

Hacking Education - tialys
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/hacking-educati.html

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Prrometheus
All this talk about how "we" need to redesign education hints at a major
problem with our current system: it is a democratic institution and not a
market. Therefore, "I" cannot decide on a change in the way "my" child is
educated, rather "we" must decide on changes in the way "our" children are
educated.

Group decision making is a phenomenally slow and stupid process, filled with
all sorts of interest groups with all kinds of different incentives. The
slowness and stupidity of this process is why education feels like it is stuck
in the past. This is also why school choice advocates are so passionate about
their issue. A school choice program would allow each parent to pursue
educational choices which he thinks would be best for his child. He could
choose some new educational model without first asking permission from the
rest of society to do so.

Technology is great. It is making real change on the margin. However, it can
only do so much good while children are inmates in a system designed by a
public bureaucracy for 40 hours a week.

~~~
greendestiny
I think you have a strong predilection for solutions that advocate the
complete rearrangement of society - with no path to achieve it and no
guarantee that it will provide any benefits until the transformation is
complete. While they might provide you with a certain feeling of righteousness
they seem to be useless.

Children already spend a large amount of time on optional education activities
that do exist in a market. If we improve these it might just provide a path to
better education within the public system.

I'd like to see the ways we train people in music, sports and with special
needs extended to the core subjects like maths. In those cases a specialist in
the learning of that subject will see the child perhaps once a week but
oversee and dictate the practice that child undertakes.

~~~
Prrometheus
I have a strong predilection for systems with incentives to make a good
product. This is especially true when the product is as important as
education. Maybe you are right and our time would be best spent on developing
ways to educate people by working around the public school system rather than
trying to change it. For example, you could pay a tutor in the marketplace to
provide the service you mentioned in your last paragraph instead of convincing
all the voters in your school district that it is a good idea.

I do think the benefit of these optional activities will be limited as long as
the 30-40 prime hours spent in school each week are of such low value. And in
general I am opposed to such waste.

Politics does require a lot of work to make any useful changes. However, I
don't think ending the public monopoly would be impossible. Voters managed to
do it in Sweden and the Netherlands.

My purpose was more to point out a relevant fact about our current educational
system than to encourage everyone to drop their startups and start lobbying
their state Congress.

~~~
greendestiny
My point is that many advances can be had without getting rid of public
education, those advances are not of only marginal utility and they do not
compete with changing public education. You frame everything in terms of
libertarianism unnecessarily and dismissing positives because they don't
advance your ideology seems unwise.

~~~
Prrometheus
I think we both have valid points. If the internet were as developed when I
was in school as it is today, I would have still been bored in school but I
would have learned a lot more after I got home from school. On net, I probably
would have been better educated.

We CAN still improve education while the 30-40 hours spent at school each week
are a complete write-off.

I still think we would have a better world if that were not the case.

~~~
greendestiny
I agree, especially since I support voucher systems.

In truth though, I think technological and other improvements in education
will lead to the education freedom we both want, rather than the other way
round. Innovations in learning could render the whole public education system
outdated, whereas at the moment alternatives don't impress me.

~~~
Prrometheus
I apologize, I've edited my comments on this thread substantially because I
misread your comments the first time around. Also, I have a tendancy to post a
"first-draft" comment and then edit it to be better over time, which is
annoying to others because every draft is public.

~~~
greendestiny
No worries, I get that, I think the thread still makes sense. Always in this
sort of thread I'm left wondering whether the initial conflict (when I
generalize about your opinions) is a necessary sort of dramatic tension to
draw out further discussion. I guess any opinion has unstated qualifiers, but
starting with them seems to unsatisfying.

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jmtame
One one side, I feel resentful because academic professors and teaching
assistants are crucifying Wikipedia as some source bizarre source of
information that is the result of 13-year old children wreaking havoc on
articles. Contrary to popular belief, the Wikipedia articles go through a
review process. Even edits I've made that I felt were accurate had been
reverted minutes later by a Wiki editor.

I typically make it a point to tell the whole class that Wikipedia cites many
of its claims. Not all of the citations are 100% accurate, but it's a start
for doing research. It gives you a high-level overview, and gives you a place
to start compared to the messy online library systems. I go to one of the most
research-intensive schools where every professor is required to be doing
research in addition to their curriculum. And our online library is a bad
place if you want to get a high-level view of the problem you're looking at.

On top of that, this article is dead on. I remember ranting about this topic
back in 2006:

[http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education-
is-...](http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education-is-broken/)

<http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/school-sucks/>

~~~
kingkongrevenge
> Wikipedia articles go through a review process

About three times I have looked through the past revisions on substantial
wikipedia articles and each time it was clear that the revisions generally
made the article worse. The general pattern is that an expert occasionally
writes meaty, high quality sections and then these either get deleted or
eventually made incomprehensible. Edits almost always degrade the prose.

I do not understand the wikipedia fanboism. It's fine for basic facts, and
great for pop culture, but better informational articles on almost any complex
topic are available elsewhere. I do not think wikipedia is working very well
and hope that the more closed system some of the original founders started a
while back comes out on top.

edit: I just looked up that new, more closed version of wikipedia and from a
quick examination it is much better than wikipedia. Compare:

<http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/War_of_1812>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812>

------
rw
In Ohio, the way of funding public grade schools (by giving local property
taxes to local schools) has been ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme
Court _four times._

Education inequality is directly linked to income inequality, and our
government has failed to solve this problem. Essentially, what we have here is
the _forced inter-generational transfer of socioeconomic status._

Privatization of schools would not fix this. Free markets fail to find the
global optimum in many situations; these situations are called market
failures. We need to design systems that benefit societal welfare over
individual welfare in the education, healthcare and government sectors.

Injecting technological innovation into the lives of students will not
adequately address education inequality (unless you build something that
provides students good food, safe homes, and loving families). If you give all
students access to, say, MIT OpenCourseWare, it might boost everyone up by the
same level, but it will not address the educational gap between the lucky and
the unlucky.

We must not allow _luck_ to play a part in education: children deserve to be
enabled to reach their full potential, and not be permanent victims of
arbitrary systems of distribution.

Edit: If you downvote, write a reply.

~~~
Prrometheus
There is no way to make people perfectly equal. There are, however, ways to
improve educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is one way.
Educational markets are another. These methods should be embraced.

Raising the quality of education for everyone is important. Maybe I have a
capacity for envy below that of the average human, but I would rather see
everyone get a 10x better education than see the gap between the best and the
worst narrowed by some amount. If we could choose between a program that
increased everybody's income by $10,000 or one that reduced everybody's income
by 50%, I would rather choose the first program even though the second would
dramatically decrease any measure of income inequality.

Unfortunately, children from wealthy homes don't get better educations only
because their schools have more money to spend. If this were the case, the
United States would have the best primary schools in the world and perennial
hell-holes like DC Public Schools would be educational utopias. Rather,
parents in wealthy homes play an active role in their children's education and
place importance on the role of education in their children's lives, as their
parents likely did.

The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture.
Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating
children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate
the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the
inequalities caused by genetics.

But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It
is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real
world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each
person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize
the education everyone receives by banning education.

Luck will always play a role in life. We can still try to make every life
better.

~~~
rw
What is your opinion of the local property-tax education funding system?
Education redistribution already occurs in that system; shouldn't we at least
redistribute education more equally?

~~~
Prrometheus
I think a government-run system has incentives that are going to produce a
lower quality educational product for everyone. I am for educational markets.
Subsidizing the consumption of education by poor people through something like
a voucher program would likely mean higher quality education for poor and rich
alike compared to the government-run model, for the same price.

I suspect that children of wealthy parents would perform better in school than
their less-wealthy peers under any reasonable system. I don't think that is
the problem that should concern us the most.

~~~
rw
Does it bother you that children are limited by the arbitrary socioeconomic
status of their families? Again, luck is determining what any child is able to
become.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
I see no reason to believe that schools can systematically rectify
socioeconomic inequalities. Educational attainment and status are outcomes of
culture and parenting, not schools and teachers. I think these things are
largely immutable, unless you want to start talking eugenics.

~~~
Alex3917
If culture and parenting were largely immutable, this would mean that not a
single early childhood intervention program would have been able to show a
statistically significant improvement. This is not the case.

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tialys
This really hit home with me. I'm suffering from poor teachers who are bored
and don't care and a system that only wants my money.

I also was amazed that this came out a week after I started working on
something that can solve this problem and do many of the things he mentioned.
It makes me feel like my idea is 110% more valid, and that is exciting.

~~~
PieSquared
If you don't mind sharing, what are you working on? I'd really love to know.
(I understand if you don't want to say though)

~~~
lief79
alternately, assuming it software, is there anything we can do to help? If
not, be sure to share the idea again once it reaches that state.

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robg
I think this is the most important point:

 _You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers._

The biggest cost is also the one that is often the least efficient. Add to
that the power of the teaching union and the system stays in stasis.

I'd like to believe technology can make a big difference, but I'd be satisfied
if we're merely able to fill some gaps.

~~~
hendler
Read "Disrupting Class" by Christensen:

<http://tinyurl.com/6a9vmf>

Christensen is a business school guy, but he understands how technology can
disrupt well established markets. In the book above he covers technology and
education.

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babyshake
In one of the comments, Fred writes "I'd like to do to standardized testing
what napster did to the music biz".

Napster as a phenomenon was possible because the cost of distributing music
had fallen close to zero. But testing is different than music, because the
value of test material as a reliable measure of proficiency is lost as it is
propogated, while the value of an MP3 is preserved, regardless of how many
times it is copied.

After all, test material, unlike songs, is subject to cheating. All it takes
is a Google search to compromise the reliability of an assessment.

If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given area,
then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever before.

~~~
ph0rque
> If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given
> area, then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever
> before.

I wonder if it was possible to take a block of text, and automatically
generate question&answer pairs from it using some kind of AI software
(probably bayesian networks combined with grammar rules).

~~~
babyshake
Question and answer pairs would be too difficult to do automatically, or semi-
automatically.

Fill in the blanks would be easier, since all you would need to do is isolate
a correct answer, and then retrieve wrong answers. And then make an interface
that would make it easy to crop or edit the quiz item in a few seconds.....

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tjpick
Resting on the assumption that it's the system that's broken and not the kids?

~~~
khafra
"There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels" -- attributed to both Napoleon
and Ulysses S. Grant

Whether it's the kids or the system that's "at fault," a system designed to
help kids should adapt to help them even if the requirements for that change.

~~~
tjpick
you're right but what concerns me is being trigger happy with change while
lacking in requirements, which is my impression of the original post.

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jfornear
Blaming the educational system without even a mention to family values is the
same old ineffective approach we've been taking for years. A good education
starts in the family. Good students have a positive attitude toward learning
and they understand the importance of an education. Parents have a
responsibility to develop these values in their children.

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rdixit
Open-source educational resources, e.g. video lectures, semantically organized
testing materials, etc. will definitely be ubiquitous in the future. The real
sticking point will be in society and individual's perception of the
'legitimacy' of online self-education versus, for instance, a college degree.

~~~
Raphael
This is a major deterrent to hackers considering whipping up education 2.0.
Who would bother with it when they are busy with their real classes?

------
hs
people who criticize wikipedia are insecure

