Blurts

This powerful documentary from a Minneapolis television station follows the educators and students of a North Minneapolis elementary school as the educators struggle to care for and educate children growing up under difficult circumstances.

Because of the focus New York Governor Cuomo has received from his daily pandemic briefings, educators have paid more than the usual attention they might have to articles describing Cuomo’s comments on the need for a new model of education and his partnership with the Gates Foundation. Cuomo seems to be grappling with the problems of education should the present situation be extended for a lengthy period of time. If I remember the quote that seems to have appeared in several accounts correctly, Cuomo was supposed to have mused “why do school buildings still exist.” Sometimes when trying to make a point, you go a little too far with your arguments. The reaction of educators defending present approaches was swift and focused on those with big money not understanding how education actually happens and questioning the motives of tech moguls pushing the benefits of technology.

Rather than assume rich technologists are motivated by some long-term personal benefits, I would encourage an assumption closer to the argument encapsulated in the expression that “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail” (my interpretation). My background (educational psychologists who became interested in educational technology) offers what in this case is a reasonable combination of biases.

First, let us assume that we for a bit are in a very different time that might allow and possibly require some creative uses of technology in education. I am not a fan of just shutting things down because I think that there is a strong possibility opening K12 institutions up in the fall “as usual” will not happen and we might want to consider how best to function for a year or so under present circumstances. Under these conditions, I see it as unreasonable that students and teachers will end up for prolonged periods of time interacting via online video. What then might accompany shorter segments of online interaction to improve student knowledge and skills?

I have long been interested in the problem of what might be called “rate of progress”. Simply put, some students learn at a faster pace than others and traditional education has responded my staking out a middle ground still boring some and losing others. I would argue that of these two problems the “boring some” problem should be easier to solve even though it seldom is. The problem with those falling behind is the accumulation of what might be described as knowledge and skill deficits. Fundamental components of more advanced understanding and functioning build provide the base for more advanced learning. Without these fundamentals new learning is not just as difficult as post learning has been, it is increasingly even more difficult resulting in a sense of hopelessness.

A traditional way of addressing this common challenge is to try to provide additional help. Think of a tutor if how this might be accomplished is not clear. Tutors are very possibly the ideal solution as long as a) the resources are available to hire these individuals and b) the student can somehow put in the additional time that will be necessary to take advantage of what the tutor offers. The second reality here is imposed by our assumption of grade levels and seat time controlling the time available for learning.

Anyway, back to Cuomo, Gates, and some of their ideas. Using money from several deep pockets philanthropists, several large scale interventions have been funded with little arguing strongly for change. My personal interest is in what I would describe as mastery methods – systems allowing students to progress at the rate individual students demonstrate mastery. One of these approaches referenced in associated with Cuomo’s encouragement of more exploration was Teach to One:Math. The attempt to evaluate a large middle school study comparing this technology-enabled math program with traditional classroom instruction is useful to review. Among other issues, it demonstrates just how difficult it is to actually test the effectiveness of what on the surface seems a simple idea in applied settings. The study was not able to show a benefit one way or the other and the researchers had to admit to multiple confounds they could not control.

Understanding how Teach to One works is at least worth the effort as it explains what an implementation of mastery learning supported by technology (and teachers) might look like. This program identifies 300 or so individual “concepts” within a map of dependencies and guided the order in which it made sense that some skills should be mastered before proceeding. Among the limitations of the student reported by the reviewers was what was allowed for the lowest performing students. Depending on the participating school, the “floor” was set as two and sometimes three years below grade levels even though the researchers noted that some students were further behind. Think about this for a second. Middle school students (6-8) more than three grade levels behind. This is the reality I was talking about.

Another methodological issue the researchers noted concerned how effectiveness was measured. So, the dependent variable tended to be the standardized tests that were traditionally given. The researchers noted that this put the mastery group at a disadvantage for some areas of knowledge. I would describe the issue in this way. If you think about the types of things you learn at a given grade level (even in math), some units of information depend on past knowledge and some do not. Math is fairly hierarchical compared to other content areas, but it is not completely hierarchical. For example, the topics of geometry (I know I am no longer describing middle school content) are not a perfect continuation of algebra. For example, learning the definitions of various shapes has little to do with the topics of the previous year of math. So, if an exam at the end of geometry would contain questions about a topic (shapes) that students who were several years behind would not have caught up enough to even experience, the students would have no chance on those items.

A similar problem at the other end of the continuum exists. What about the students who might have been able to get beyond the content normally taught at a grade level if allowed to progress at their rate of mastery? Wouldn’t the traditional grade-level exam underestimate what they had learned?

This is the type of challenge researchers face and the reason answers are not as easy to generate as you might think.

I encourage people to participate in social media experiences other than Facebook and Twitter. I have a general issue with platforms that approach monopoly status as this gives these platforms too much power and limits innovation within a given sector of the economy. I like to spend some of my online time with platforms that don’t depend on ad revenue and the collection of my personal information. I admit it is a struggle because folks don’t like to make such changes and become comfortable with the social group they have on dominant platforms.

Here are a couple of suggestions for alternative platforms.

Wt:Social is a Facebook alternative developed by Jimmy Wales. It has a general feed like Facebook that provides access to posts from individual subwikis a user joins. I am not certain why the wiki label is used to describe these interest groups. Users can collectively modify posts if the original author designates a post for that purpose, but most posts are intended to be static with attached comments from other users. This post from LifeWire provides a nice overview of this platform.

I admit I have been a bit discouraged with the social experience to this point. The technology itself is great, but subwikis that sound interesting often have many members, but few posts. I have not had much luck attracting others to a subwiki I started, but I am sticking with it. I mostly cross-post things so I see this an effort to get Wt:social going. If you give wt:social a try, search for your interests and join a few subwikis to get started. Make certain you post and comment.

My second interest has been diaspora. This project is based on a federated model. So, there are multiple sites running the diaspora software. You join one or more that interest you, but you can also experience a public feed combining the content added to the multiple sites. This seems a great idea, but the public feed is too big and too random. I haven’t really found a site focused on educational issues which would be what would be of greatest personal interest. I thought about hosting a site, but the way the software is developed it would too difficult for me to implement on my server space.

I have been an advocate for the Brave browser and ecosystem for some time. The developers of Brave have created a browser that prevents the collection of personal information AND supports content creators through ads that don’t leverage the personal information of users. It is easy enough to block ads, but this ignores the responsibility to compensate content creators who assume the ads the allow associated with their content will be viewed.

Brave does not automatically compensate content creators through the display of the ads it displays, but requires users to both opt in to view these ads and to share compensation with content creators. If you don’t want to view ads, you can agree to fund creators through micropayments when you view creators who have agreed to an arrangement with Brave. This is done through the use of BAT – a cryptocurrency you purchase. I invested $50 in BAT some months ago and I now have more money in BAT than I invested. I don’t understand or bother to investigate how the value of BAT is determined, but the value of what I invested has increased at a faster rate than I have designated for compensation.

If you agree to see ads, you can also earn BAT. So, you don’t have to actually put money into the Brave system, but you can earn BAT and then use these “funds” to compensate content creators.

However, this article notes that only 12% of Brave users have taken the steps necessary to compensate users. So, these users are blocking ads that appear on sites, but not bothering to take simple steps necessary to replace whatever the revenue to content creators was with the resources Brave makes available.

Here are the action necessary. Again, even if you don’t put money into Brave, you should at least make the effort to replace the revenue lost by blocking ads.

The red triangle that appears at the top of the Brave browser window provides access to the sliders allowing ads to be shown and allows revenue generated to be shared with content creators.

The settings accessed from the auto-contribute “view details” of the autocontribute section provide information about your ads viewed and allow you to set your monthly contribution to be divided among authorized sites in proportion to the time you have spent on those sites.