The Concord Consortium

I was on the plane returning from Wednesday’s great Cyberlearning Summit when Apple went live with its announcement about iBooks 2 and its foray into the textbook game. This is particularly relevant, as it applies directly to the concerns about digital textbooks and innovation we’ve been addressing in our calls for deeply digital learning. I’m sure I’ll have more to come, but here are some initial thoughts about this announcement and its implications.

Innovation? In many ways, the announcement was an example of the many things there are to be concerned about regarding shallow innovations in digital learning. The main features touted about digital textbooks were the obvious ones. They weigh less. They don’t fray at the edges. They can include images and videos. You can highlight. You can jump to individual sections, pages, or chapters. These are all good features of digital books, but do very little to move us past the transmissionist pedagogy that textbooks represent so strongly today.

Openness? A second large concern raised by many in the ensuing blogosphere echoes relates to the lack of openness that these textbooks permit. Creation occurs principally or solely (for now) on a Mac, via Apple’s iBooks Author application, and books created with this are for use on the iPad only, not even for use on Mac computers. Somewhat understandable, all, since Apple is all about ecosystems, and the iPad is certainly an imaginably good tool for use in the classroom. However, the strictures extend further in ways that seem relatively unpalatable in the long run. According to the iBooks Author EULA, as Dan Wineman identifies, the mere act of creating books via this application is supposed to legally restrict where they can be sold or distributed. This ranges from surprising to shocking, depending upon your views, and the viability of such a model will remain to be seen. Further, the standard used for iBooks, while a thin wrapper over ePub3, is apparently a closed standard, and the application is unlikely to output in formats that permit content to be used and distributed as widely as should be possible for educational materials.

However, there is a slight silver (gray?) lining involved, as the EULA does make it clear that textbooks created with iBooks Author can be distributed for free at will, seemingly across platforms as well. As long as you don’t ever want to attach a price to the materials, this may provide an out. May is the operative term, however, seeing as Apple has certainly been known to change its terms on various whims in the past.

Deeply Digital possibilities? This is where things get a bit interesting. Taking all the former concerns into stride (which may well be too difficult to do for many), the most intriguing and underreported innovation may be yet to be discovered within this. The possibility of creating custom widgets for iBooks using HTML5 and Javascript holds intriguing ramifications. Depending upon the potential and limitations of these widgets, it may be possible to begin opening up aspects of learning that transcend the mundane and push toward deeply digital learning. It’s yet unclear, and will require some cracks from programmers (in our camp as well as others) to try to stretch the possibilities of these Dashcode widgets for the iPad to see what they can enable. True computational models and simulations, rather than basic interactive images or animations? Access to probeware and sensors? Outside access to tools and data streams? Potential for real-time formative assessment and reporting on student progress?

It’s likely that some, but not all, of these will indeed be possible, and the iPad is a beautiful platform to create things for with creation tools that are usually equally elegant. Whether these push the possibilities of technology toward capabilities that can truly make a difference for teaching and learning or whether Apple’s format and strictures will limit these examples to another small stride or shallow cut at innovative educational technology remains to be seen.

There have been some interesting posts recently demonstrating and discussing control of devices beyond the keyboard. First, every casual gamer’s dream has now come true: you can play Angry Birds using your brain as a controller. The implications for reaching an even higher vegetative state state of flow are simply staggering.

Second, one story that illustrates Apple’s genius in this arena and a second that questions it. If you missed All Things D’s story about the moment that Apple and Microsoft’s touch interface dreams diverged, chug it into your Instapaper queue right now – it’s a great reminder of how far we’ve come in such a short time, and about how Microsoft continued a strange fumble with their Surface platform while Apple managed this transition from practice with the iPhone to full-on victory with the iPad. (I touched on the consumer side of the success of practicing with the iPhone’s interface as readying the public for the concept of the iPad in my Perspective piece a year or so ago.)

Third, an interesting rant from Matt Honan at Gizmodo claims that Siri’s hands-off interface presents the nuanced user experience we have come to expect from Apple. Gruber agrees, and I have to say I do much of the time as well.

And finally, a group in Tokyo is turning everyday objects into interactive devices using projectors and cameras. I particularly like their turning a banana into a functioning telephone through the use of object detection and focused sound beams.

Happy snacking – maybe you can read this whole post without touching your computer. Just think “scroll up” really hard…

We put the last clock radio in our house in the Goodwill pile last week. Seeing it sitting on the pile to go downstairs was a surprising revelation for me. Somehow it felt wrong for a reason I couldn’t place. Then it hit me: a clock radio was my first real gadget purchase.

For those who don’t recall, there was a time when clock radios were quite a novel invention. The ability to wake to the radio instead of some raucous bell was an entirely new concept. And to a budding radio-phile like me, it seemed like the newest of frontiers. I remember looking across the counter at our local Sterling Drug for many a visit, and piling up birthday money and allowance until the mound was enough to purchase this coolest of things. The red glow of the lights and the late-night sessions listening to AM talk radio or trying to pull the strains of Dr. Demento out of the static seem as close now as they did then.

This was a first – a multi-function gadget. And the mere concept of combining the functions was mesmerizing. Now, it’s entirely replaced by one entirely multi-function gadget. I use my iPhone both to listen to radio as I’m falling asleep and to wake me up. Of course, our family point-and-shoot camera and car GPS device are also starting to gather dust at a surprising rate.

This is no new revelation, of course, but the fundamental nature of my feeling at this loss was interesting to note. What other fundamental weirdness will we be in for as technology continues to contract our world of life and transform the world of education? The first time a teacher enters a classroom without a board he or she can write on? The first time a mom realizes she doesn’t need to buy any spiral-bound notebooks at the back-to-school sales? The first time a principal realizes that she can find out about the misconceptions all of her students hold on a given day about science concepts they are studying, even the students who transferred in to school that morning?

Time will tell with all of these. For now, I need a nap – Siri, can you set a timer to wake me up…?

I recently fawned over Joi Ito’s NY Times story about how openness and the Internet change the way we approach innovation and daily life. However, the unabridged version he posted to his blog is actually much better. It’s interesting to think for a moment about this episode.

First, the simple fact that this had to be shortened is reflective of old/new media constraints. Clearly, the costs and space of paper itself drive this need at least partially. Electrons are cheap, and Joi has no problem posting something of any length he wants on his blog. Any new media does not live by these constraints. And the collision of the two is befuddling many in the industry right now. The NY Times online version of this story is the same as the print version as far as I can tell, though it does include a link to the MIT Media Lab. And, in fact, the Times’ forward-thinking hyperlink system is what enabled me to link directly to a highlighted sentence in Joi’s story online.

Now, I understand the necessity of editing things down. The vote-with-your-mouse Internet has made that all too clear. And I benefit significantly from the editing of others. But I think this piece suffered at the hands of old media constraints. Let’s look into it a bit.

First, the description of the creation of X.25 in the NYT article has it as a “standard that seemed to anticipate every possible problem and application.” When I first read that, I questioned why we ended up going with IP after all. Reading Joi’s phrasing, however, tells a different story. He states, “The X.25 people were trying to plan and anticipate every possible problem and application. They developed complex and extremely well-thought-out standards that the largest and most established research labs and companies would render into software and hardware.” The subtleties here describe quite a different proposition. “Trying to plan and anticipate every problem” and developing “complex” standards is not exactly the same thing as “seeming to anticipate every…problem.” From an Agile development point of view, one might in fact become increasingly skeptical of any solution that strives to anticipate every problem. This is part of the point I think Joi is trying to make here, and it is blurred in a subtle, but important, way by this edit.

A second edit that removes important concepts comes in the loss of the reference to the RFC process. To the NY Times’ credit, they have weighed in admirably on this in the past, and it is certainly a bit obscure, so I understand the change. However, for anyone familiar with the story, this nuance shows some of the depth behind how openness triumphed in this case. Not by pure magic, but as a product of carefully managed process and group dedication in equal measure.

Though the Times article captures many of the nuances of argument that the Maker movement parallels much about the early days of the Internet, a subtle change loses meaning here, too. Joi describes 3D printers and the related ecosystem as ” cheaper, standardized and connected via the Internet,” three essential elements to the core of the innovation happening here. While the Times’ description of this tightens this up nicely and gets the basics right, it is interesting to note the nuances that are missed.

New platforms and new media permit new messages and new opportunities. That is some of what the story of the Internet’ birth tells us. In the same way, it’s what we also see playing out in educational technology today. Let’s look closely as we go forward, and try not to miss the nuances.

I just finished reading Joi Ito’s great New York Times essay about the Internet and openness. This is clearly a piece that resonates with many of us at the Concord Consortium as well as in the creative technology community at large. Joi does an excellent job explaining and characterizing what it is about the Internet’s birth and durability over time, capturing that often ineffable quality of open interconnectedness that is responsible for many of the aspects of networked life we take for granted every day.

One of the most exciting aspects of this all is something that Joi’s piece captures well – the freewheeling and wide-ranging freedom that this openness provides everyone who takes part. The fact that anyone with a good idea is in theory equally close to any other (though this apparently leaves many in this country without good network connections in the cold) is what makes the fabled guys-in-a-garage notion able to spring forth as the next Facebook or Google. It’s also what is fueling the burgeoning Maker movement (that the Economist captured somewhat well in a recent article highlighting the Maker Faire that our colleagues at the New York Hall of Science hold each year now).

Plying this sensibility for the development of educational technology is our stock in trade at the Concord Consortium. Capturing this sensibility in everything we do, on the other hand seems to be in the genes of most all of us. Listening to the table conversations over one of our staff potlucks, I’m always amazed at how one central emotion ties through such a diversity of discourse: a shared interest in creation and the discovery of new things. This overriding interest is probably what makes most of us here science geeks. The idea of applying it in order to make education better for students across the world is what draws us to the Concord Consortium.

It’s in the pursuit of this interest that we all do our work here, but it’s in the enactment of openness that the work is able to thrive. Our code is on Github, our content is shared, and our ideas are in the open air.

I understand intrinsically what Joi describes with his use of the wonderful word “neoteny” to describe the childlike wonder of discovery retained as an adult. It’s why our friends at the Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group chose their moniker. And now that we have been introduced to the word, I’m fairly certain it’s one we’ll hear included in the vivacious conversations across the table at our next group potluck. Thanks, Joi, for helping the Times’ readers make the connection between this concept and the openness that is so important to innovation and the Internet.

Update: 12/6 at 10:10 AM: Corrected the idiom to the proper “stock in trade,” and (reluctantly!) corrected the typo “monkier” to read “moniker.”

Over the last week and a half, we – like everyone in the tech community – have been thinking a lot about Steve Jobs and his amazing legacy. Since we didn’t post about it on the date we first heard the news, it seems that the date of the memorial service is a fitting date to share our internal commemoration.

From a Mac SE to a clickwheel iPod to an original Newton and eMate, we tried to capture most of Apple’s history from 1984 or so to the present day. (Yeah, we know that Steve’s role with the Newton was mainly to kill it, but hey – it was important and inspired by his work nonetheless.) The most impressive thing about this all was that it all came together via about 30 minutes of high-speed IM chatting as the news was rolling in that Wednesday night. By 9:00 the next morning, we had the whole thing assembled. Thanks to Ethan our Webmaster, we even managed to put together a one-day Web tribute within a few hours of the news as well.

It’s been a whirlwind week and a half thinking reflecting on just how much innovation Steve Jobs brought to us all. And it’s been even more inspiring to think about just how much joy he brought along with that innovation. Like many, his lasting work only inspires us more to try and create our own insanely great things, and to remember to always stay hungry and foolish.

Scientists have known for a long time that ocean currents affect climate.  The big unanswered question is how ocean currents change during the periods of greatest change–from ice ages to periods of global warming.

During the Eocene period, 38 million years ago, the Antarctic had a temperate climate.  What is now the midwest United States was covered in tropical jungles.  The temperature differential during that last warm period was much smaller than it is today, when Antarctica is a frozen tundra.

New research suggests that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), an ocean current that surrounds Antarctica, played a major role in the Eocene climate shift and that ACC formation played a vital role in the formation of modern ocean structure.  During the Eocene, when temperature differences were not as large between the poles and the midlatitudes, ocean currents were weaker than they are today.  Today, the ACC is considered the most significant ocean current, thermally isolating Antarctica from the rest of the planet, keeping warm surface waters away from the frozen ice sheets.

“What we have found is that the evolution of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current influenced global ocean circulation much earlier than previous studies have shown,” said Katz, who is assistant professor of earth and environmental science at Rensselaer.  ”This finding is particularly significant because it places the impact of initial shallow ACC circulation in the same interval when the climate began its long-term shift to cooler temperatures.”

Just how did this shift in ocean currents happen?  That’s not yet understood.

Scientist Miriam Katz points out, “By reconstructing climates of the past, we can provide a science-based means to explore or predict possible system responses to the current climate change.”  As always, science requires more study to start filling in the blanks of the big unknowns!

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526141406.htm

In the past two days the New York Times has provided readers with six fascinating articles and discussions about online learning. One set is called Room for Debate: Can Young Students Learn from Online Classes and the other is a front-page article in yesterday’s paper: More Pupils are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality.

The quality of these articles and many reader comments is excellent, and the best of them are nuanced. Only a small fraction of students have ever taken fully online classes, so it is very difficult to generalize from these volunteers to conclusions about all or typical students. Some pieces, like Karen Swan’s entry in Room for Debate, cite studies investigating which students are likely to succeed online, and which are not.

Online learning offers genuine benefits to some students (such as access to courses not available in a local school) and will continue to spread. Very likely the scenario that will help the most students in grades K-12 is that more and more teachers in brick-and-mortar schools add online features to the courses they teach face-to-face. Students can then continue a lively discussion after school hours, interact with experts who never visit the school, or use computers and the Internet in other ways that supplement, rather than substitute for, what happens in school. In contrast, the vision of most American students taking a large percentage of their courses online, without a face-to-face component, may appeal to politicians as a way to reduce costs but seems very ill-suited to adolescents’ needs. Let’s not go there!

Andy Zucker
Senior Research Scientist
The Concord Consortium
Lead author of The Virtual High School: Teaching Generation V (Teachers College Press, 2003)

They’re the in thing, especially for teaching science. Everyone, it seems, is fascinated by the potential of educational games. They’re interactive and “multimedia,” they can adapt to individual students, they promote “authentic learning.” In short, they match the outsize expectations of a digital world. They’re definitely cool, but do they teach, and if so, what do they teach?

Full disclosure: I am an enthusiastic proponent of educational games. I created one called “ThinkerTools” so long ago that it ran on a Commodore 64 computer and had to be programmed in machine language to make it run fast enough. And, yes, I have no doubt that kids learn from such games. But do they learn what we think they’re learning? And how would we know if they were? Is it sufficient that they get better at the game? Surely not, else chess masters would be good at logic, and athletes would be physicists.

It is tempting to imagine that we can design educational games so cleverly that it would be impossible for a student to get good at the game without acquiring a deep understanding of whatever it is the game is trying to teach. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way, as I learned from my experience with another educational game called GenScope.

GenScope was a multi-level genetics game. It linked processes at all different levels, from molecules to ecosystems, and we used it to create a bunch of engaging challenges for students. Our species of choice was dragons. We would show a dragon’s chromosomes, for instance, and ask students to figure out how to change its genes to make the dragon breathe fire. Later on, we would challenge them to breed a strain of blue dragons, or try to find two parent dragons that could only have two-legged offspring (hint: neither parent can have two legs).

We used the GenScope games in several high schools. We compared students who had used the games to others who had learned genetics by conventional means. To do this we designed a clever test that assessed precisely the reasoning skills we were trying to teach—and that we naively assumed were necessary to succeed at the games. Each time we did this, we found that the GenScope classes did no better on the test than the control group. Sometimes they did worse!

In the jargon of the trade the Holy Grail is “transfer,” and we weren’t getting much. Knowledge gained in one context is often difficult for the novice to apply to another one, even though to an expert the two situations appear very much alike.

To us, the researchers, the genetic principles behind the GenScope games were obvious, and their relevance to the questions on the test equally so. Clearly, that was not the case for the students, who became expert GenScope players but failed to apply what they learned to genetics.

There are ways around this impasse, of course, and I will describe a few in a future blog post. For the moment, though, let’s just keep in mind: there are lots of ways of getting good at an educational game. Only one of them involves learning what the game is supposed to teach.

Global temperatures in the year 2010 are on course to be the highest ever in 130-year record. This is the consensus of recent three different analyses by NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center and a joint record kept by Britain’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia. While these results do not prove that the long-term trend will continue, the conclusions add to a growing mountain of data and models that do predict catastrophic global temperature rise over the next half-century. Scientists who specialize in climate have carefully weighed all the evidence and an overwhelming number agree.

A snapshot of the stylized model of the atmosphere and oceans that students can investigate from the High Adventure Science activity on Climate Change. Programmed in NetLogo by Bob Tinker.

There is a rising chorus of “deniers,” people who deny the data and projections. These are not skeptics who look at the data and draw serious opinions. Serious skepticism is an important part of science. The deniers are “contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry [spokesmen, who have] created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.” The deniers claim, without proof, that the scientific case has not been made, that certain scientists are lying, even though investigations have cleared them, assert that climate change is benign, and even claim that the covenant God made with Noah will protect us. This is not science, it is propaganda.

The public is confused about these public debates and is increasingly convinced that they reflect true scientific uncertainty. Gallup polls show the percent of the population that thinks that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated has grown from 30%in 2006 to 41% in 2009.

It is important to go to the root of the problem: a poorly educated nation that is unequipped to tell the difference between science and propaganda. An example of what is needed is an engaging activity we created on climate that is designed to help students understand the possible causes of climate change and appreciate the issues involved. Our key innovation is an interactive model that incorporates many of the important factors that influence climate such as clouds, CO2, water vapor, ice sheets, ocean absorption of greenhouse gasses. Students can learn for themselves about the interactions of these factors by experimenting with the model. The model is not intended to be predictive—that requires the most powerful computers that exist—but it does illustrate many of the dynamic features in the scientist’s models.

Materials based on this model should help students understand the science, but science educators need to go one step farther and help students understand the difference between science and propaganda. We need to engage students in thoughtful debate about the issue so they can form their own opinion. We should care less about what those opinions are than that they are backed by an understanding of the science and the process of science. This is why every student needs a better understanding of science.