Increasingly, our everyday lives are influenced by computing algorithms that we cannot see or control.

This is the somewhat alarmist but nonetheless grounded in truth statement by Kevin Slavin in his recent TED talk (shown in the embedded player to the right). It’s not just financial markets, but movie scripts, book recommendations and advertising selections… the online and media world is increasing using software algorithms to tailor itself to what a mathematical equation thinks we want.

I find one of the most alarming examples is Facebook’s algorithm to determine what warrants “top news”. Effectively, Facebook is deciding for you which of your many friends’ updates is most important. And the implications of that are quite scary.. What if a friend thinks you are not listening because Facebook filtered out their update? Or what if you miss an opportunity for a future romantic involvement because Facebook hides a party update from what it thinks is someone you don’t care about?

Increasingly in the future we are going to have to think carefully about what decisions we allow software to make for us, and what things we should keep full control of ourselves.

Watch the TED video here or embedded above, or read the BBC News article for more information.

The sequel to Deus Ex, one of the top-ranked games of all time and a pioneer in the cyperpunk genre, is nearing release. The sequel paints a pretty bleak picture of human augmentation. But this live action trailer goes way beyond promoting a game; it’s nothing short of a short film on the consequences of human augmentation.

Watch the clip. Forget it’s a video game. How likely is this kind of thing in coming years?

You know that scene in Bladerunner where Harrison Ford uses a computer to zoom, refocus and travel in 3D space within a photograph? For years we’ve all thought that would be forever impossible, but new technology from Lytro suggests that this sort of thing may soon be possible.

Their forthcoming light field camera captures not just one perspective of a scene, but uses a lenticular array to capture the entire light field, meaning that the 3D space from which the light originated can be explored after the photo is taken – so you can change which part of the scene is in focus, generate 3D images or even peek “behind” foreground objects.

The Silicon Valley startup clearly faces technical and financial challenges to change their prototypes into an affordable consumer product – but the cat is out of the bag on the idea, and we can expect camera manufacturers to race to catch up and enter this brand new market. This is a disruptive technology with huge potential to change the way we think about photography. Soon we may have a completely new kind of camera, which can truly capture a moment in a way we never thought possible. Some are wondering if it will take the skill out of photography, while others are already speculating about what this might do to re-ignite 3D film-making.

Read more details at AllThingsDigital and try refocussing images for yourself in Lytro’s Picture Gallery.

Zdenek Kalal, a PhD at the University of Surrey, has developed an impressive real-time system which looks within a live camera feed for an identified object or person, then watches and learns to track that object as it rotates, moves or disappears, reappears. He demonstrates a prototype of the system in the video shown to the right.

The project won him the ICT Pioneer award and has attracted a great deal of attention from press and industry alike, as this could enable a plethora of image-tracking applications, from security systems to video stablization and control systems for the handicapped.

What is remarkable about the system is that it needs no special training (for example learning what a face is), you can simply identify an object on screen and the system will learn to track it. It looks like the stuff of science-fiction, but it’s very real. Read more on his project page.

The non-profit grassroots organization ahumanright.org recently launched a bold new campaign to help to bring Internet access to some of the 5 billion people who aren’t online. They hope to raise sufficient funds to buy the abandoned TerreStar-1 satellite and offer free Internet access to citizens of impoverished nations, funded by renting usage of the satellite to other communications companies.

If it succeeds, it could become a lot harder for governments to shut down the Internet in their countries during civil unrest, as the satellite coverage would span international boundaries and the organization would be managed with a human right to information at its core.

If you have a spare $1m lying around you can make a donation at http://www.buythissatellite.org/. Read more at TIME or watch the TEDx talk.

While you’re doing that thing you’d rather keep secret, a bunch of kids nearby snap photos of each other on their iPhones. You’re in the background of one of their shots. When they upload it, Facebook scans the faces in the photo and automatically identifies you, based on photos you’re already tagged in. The photo is then published to your wall; it is broadcasted to your entire social network. Your “secret” is now plain to see. Your Mum sees you smoking, your girlfriend sees you outside the sex shop, your husband sees you dining with your ex.

If this sounds far-fetched, think again. The pieces are already in place. Import a photo into iPhoto and it will make a good guess about who’s in the photo. Facebook already broadcasts any photo in which you’re tagged to your News Feed. Facebook recently added automatic face detection, making it easier to tag you.

Face detection is just the first step towards face recognition, and it’s likely that Facebook will add that soon – they already have a vast corpus of facially-tagged images of their users. At first, they’ll only tag you in photos from your friends (which you’re likely to know about). The only thing that then prevents random strangers’ photos from reaching your wall is Mark Zuckerberg’s unpredictable whim.

We’ve given Facebook permission to broadcast photos to all of our friends, without asking us, at any time. We have no control over the process. Are you ready to gamble your personal privacy on the chance that no-one will photograph you, and that Facebook will put your best interests first?

Perhaps privacy was just a temporary aberration. The global village is getting smaller every day. In a world of Wikileaks and Google vans, maybe there are no secrets anymore.

——
Related reading: The science-fiction novel The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, provides an excellent exploration of a future without privacy.

Image credit: iFovia on Flickr (Creative Commons)

In Michigan, a man has been charged with a felony after reading his wife’s email without permission. If convicted, this could set the precedent that anyone reading a family member’s private mail would be committing a crime.

In some cases this might seem reasonable, but could it mark the beginning of a slippery slope? What about parents who have legitimate reasons to monitor their childrens’ internet usage – could they soon be deemed criminals?

Read the full story at the Detroit Free Press.

Facebook encourages us to hold on to our past, and in a way, it lives on there for ever. As Richard writes:

No memoirist can write without making every effort to doublecheck one’s own past. But when the past becomes a moving target, how is one to nail it down?

Read the full article at The Daily Beast.

1. Posthumanity and digital superpowers

We’ve been blogging about Human 2.0 for over two years now, but it was this April that we split off from Bitcurrent and launched this site. We kicked off with two launch posts… a high-level scene-setter called Welcome to posthumanity:

“We’re becoming a new species–one that can hack its own cognition and edit its own biology. We’re all getting an upgrade, like it or not. This is the most important subject of the century, but it’s still hiding in academia and science fiction. We hope to change that.”

…and a look at some of the tangible ways in which the Internet gives us superpowers:

We may not realize it, but the Internet has given us superhuman abilities. Technology lets us to do things that were impossible 30 years ago – from speaking foreign languages and armchair travel to global messaging and virtual worlds. Welcome, Human 2.0, these are your superpowers.

2. It’s all about the data

Now that we live a significant part of our lives online, we generate data that can be used to create visualizations and learn more about people, for good or for ill. We may reveal details about ourselves that we’d rather keep private. This year we’ve explored this issue from several angles:

Behavioural Analysis and the Age of Metrics explored how HCI researchers are using gameplay data to understand player behaviour and design better games, and examined the wider trend of analyzing human behaviour:

As we enter the age of metrics, analyzing player behaviour in games and sports is just the tip of the iceberg. Already you can track your computer usage, the language you use, and even your sex life! In the future, visualizations of our life data will empower us to make better decisions.

You can also learn a lot by analysing people’s social networks. Here’s what Twitter infers from your followers:

Analysis of social graphs will be part of an arms race similar to that seen in Search Engine Optimization, where unscrupulous marketers try to convince Google to list them in search results.

We covered Ben Shneiderman’s talk on the importance of Human Network Analysis as a skill for the 21st century:

Free network analysis tools are now being used by researchers to deliver valuable understanding and insights to practitioners in a variety of fields, from analysing Senate voting habits to healthcare and counter-terrorism research.

What do your words say about you examined how each of us is now empowered to do our own analysis of authors and public speakers using tag clouds:

We all produce more words digitally than ever before. With free tag cloud generators, anyone can analyze your language and learn a great deal about you in just a few seconds. The age of digital linguistics has begun.

In our first foray into the realms of flash fiction, we explored the impact of music sharing on witness protection in “I know what you liked last summer”:

“Listen, we’ve had six other killings this week. Same M.O. They were all women in their mid-thirties. They were all killed, execution-style, late at night, just as Janet was. And most importantly, all six of them liked the same music.”

In fact, computers might be used to uncover all sorts of patterns in people’s behaviour, some of which they might rather keep private. Periodicity tackled this delicate subject:

Sentiment analysis can decide whether a blogger is angry or content, happy or sad. Given data over time, it can likely recognize patterns of mood, even cycles… Such as those that occur every twenty-eight days.

3. Ownership and digital rights

New technologies call into question the ownership of data and change our rights as individuals. This encompasses a lot of different issues and we’ve only begun to scrape the surface, but here are some highlights:

We looked at the issues around citizens being arrested to photographing police in Is photography a human right? :

Prosecuting these photographers could enable law enforcement agencies to abuse their power. If citizens cannot scrutinize police and hold them accountable for their actions, what is to prevent them breaking the very laws they are meant to uphold? As Plato first asked in The Republic, “Who watches the watchers?”.

It’s surprising how many new forms of online communication are completely owned by corporations. Read the details in Who owns your voice online:

It’s only when we take a step back that the picture becomes evident, and it’s not a pretty one. Almost every form of digital communication is dominated by one company, and locked in to members of that service. We are in a poor state for a free, open exchange of ideas.

Continuing this theme, we looked at how Facebook manipulates its users to better serve its advertisers in Facebook, this abusive relationship must end:

Contrary to popular opinion, Facebook isn’t free – I’ve sold my soul, digitally. On Facebook, you’re the product. Companies pay for your eyes, and the more she knows about you, the more she can sell you for. And that’s about how much she cares about me.

In the field of education, tablets like the iPad could bring about a personal education revolution. But such raw accountability may cause a backlash from teaching unions, as we explored in our four part series, Tablets, unions and education:

When you learn from a tablet, it learns from you. As students work with digital course material, they leave a trail behind them. Teachers can tell whether a particular student isn’t spending enough time on their lessons, or is breezing through them. Maybe, by ushering in an era of cheap, tailored, analyzed learning, tablets can leave no child behind.

Other highlights

You may also be interested to read about:

• Can computers help us remember? (audio interview with Sunil Vemuri of reQall)
• Our guest post by Alexandra Bowyer, Is this the beginning of synthetic life?
• Lifelogging 101: How to record your life digitally.
• New devices that unchain your digital media.
• How distrust of users could be the slippery slope to a dull, safe Internet.
• 2009, the year of Twitter
  (including two of our most popular posts, Twitter’s not a site, it’s a protocol and A better design for Twitter retweets).
• How social networks can cause Status Update Anxiety.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our blog posts in 2010 and we look forward to digging into some more interesting angles on how technology is changing society next year.

To thank you for following us, we have a small gift for you: Human 2.0 is now available on the Chrome Web Store!

Don’t forget to leave us comments or contact @human20 on Twitter to let us know what you think, and what you want to hear more about! Happy New Year, Human 2.0!

Inspired by geocaching and a desire to get technology out into the physical world, media artist Aram Bartholl has spawned a new Internet phenomenon. “Dead drops” are USB sticks cemented into walls of public buildings, with their locations plotted online at deaddrops.com, the site which invites you to “un-cloud your files in cement”. Together the drops form “an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space”.

The idea is that anyone can upload or download files by plugging their laptop into the wall. The project has sparked a great deal of controversy with some describing the drops as “electronic glory holes”, but as Bartholl says “It’s very much about the thrill and the idea of what could be on there.”

Read an interview with Aram Bartholl at .net.

Read more at Geekosystem.

These are just some of the questions discussed in this 30-minute audio interview with Sunil Vemuri. Sunil spent 2 years digitally recording his own life while he was a researcher at MIT, and went on to found reQall, a company whose product specializes in helping you remember what’s important as you go about your daily life, with a minimum of effort.

Click here to listen to the full MP3 interview. (Length 32:19, Size 31Mb).

Editor’s note: This interview was recorded back in March 2010, as the first episode in a regular Human 2.0 podcast series. Unfortunately, as Human 2.0 is made in our free time, we’ve had to put the podcast plans on hold for the time being. We’re publishing this as a one-off audio post, but watch this space as we may feature more audio content in the future!

Image (cc) by Rutger Middendorp on Flickr.

Natural language processing and semantic analysis allows us to extract sentiment from documents. Marketing organizations and community managers rely on tools from Scoutlabs, Radian6, and others that try to understand how online communities feel about their brands and products.

As we share more of our lives online, there’s more to analyze. Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University analyzed Twitter’s mood over the day. This kind of sentiment analysis can look at someone’s online messages and decide whether they’re angry or content, happy or sad. Given data over time, it can likely recognize patterns of mood, even cycles.

Such as those that occur every twenty-eight days.

(It’s at this point that my dinner companion launched a well-aimed palm at my somewhat scruffy chin.)

Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool, generally aimed at understanding a particular thing.

But we could point the same kinds of tools at people, in an attempt to understand when it’s a good time to sell them something, or ask a favor, or send them an unsolicited message.

The Decade of Sharing is upon us, and public disclosure means public analysis. Knowing how receptive a prospect might be to a particular sales pitch could be invaluable to marketers.

Moods may relate to natural cycles–variances in hormones, day length, weather, and so on. They can occur in both men and women (a point I tried valiantly to make in my defense, without much success.) And they can be triggered by a huge range of causes.

This could have some interesting consequences.

• Wily consumers might try to game the system, posting carefully worded messages in the hope of steering good deals their way.
• Companies might restrict what their purchasing officers can do online, fearing that they might lose out in negotiations.
• Marketing companies could start selling data on individual consumers’ mood patterns.

Because of cross-site cookies, online marketing already targets users, as my friend Julie Matlin recently found out. But in Julie’s case, while the offer of a pair of shoes followed her around the web, it was a dumb offer: it didn’t take into account how she was feeling. Julie’s an unusually transparent online persona, and there’s plenty a marketer could have used to craft a targeted proposition that would have made her likely to buy.

Websites use A/B and multivariate testing to decide which propositions work best. By adjusting a range of variables — color, price, wording — each time someone visits their site, they can optimize their online businesses and maximize their revenues. If marketers can correlate causes with shifts in mood among their target markets, they’ll have tremendous power over consumers. If they then apply A/B and multivariate testing  to those consumers, they’ll quickly learn what approaches work for what moods, taking direct marketing to an uncomfortably personal new level.

Let the slapping begin.

The ideas were the result of the OpenInnovation competition – read more at the site.

At first it seems quite useful, putting information onto surfaces like desks and mirrors. But if you take that to to the extreme you end up with something like the world shown in this second concept video, which uses augmented reality to put information everywhere. To me, it looks like something of a nightmare. What do you think?

(This video was created for an architecture project by Keiichi Matsuda. Read more here.)

Understanding human behaviour is vital for good product design. But you can’t just ask people what they need, you have to observe them first-hand. iPods, eBay and TiVo exist because designers watched people, noticed a problem with current products, and designed a solution for a problem people didn’t even know they had.

At OXO Foods in the UK, researchers studied how people measure liquids while cooking, and noticed that most people need to bend down repeatedly to read the markings on the side of the container. None of them reported this as a problem when interviewed. So OXO designed a measuring jug(cup) which could be viewed from above (shown right). This is an example of the growing science of design ethnography – product design based on direct human observation.

How to measure human behaviour “in the wild”?

Observational studies are expensive to conduct, and sometimes distorted because you can’t always observe someone in their natural environment. Fortunately, computers now make it much easier to collect data from “real world” activities. Such data is invaluable – for product designers to better understand their users, and also for us to help us cultivate a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Consider a game designer who wants to improve the interface for her game. At HCI2010, I saw Dr Richard Lilley demonstrate the new i-View X technology from SensoMotoric Instruments, shown in the video below. This tracks the player’s gaze and records what part of the screen they are looking at.

As well as recording the game experience and user inputs, a webcam captures facial expressions. With this system, our designer can examine both qualitative and quantitive data to measure the impact of interface changes – such as repositioning an on-screen HUD – based on how much attention the user gives it and how it influences their play. The designer can develop the game systematically and improve it faster. By watching his own recordings, a player can learn and improve his skills quickly too – and this approach is already being applied in a variety of different sports. For both player and designer, the feedback cycle is shortened considerably.

Visualizing Gameplay Data for Deeper Understanding

At the same conference I met Alicia Dudek, an MSc Design Ethnographer from the University of Dundee, whose research explores ways to gain deeper understanding of how people play games. Your choices when playing a game are a combination of your personal circumstances and the way the game is designed, so both must be explored – but the first step is to identify behaviour patterns.

To do this, Alicia and her colleague Rachel Shadoan analysed 18 months of player histories from the web game Plant Wars. They plotted this data on a graph, with the vertical axis representing time of day, and the x axis representing the passage of time in weeks and months. Different activities in game are marked using dots of different colours and sizes at the appropriate time. Here is the visualization for one player: (Click the chart for a larger version.)

These graphs were used as the basis for player interviews, where key events were annotated with feedback from the player. Having these visual stimuli yielded more detail than relying on memory. Here we can see how the game rules, the player’s daily routine and even the device he used had measurable affects on his patterns of play. The study is detailed in full in this PDF.

From Gameplay to Real Life

Visualizing and explaining behaviour patterns will help designers create better games, but can they help players too? I asked Alicia where this research might lead in future:

“We create vast amounts of data about our behavior patterns, which over time form habits, altering us as people. We need to elevate our awareness of our intangible interactions. We cannot touch emails or feel battles in games. Our minds and ways of thinking are being restructured. Research like ours aims to make it easy to understand your behaviour without specialist training. One day you may be able to know not only what you’re getting good at in a games but also how it affects you.”

As we enter the age of metrics, games and sports are just the tip of the iceberg. Already you can track your computer usage, the language you use, or even your sex life! And the behavioural data we all generate daily is very valuable. Twitter and Google both collect and analyze your web surfing habits. And fraudsters want your behaviour data too. But a new generation of tools are emerging, with which we will explore and learn from our own behaviour data. In the future, our choices will be much better informed.

For example, with my Fitbit I can measure my calories burned and consumed and see it on a graph:

Right now, you need to add your own annotations. But it’s easy to imagine a tool that would let you annotate and interpret patterns like these. Your phone could even alert you when you’ve over-eaten and discourage you from making that restaurant booking.

As more data about our lives become available, we’ll gain new insights into our unconscious habits; computers will increase our awareness of ourselves. They’ll help us understand how music affects our mood, how our diet affects our work productivity, or how our sleeping habits affect our relationships. Life visualizations will empower us to make better decisions. The only caveat: As we use this new power to reduce many decisions to equations, we’ll need to be careful not to sideline those intangible, unmeasurable qualities like love, happiness and instinct.

In this four-part series, we look at the impact of tablet computing on education: how tablets can save North American students, but how their ability to collect and analyze how students learn will make teaching more accountable — something that unions will oppose aggressively as they try to protect their members’ jobs.

This is a detailed write-up of the Short Bit I first presented at Bitnorth 2010, with lots of background and links to references I found while putting together that presentation. We decided to break it into several parts to make it easier to digest.

Tablet computing is the catalyst that can trigger a classroom revolution: the digital classroom, personalized learning, cheap access to content, and a transformation of how we learn. They promise a shift in education that puts the student, not the teacher, at the center of the learning experience. And tablets can capture and analyze everything about how someone learns.

In other words, tablets make teaching accountable, bringing to it the kind of clarity and can’t-argue-with-that science that has transformed online marketing. But as we saw yesterday, there are powerful forces terrified of what the harsh light of accountability will reveal, as we saw yesterday.

Tablets don’t just display, they collect

Tablets are the ultimate analytical tool. They collect copious amounts of data that can be analyzed, letting us crunch all aspects of a learning experience: What was read, touched, and heard; when and where that learning happened; what was read slowly and what was rushed through. Properly instrumented, a tablet is a window into how a student acquires knowledge. It’s the perfect sensor for educational analytics.

And analytics, as anyone who runs a website will tell you, mean accountability. As we saw yesterday, accountability is something that unions have resisted defiantly for decades.

Tablets, and the digital revolution they bring into the classroom, could radically change the way we learn, and with that, the fate of a society. But they’ll be fought every step of the way by teachers who fear for their jobs. If those teachers win, it’ll be another continent’s turn. So convinced of this was the producer of 2 Million Minutes that, when I saw him speak last year, he admitted to buying a condominium in Mumbai for his retirement because he expected India to have the best standard of living.

Worse, since countries like the U.S. and Canada are huge consumers of the world’s resources — and yet some of the strongest opponents to actually fixing crises that have resulted from overpopulation and mass consumption — it may not just be another continent’s turn. It may be another species’. In an era of globalization, overpopulation, and technology, an illiterate North American electorate is bad for the planet’s health. As Snarkmarket says, forget Skynet; the real apocalypse starts when all the fish die.

A smart population can fix these kinds of problems, particularly when armed with powerful tools like tablets and digital learning. Churchill once said that “America will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options.” Unfortunately, teachers’ unions are stopping the country from doing the right thing.

Unions will come up with all sorts of ways to fight tablets and the digital classroom they usher in. They’ll argue that digital learning is impersonal, and that without supervision and encouragement, students will find ways to trick the system and avoid work. They’ll claim standardization and automation stifle creativity. They’ll argue that the web can’t teach, citing by Nick Carr’s cautionary tale of The Shallows to criticize digital learning. They’ll claim that tablets destroy jobs, just as ATMs were supposed to destroy retail banking and self-service pumps apparently threatened gas stations.

Many of these arguments are contradictory: teachers often teach from the same course material year after year, and are unwilling to update it. Motivated by personal convictions, or trying to hide gaps in their knowledge, they sometimes teach their own version of the truth.

But the real problem here is that educators need to play a new role — one for which they’re woefully unprepared.

The digital classroom is inevitable

The digitization of humanity has shaken the foundations of print, broadcast media, and music. Now it’s teaching’s turn. The democratization of technology puts the world’s knowledge on the lips of every know-it-all in a  classroom. Plagiarism is only a few keystrokes away for any lazy student. How can teachers possibly compete with the best content the world has to offer?

Faced with an onslaught of rich content and a classroom that has grown up connected, some teachers hide behind union rules, sticking to their outdated lesson plans and crying out for protection. But as every newspaper, record label, and broadcaster has learned, hiding from the future won’t stop it.

Just look at how technology has invaded the workplace. In the 1950s, Information Technology involved either counting things, or aiming things. Its primary uses were the census, artillery, and space missions. By the 1970s, the locus of innovation was in businesses and institutions, who used it in pursuit of profit, cost-cutting, and efficiency. By the turn of the new millennium, innovation happened at the edge, on the screens and hips of citizens. The web, mobility, and an unprecedented wave of creation has swept us forever into an ocean of information.

The Kno is a tablet textbook specifically for schools.

Classes are already including online content, but only in a fraction of schools. In a 2008 survey of U.S. school district administrators, researchers found that 75% of schools were offering online or blended courses, and that roughly 1,030,000 K-12 students were engaged in online courses in 2008, up 47% from a 2005 survey.

Sites like Watchknow are filled with student-ready, structured content for kids — in fact, Mashable published a list of online tools for educator just yesterday that underscores how quickly technology can insert itself into classrooms.

This will force teachers to change. No longer will they be the administrators of a curriculum, assigning and grading tests and babysitting classrooms. They’ll become content creators, building lessons and assembling information from many sources. They’ll be stewards of the learning process, using management tools to govern their students’ education. It’s a job for which they — and their unions — are ill-equipped. But it’s inevitable if tablet computing enters the classroom.

A bright light: the new role of educators

In this series of posts, we’ve picked on teachers’ unions a lot. But teachers aren’t unions, and many of them are well-intentioned. They genuinely want to change lives, and they’re frustrated by poor pay and awful classrooms. They’re going to have to learn new skills to manage the digital classroom. And they’re going to have to stand up to their unions, sacrificing protections for true change.

If we can get well-intentioned teachers the tools they need, without the interference of unions, their role will shift. Teachers will manage the “learning dashboard” — air traffic controllers for each student’s learning experience. They’ll define content and tailor it to current situations and each students’ abilities and learning styles. They’ll manage the exceptions, intervening when there are problems and encouraging when there’s excellence.

It takes technical aptitude to do this well. That means making teachers understand and embrace new technologies, rather than hiding from them. Lynn Steen, a professor of mathematics at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN warns that “an innumerate citizen today is as vulnerable as the illiterate peasant of Gutenberg’s time.” She might as well be talking about a technically illiterate teacher in the era of digital classrooms.

Attempts to analyze students and identify problems have borne fruit. Many post-secondary institutions have Learning Management Systems (LMS) that handle the administration of the student body: class schedules, payment, enrollment, and so on. Increasingly, the LMS is the source of course content and test marks, which makes it a good test-tube for academic analytics.

By looking at which students have accessed LMS-based content, and comparing that to their marks, universities can see correlations. They can then alert teachers to students who are likely to have problems based on their interaction with course content. Imagine what this will be like when every textbook, every notepad, every musical instrument, every lecture includes analytical information.

Another system lets students bet on their grades. It’s a rigged bet — the student can get an A if they really try — but in this case, the end justifies the means. Analytics and measurement make this kind of game theory possible in the first place.

On O’Reilly Radar, Jason Grigsby talks about an iPod Touch educational program that gives students one-on-one interaction with touch devices. Coordinator Joseph Morelock has studiously documented the results of classes equipped with iPods, and the results have been dramatic enough to prompt parents to try and raise money for devices in every classroom.

Perhaps the brightest example of the new teaching model is the NYC School Of One initiative, which uses a “playlist” metaphor and different learning modalities to optimize the educational process.

In their model, each student can learn content in many ways — online tutor, team problem solving, individual study, and so on — and the system analyzes which methods work best for which content for each student. It knows, for example, that you learn Euclidean geometry best through watching a video, and calculus through team problem solving. Then it applies this to future lesson plans, analyzing performance by student, topic, and teaching approach.

It’s early days for the system, which is an after-school pilot project at the moment. But already, students are leapfrogging their traditionally-taught peers.

Some conclusions

As I dug into the subject of tablets and education, I learned more than I cared to about the politics and bureaucracy of learning. North America’s future lies in the hands and minds of its youth, and today, that future looks bleak. Soaring costs and an anti-science attitude won’t have an immediate impact on our lifestyles, but the long-term neglect of education will be hard to reverse.

I asked the folks at School of One what they’d found in their work:

“I’m preparing a presentation for an upcoming conference on tablet computing, education, and the potential tablets have for revolutionizing learning. Much of the power of tablets is personalizing the learning process, something the School of One seems to be all about. At the same time, I’ve read a lot about the resistance teachers’ unions have to accountability, including a recent NPR podcast in which one of the panelists said:

“Right here in New York City, Joel Klein indicated a while ago that he was going to use student test scores as one factor in evaluating teachers for tenure. What did the union do? Now, this is something that Obama supports, that Arne Duncan supports. It’s unbelievable. What the union did is they went to Albany and they got their friends in the legislature to pass a law making it illegal to use student test scores in evaluating teachers for tenure anywhere in the state of New York.”

I’m curious about the tension between these two trends: on the one hand, tablet computing and heavily analyzed student progress (like what you’re doing at the School of One) provides a lot of data for improvement; on the other hand, unions seem to resist that. So my questions are: what objections have unions voiced to the School of One program? Are teachers more or less busy? Will this create or reduce jobs?

They responded with a terse, and politically safe, note saying that unions support the initiative because teachers just have to teach:

“The unions have generally been supportive of our project. Because the computers help so much with organizing curriculum, assessment, and administrative tasks, teachers have a simpler job: just delivering their lessons.” (my emphasis)

In my opinion, this misses the point. Teaching will change. Author Daniel Pink describes one teacher who’s realized that classrooms should be for work, and alone time should be for lessons:

“Instead of lecturing about polynomials and exponents during class time – and then giving his young charges 30 problems to work on at home – Fisch has flipped the sequence. He’s recorded his lectures on video and uploaded them to YouTube for his 28 students to watch at home. Then, in class, he works with students as they solve problems and experiment with the concepts. Lectures at night, ‘homework’ during the day.”

This is far more indicative of what tomorrow’s classrooms should look like. It’s a complete reversal of today’s “show up and speak” mentality, and I suspect it will be far more difficult for the more tenured, set-in-their-ways teachers to embrace.

It’s important to remember, however, that technology in education isn’t a one-time budget item. It’s an ongoing, recurring, constant part of the curriculum, like chalk and recess. Teachers need tools and training to change their responsibilities, and someone needs to develop proper content aligned with the course plan. Simply giving tablets to students won’t change education; rather, developing two-way digital learning and putting tech-savvy teachers in control will.

In the words of Sam Seaborn, Rob Lowe’s character on the West Wing,

Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

As Julie Johnson, a 3rd grade teacher participating in Morelock’s Canby School District program said, “It’s just so fun to listen to them answer their own questions without my help. I am now the last resort.”

Tablet computing, and the digital classroom of one, gives students access to petabytes of knowledge, tailored to their current situation, ability, and learning preferences. It’s how we can overcome many of the problems endemic in today’s schools. It’ll mean retooling and re-training teachers, equipping them for the student-centric classroom of tomorrow.

As long as the unions don’t get in the way.

In this four-part series, we look at the impact of tablet computing on education: how tablets can save North American students, but how their ability to collect and analyze how students learn will make teaching more accountable — something that unions will oppose aggressively as they try to protect their members’ jobs.

This is a detailed write-up of the Short Bit I first presented at Bitnorth 2010, with lots of background and links to references I found while putting together that presentation. We decided to break it into several parts to make it easier to digest.

At this point in my research, as I explained in yesterday’s post, I’d concluded that learning isn’t a priority in North America — politically, culturally, or economically. It seems to me that tablets — with their access to affordable, tailored education — offer a tantalizing cure to the ills of North American’s classrooms, and a path to the digital classroom that can help us catch up with the rest of the world.

When I started looking into the issue of education in North America, I assumed that military spending outstripped healthcare and education dramatically. That’s how it is in many regions. In San Francisco, for example, 21% of a family’s taxes in 2007 paid for war, while just 5% went to education. Globalissues.org puts military spending — and the financing of past wars — at 44.4% of the US tax haul, with education just under 7%.

In absolute terms, the US pays a tremendous amount for its education (putting aside “special budgets” for specific wars). Universities in the US are the most expensive in the world, and despite spending all that money, the K-12 educational system is dysfunctional.

Comparing standardized test scores, spending on teachers in North America climbed dramatically while performance remained flat.

In other words, despite spending a lot on education, we aren’t seeing good results.

It’s not just lack of money, or inefficiency, which undermines US education. Some regions of the country, like Detroit and New Orleans, are still dealing with economic and environmental collapse. To make matters worse, the country is still trying to decide whether it should teach science or faith, redacting history, evolution, and climate change while adding God to the curriculum. The strangely gerrymandered economics of textbook manufacture means that Texas gets to decide what goes into the books the whole country reads. And Texas has decided to rewrite history.

But amazingly, hippy lefty liberal that I am, I don’t want to complain about any of these problems. And I don’t want to just pick on the US here: similar inefficiencies are creeping into the education system of other Western nations, including Canada and the UK.

Instead, I want to talk about the biggest threat to education: Teachers’ unions. Here’s the argument in a nutshell: When you learn from a tablet, it learns from you. What if it learns that your teacher can’t teach?

What makes great teachers?

The Gates Foundation set out to try and understand why US education was so broken (education is one of the foundation’s core areas of focus.) It turns out that the single most important factor in children’s performance is having great teachers. Simply put, if your teacher is in the top 25 percent of teachers, your test scores go up by 10 percent in a single year.

In other words, if the entire U.S. population had teachers ranked in the top 25 percent, the gap between US and Asian schools would vanish in a single year — and in four years, the U.S. would be far ahead of the rest of the planet.

Think about that for a minute: make more good teachers, fix the future of a nation.

Simple, right? You just need to find and encourage those top teachers: put them in charge, give them money, learn from them. Find out what makes them better, and reward that.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the system works. The foundation’s research showed that the only predictor of whether a teacher is in the top 25 percent — the percent that can save us — is that teacher’s past performance. Factors like whether a teacher has a master’s degree, or how long they’ve been teaching, have nothing to do with their students’ performance. And yet those are two things that have a big impact on teacher salary.

Guess what doesn’t get a teacher a raise? That’s right: being a good teacher. Worse, Gates’ team found that on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system early in their careers, meaning that the longer a teacher has been teaching (and the harder they are to fire), the less likely they are to be good.

Teachers’ unions have numbers and money

Terry Moe, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and the William Bennett Munro Professor of political science at Stanford University, says that “unions are and have long been major obstacles to real reform in the [educational] system.” Rod Paige, the U.S. Secretary of Education under the Bush administration, goes one further, calling them terrorist groups.

Unions have strength in numbers. 12 percent of the US workforce is unionized; but with teachers, it’s 38 percent. In New York City, 96 percent of people who teach are in the union. The two largest unions, the NEA and the AFT, have 4.6 million members between them.

They have money, too. The NEA alone had $400M in dues in 2007. As a teacher, you can’t just decide not to be a union member: in California, if you opt out, you get back $300 of your $1,000 annual fee, the union still gets $700, and you still have to play by their rules. They put the money they raise to good use, too: teachers’ unions are the top political spender in the US — contributing more than double what the runner-up did to elected leaders and lobbyists.

What about charter schools?

Some schools are trying to fix this, particularly those known as charter schools. By challenging traditional public school methods and focusing on student performance, charter schools have shown amazing results. These schools tend to embrace teacher data. They show colleagues what works and what doesn’t. They teach in teams. They focus on teaching well. The result? In one case of a charter school that Gates cites, 96 percent of high school graduates — from the poorest regions of America — went to college.

Since they’re a threat to unions, charter schools are under fire. There are 4,600 charter schools in the US and 90,000 public schools. Those charter schools have huge waiting lists — 11,000 students in Harlem applied for 2,000 open slots recently. So why not make more of them? Because the unions don’t like them.

In Detroit a few years ago, a donor offered to spend $200M to set up additional charter schools in what is one of the worst regions of the country. Unions shut down the schools, demonstrated in the state capitol, and convinced politicians to turn down the money.

Lobbying against accountability

It’s not just charter schools that are in the unions’ sights:

• In New York City, when schools suggested they were going to use student test scores as one factor in evaluating teachers for tenure, the unions convinced state legislators to pass a law making it illegal to use those scores in evaluating teachers for tenure anywhere in the state of New York.
• It happens at the national level, too: a recent US House stimulus bill included funding for data systems to track and improve teaching, but the Senate removed it under pressure.
• During layoffs, seniority rules mean that junior people get laid off before senior ones. This purges good teachers from the system, since effective teachers, statistically, are young teachers.
• Unions have even successfully limited the number of times a principal can come into the classroom, even requiring advance notice of visits.
• Jaime Escalante, (played by Edward James Olmos in the movie Stand and Deliver) taught college-level calculus to “unteachable” gang members in L.A. He allowed more students in his class than the union contract allowed, so he was run out of town by the union.
• Bill Evers, a reformer in California, wanted to try a new way of teaching math into his schools. The unions killed it because learning the new teaching method was too hard.

The list goes on. Frustrated parents and administrators have hundreds of stories of the union protecting its members at the expense of students’ education, even when those members’ behavior is indefensible.

When administrators do find a bad egg, unions make it impossible to remove the rot. Unions fight for all kinds of protections that make it incredibly difficult to fire a teacher. On average, it takes 2 years and $200,000, and 15 percent of a principal’s time to remove one bad teacher.

Unions go to great lengths to protect tenured members — so school boards sometimes put alleged sex offenders into a district office rather than firing them. According to Sand, this is commonplace: one union rep admitted to him, “I’ve gone in and defended teachers who shouldn’t even be pumping gas.”

Administrators are terrified of the unions’ power, and capitulate. According to as explained in a recent Freakonomics podcast on charter schools, only 13 percent of teachers in New York can get 80 percent of their students to pass. Yet 99 percent of teachers get a satisfactory rating from administrators.

If only 10 percent of teachers are downright awful — as we’d expect from a normal distribution of teaching talent, were we allowed to analyze it — that’s still 5 million children stuck in classrooms with awful teachers who can’t be replaced.

In the end, unions hate accountability, calling it “scapegoating” of teachers. Yet a 2004 study by the Thomas B. Fordham institute concluded that 21.5% of urban public school teachers sent their own kids to private school, compared with 17.5% of all urban families and only 12.2% of all families in the U.S. A 1983 study of Chicago public schools showed teachers were twice as likely to send their kids to a private school. And it’s not because teachers earn more — indeed, the Fordham study found that “as income decreases, a greater percentage of urban public school teachers choose private schools.”

How can this be good for kids?

Clearly, this is protecting bad teachers at the expense of a nation’s education. But the union’s massive membership numbers give teachers’ unions tremendous power to change how education happens, despite having no accountability for the results. Speak out against them, and you’re a pariah, on the receiving end of hate mail and accusations of class warfare (which this series of posts will undoubtedly earn.)

Both Gates and Moe ask an awkward question: would anyone organize education this way if their top priority was the improvement of young minds? Probably not. Imagine running a company, asks Gates, where you couldn’t use someone’s performance to decide whether they got promoted, and weren’t allowed to supervise your employees or learn and teach what worked best. Sadly, that’s the state of much of North American education.

Teachers know what schools are like, though.

Simply put, unions resist anything that might weaken the stranglehold they have on the future of a nation’s children, and with it, the future of a nation. So guess how they’re going to feel about the accountable, free, extensible classroom-of-one that tablets promise — a promise that could reverse the decline of the North American empire. That’s what we’ll look at next.

In this four-part series, we look at the impact of tablet computing on education: how tablets can save North American students, but how their ability to collect and analyze how students learn will make teaching more accountable — something that unions will oppose aggressively as they try to protect their members’ jobs.

This is a detailed write-up of the Short Bit I first presented at Bitnorth 2010, with lots of background and links to references I found while putting together that presentation. We decided to break it into several parts to make it easier to digest.

Yesterday, we looked at the sorry state of Western education. Now we’re going to consider the ways in which a digital classroom — made manifest by the modern tablet — could reverse the decline.

Digital education isn’t a new idea. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project started shipping cheap, reliable computers to students years ago, and the Web has been a critical resource for many rural and remote schools. But it’s the arrival of ubiquitous tablet computing that can really transform the modern classroom.

If students have their own tablets, they’re equipped with a powerful platform for learning. Here’s why:

1. They’re your entire curriculum

Consider an interactive tablet for education. It’s not just a book: it’s a musical instrument, a fitness trainer, an artistic canvas, a research system, a design tool. It would be an integral part of every class, from science to arts to shop.

The OLPC initiative has put XO laptops into the hands of 1.4 million children worldwide. The results of that experiment? Children teach their parents to read; students are absent from class less often; and teachers report that they love teaching.

2. They’re your library

A tablet is the planet’s biggest book. Armed with a tablet, a student would have the world’s content at her fingertips. The iPad may be first-generation device that doesn’t have a camera, or a microphone, or a GPS, in it yet. But it has millions of resources for students, such as:

• The Elements, an exploration of the periodic table that’s linked to online systems like Wolfram Alpha

• Toy Story, the interactive book that includes read-out-loud and painting modes
• The Khan Academy, a YouTube channel from a retired investment banker that has roughly 1,200 educational videos he’s made
• The MIT Open Courseware project, which puts the university’s curriculum and course materials online for anyone in the world
• Wikipedia, the pinnacle of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, with (at last count) 3,391,351 articles on nearly everything

When books were made of atoms, publishers could control their distribution. But that model is in ruins, and we’re creating free, open content at a breakneck rate.

As Shirky points out, the huge gains in free time that came about from industrialization were largely consumed by the television, a passive, one-way device we watch for 200 billion hours a year. But the advent of the Internet has unleashed a huge cognitive surplus on humanity. We created Wikipedia — a true wonder of the online world — in just 100 million hours: a fraction of the time we spend watching TV in a single year.

OLPC’s strategy for their next-generation tablet is to ship each device headed for a particular community with a different set of a hundred books. Then, using peer-to-peer sharing, the community has a vast library: a village with a hundred students would have 10,000 books in its digital library.

3. They’re getting affordable

In The Diamond Age, our heroine grows up in a world of nanotechnology. It’s cheap to make anything, simply by writing the proper code and setting tiny machines loose in a vat of goo. But we’re not so lucky: tablets cost money.

Fortunately, they’re coming down in price. The Indian government recently announced a $35 tablet, which was likely a publicity stunt — the raw components cost $47 — but still shows the shape of things to come. The first OLPC struggled to cost under $200, but now a $75 one may be within reach based on the affordably priced Marvell chipset.

A concept design for the OLPC tablet

There are also Linux implementations on the horizon and both handheld gaming and mobile phones are driving down the price point of portable devices. Today, a $50 phone has a Java engine, camera, speaker, microphone, and more.

Even if tablets are expensive, they’re still cheaper than the alternative. Printed textbooks are a $4.3B a year industry, dominated by a few large publishers who frequently edit their books to encourage students to buy new ones rather than resorting to cheaper used texts. The average high school student has 7 textbooks worth $70 to $90 each; by contrast, a Kindle costs around $260, and an iPad around $600, but eBooks pricing means the total cost of a year’s books is lower than the printed alternative.

Tablets are cheaper than printed texts over their lifetime

The economics are so attractive that the Italian government has just stated that starting in 2011, teachers can only use books that are available partly or entirely online. They estimate a 90% savings of the €200 to €250 a year spent on books per student. Tablets also tackle many of the issues that made student notebooks expensive: they have no hinges, keyboards, or mice.

4. They’re personalized and interactive

Tablets are more than just free course materials. Tablets can tailor the content, format, and rate of learning to each student. That means no more one-size-fits-all learning.

How tablets will connect all the stakeholders in a child's education

Having trouble? Get remedial help or alternate explanations. Dyslexic? Watch a video. A quick learner? Dig deeper or talk to a career counselor. Need more assistance? Hire a tutor, on demand, from anywhere on the Internet.

5. They’re analytical

And here’s where it gets really interesting, because interactivity means analytics. Simply put: when you learn from a tablet, it learns from you.

As students work with digital course material, they leave a trail behind them. The tablet can record what’s being read — and what’s being skipped. Teachers can tell whether a particular student isn’t spending enough time on their lessons, or is breezing through them.

Tablets can be the basis for testing, allowing teachers to assign homework within the device and check it efficiently. Parents can show they’ve checked their child’s work. Students can flag subject matter they don’t understand, so teachers can see where the class is stuck.

So maybe, by ushering in an era of cheap, tailored, analyzed learning, tablets can leave no child behind. But they face one huge, terrifying obstacle. When you read a tablet, it reads you. Tablets are the basis for unprecedented analytical insight into what makes students smart or stupid.

An analyzed, accountable education sounds great, unless you’re the largest political force in the US: Teacher’s unions. We’ll look at that in detail in the next post.

In this four-part series, we look at the impact of tablet computing on education: how tablets can save North American students, but how their ability to collect and analyze how students learn will make teaching more accountable — something that unions will oppose aggressively as they try to protect their members’ jobs.

This is a detailed write-up of the Short Bit I first presented at Bitnorth 2010, with lots of background and links to references I found while putting together that presentation. We decided to break it into several parts to make it easier to digest.

In his novel The Diamond Age, author Neal Stephenson describes a digital book his heroine carries with her. Dubbed the Young Lady’s Interactive Primer, this device is part guidebook, part tablet, and part personal guardian. It’s interactive, changing stories and allegories based on the predicaments our heroine faces. Some of its content is recorded; much of it is prepared, on the fly, by actors thousands of miles away.

Much as he colored in the picture of virtual reality — Stephenson coined the term Avatar as a representation of a virtual self, and his novel Snow Crash is the inspiration for Second Life — he may have nailed tablet computing. With the release of Apple’s iPad, we’re finding dozens of uses for a device we didn’t know we needed. It’s a console, a reader, a movie screen, a musical instrument, a game board, and a window into other worlds.

Beyond all these uses, however, the killer app for tablets could be education. Done right, personal tablets can reverse the precipitous decline of learning in much of the Western world. By putting the world’s knowledge at a student’s fingertips virtually for free, making it interactive, and tailoring it to each student’s abilities and interests, tablets could completely alter the way we teach and learn.

Education is the foundation of prosperity

An illiterate, misinformed population is the hallmark of a failed state. Less educated citizens can’t compete in the global economy, are easily swayed,  and are less likely to make informed decisions. In an information age, an inability to work with information is a death sentence — almost literally, since it correlates with higher rates of infant mortality and lower lifespans.

A Gapminder visualization of the correlation between literacy and life expectancy

Education in the Western world, particularly North America, is on the decline.

One quick note on the scope of this series: As I learned about education, unions, and other subjects, I came across a wide range of research. A preponderance of it was specific to the U.S., but many of the observations about the decline of educational standards apply to a large number of Western nations. As a result, some of the data in here refers to the U.S., some to North America, and some to a broader set of countries. There are several European countries that are succeeding in education, so it would be wrong to lump them into this analysis.

That’s a pretty controversial statement. Many public indicators of literacy are up: the top quartile of America’s universities contain the smartest students anywhere, and standardized testing shows a modest improvement in literacy. The historian Lawrence Cremin argues that “Americans were a more literate population at the end of the 20th century than at any time earlier,” a direct consequence of access to public education.

Look deeper at the state of North American education, however, and things quickly go pear-shaped. Critics caution that the No Child Left Behind Act has simply lowered the bar enough that weak students, ill-equipped to survive in a knowledge-based society, can climb over it. Even Cremin cautions against defining literacy as no more than rudimentary technical skills in reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic — because literacy aims at a changing target.

In a recent TED presentation that didn’t pull many punches, Bill Gates makes a case for fixing our ailing schools. If you’re a kid in the U.S., he points out, you a have 30 percent chance of never finishing high school. If you’re a minority, that’s more than 50 percent. Barbara Amiel recently observed out that one in 31 Americans is involved in the legal system somehow, whether by probation, incarceration, or investigation. With numbers like these, Gates reminds us that if you’re in a low income bracket, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a college degree.

Numeracy — quantitative literacy — is particularly bad.

According to Mathematics and democracy: the case for quantitative literacy, “Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that the average mathematics performance of seventeen-year-old students has risen just one percent in 25 years and remains, at 307, in the lower half of the “basic” range (286–336) and well below the “proficient” range (336–367). Moreover, despite slight growth in recent years, average scores of Hispanic students (292) and black students (286) are near the bottom of the “basic” range.”

What’s scary isn’t just that education has stalled — it’s that the rest of the world has kept going. We need more literacy and numeracy today than we did decades ago. Today’s citizen must understand risks of infection and read voting results. He has to screen advertising claims and measure growth rates. He must interpret data and work with computers every day.

Cremin describes two kinds of quantitative literacy: inert and liberating. “Inert” literacy is the basics: comprehending instructions and performing repeated tasks. It’s the kind of literacy we’d expect in a stalled state, where citizens have limited opportunity and aren’t expected to question or change. And increasingly, it’s considered good enough in our educational systems.

By contrast, Cremin’s “liberating” literacy means that individuals can find, analyze, and communicate information. They can apply it to problems and use it to make decisions. The educator John Dewey called this “popular enlightenment” and it’s the basis of a democracy, because only liberated citizens can think for themselves, make their own decisions, and discriminate between truth and lies.

Most U.S. students lack the literacy they need to live well in modern society; they suffer from “math panic” and retreat into faith and bumper-sticker politics. They’re ill-equipped for today’s in-demand jobs. Virtually every college finds that many students need remedial mathematics. We don’t even understand the equal sign properly.

Not fully understanding the “equal sign” in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math.

“About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students,”

Students who exhibit the correct understanding of the equal sign show the greatest achievement in mathematics and persist in fields that require mathematics proficiency like engineering, according to their research. “Chinese textbooks provided the best examples for students and that even the best U.S. textbooks, those sponsored by the National Science Foundation, were lacking relational examples about the equal sign.”

Two million minutes

Students have about two million minutes of high school, and how they spend that time varies widely throughout the world. The documentary 2 Million Minutes looks at this period in the lives of three pairs of students: two from California, two from China, and two from India. It’s a depressing story.

When the filmmakers asked the overseas students what they wanted to be, Chinese students listed scientist, astronaut, or doctor. Indian students aspired to be a computer programmer, or a physicist.

Americans, by contrast, told the filmmakers they simply wanted to be celebrities.

The film underscores the vast differences between learning in Asia and America. In the U.S., if a child shows prowess at sports, they get her a coach. In India, if a child shows promise in school, the parents hire a teacher. But in the U.S., tutors are largely remedial: We don’t encourage intelligence; rather, we try to correct stupidity.

This is a problem that’s finally getting mainstream attention. Several other films are hitting the screens now. Take a look at this trailer for Waiting For Superman, which tackles the subject of charter schools and the collapse of the educational system.

Then have a quick look at The Cartel, a documentary on corruption and obfuscation in school systems.

If you watched those three trailers, you may be wondering what the future looks like. It’s bleak. North America doesn’t value education and science. We put athletes and musicians on pedestals, ignoring teachers and dismissing scientific inquiry in our politics and media.

We’ll pay the price for this attitude, but it will take decades. The effects of a weakened educational system take a generation to show themselves in the workforce — long after the party that weakened the system is no longer in power — so it’s easy for elected officials to turn a blind eye to the problem.

Big classes make dumb students

Education is imperiled for dozens of reasons, and there are no magic cure-alls. One big problem, however, is classroom size. Simply put, teaching doesn’t scale well. The Center for Public Education reviewed 19 well-researched studies, and concluded that smaller classes did better.

They found that:

• Smaller classes in the early grades (K-3) can boost student academic achievement;
• A class size of no more than 18 students per teacher is required to produce the greatest benefits;
• A program spanning grades K-3 will produce more benefits than a program that reaches students in only one or two of the primary grades;
• Minority and low-income students show even greater gains when placed in small classes in the primary grades;
• The experience and preparation of teachers is a critical factor in the success or failure of class size reduction programs;
• Reducing class size will have little effect without enough classrooms and well-qualified teachers; and
• Supports, such as professional development for teachers and a rigorous curriculum, enhance the effect of reduced class size on academic achievement.

The more students you have in a class, the less tailored each lesson can be to individual students. That means lessons are one-size-fits all, watered down by special interest groups and structured to appease the lowest common denominator. Big classes are distracted classes, and bad kids enjoy the same asymmetry as terrorists, because it takes very little effort for one student to interrupt the learning of forty others.

There simply aren’t enough teachers to give every student personal attention, helping those who struggle and accelerating those who excel.

In part two, we look at something that could reverse the decline of education in much of the Western world: tablet computing, and its promise of an interactive, digital, analyzed “classroom of one”.

Dutch researchers have demonstrated a new type of network – not LAN or WAN, but BAN, the Body Area Network. What this means is that sensors in your body (for example electrocardiogram sensors monitoring your heart, or EEGs monitoring your brain) can now communicate via radiowaves to a wearable computer hung round the neck. This computer can send you a text message if readings stray from the norm. Your body will text you when it needs medical attention!

Read more at New Scientist. Image courtesy of Gizmodo