). 

Questions, developing-country education 

• Will the P/N combine develop separate content or make tweaks to its algorithm in response to different learning styles or approaches that arise from cultural and educational differences among developing-country learners? 
  
  
• Will donor agencies fund country- or NREN-level investments in MyLabs or other P/N-style products?
  
  
• If donor-agency funding is forthcoming,* will the P/N combine gain the kind of clout in terms of ICT4E projects that the Big Three (Intel, Cisco, Microsoft) have acquired? 
  
  

*USAID (which is the bi-lateral agency of the United States that funds education projects in developing countries, and you will note that P/N are titularly US companies) has included higher education as a target in is current 5-year education strategy. To provide context, secondary education, as well as primary education outside of literacy and numeracy, are not targeted. Thus there's at least a reasonable chance that USAID-served countries could swing funding for a P/N-driven higher-ed program. 

Finally, many of the world's most distributed university systems are located in developing countries. These include the massive open universities (IGNOU in India, Wits in South Africa) and some of the larger geograhically distributed systems such as that of Indonesia or University of the West Indies in Barbados and throughout the Caribbean. For these large, distributed, high-impact systems, investments in P/N-driven solutions would seem very likely. All of these large, distributed, bottom-of-the-pyramid systems are taking steps to radically increase their e-presence. They remain, however, weakest where P/N is strong. (In fact, if I were running the P/N thing, I would get a sales team focused specifically on developing countries. Tomorrow, if not today.) 

David Wiley explains it (almost) all to you

David Wiley's 1000-word contribution to the cool Change: Edu, learning & tech course offers a lot of leverage on seminal events in learning technology that took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s: 

Many learning objects researchers and funding agencies were pushing to fully automate the selection and assembly of learning objects, essentially driving all human participation in the design of instruction (and all human interaction during learning) out of the educational experience, because humans are too “expensive.”

....Of course, the universal, ambient assumption underlying the reusability paradox is that learning objects must be used “as is” due to their copyright status. This realization allowed me to connect my passion for openness to my academic work on learning objects. From 2004 until today I continue to focus a good portion of my thinking and work on open educational resources – “learning objects with an open license.”

Mr Wiley's smart, committed and compassionate approaches to learning have, incidentally, given him a unique perspective on the history of educational technology in American and worldwide. However, his presentation of this perspective on the past isn't entirely comprehensive, which begs questions about the forces underlying the key issues that educationists are grappling with today.

The learning-objects/learning-automation nexus that Mr Wiley describes was driven, flogged even, by billions of dollars that were injected into education-technology by the US Dept of Defense. DoD was mesmerized by precisely the learning-object problem that Mr Wiley points out: How to design, tag, store and serve LOs that could be re-used to create compelling content cost effectively and on the fly. DOD funded among other things the Advanced Distributed Learning lab, which drove--flogged, even--the development of SCORM (Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model), a specification for making LOs shareable by lots of different Learning Management Systems, and one of the bedrocks of interoperability among today's LMSs, Virtual Learning Environments and other platforms. SCORM was, especially because it provided an early rule-set for XML, the mother of all standards (in online learning). 

Well and good. Mr Wiley's and others' work on LOs in the 90s and 00s walked the discussion away from military training and over to K12 and higher education—although the US military's emphasis on automation and cost savings can still be discerned in the configuration of Virtual Learning Environments and their resources. 

But we need to perform due diligence in relation to the origins of OERs, by traveling back up the roots of our current discussions of open content to better understand the underlying forces and actors that are driving that conversation as well. Why have OERs emerged at this time as critical, or potentially critical, means of improving education? How is the emergence of OERs similar to the emergence of LOs/automation? How different?