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Nitin Nohria, Dean of Harvard Business School, talks about what education is for.

He had never been out of India when he got accepted to MIT. Plus he got a fellowship, or else he would not have been able to go. Education opens up opportunities in ways people could not even imagine.

What words to you hear when you hear “HBS,” he asks? Audience: elite, rich, case method, leadership, lehman brothers…

The case method is the idea most associated with HBS. But it took 20 years to evolve that method. What can we do in our second hundred years? The school is in a good place. The program is strong. Enviable applicant pool. Strong placement record, even in bad times. There’s a natural engine of innovation in the case method: they write 300 new cases per year. New faculty come in. New courses, etc.

Why the case method? It’s close to life. It’s real problems. “If you were in the protagonist’s shoes, what would you do?” You learn why you think differently from others. Over 2 yrs, students will have been through 500 cases. Problem-solving becomes a habit. You get good at collaboration, communication. “Our alumni think of the case method as developing a meta-capability.”

A few years ago, HBR wrote cases about 7 different business schools, and researched 200 others. They found business schools generally agree that their task is teaching knowing what it means to be a leader, translating that knowing into doing, and getting over the gap between doing and being (i.e., how you are being experienced). HBR has been asking how it can do better at the “being” component. So, it’s creating the field method in addition to the case method. It puts student in the “field” in a small group (about 6). Students will be the protagonist, rather than stepping into someone else’s shoes. They are presented with a scenario, and must take action, and then reflect on the action and outcome. Students should be in about 10 different situations by the time they are graduated.

Also, all students will have to build a venture that they can launch in eight weeks. In teams. The school expects one third to fail at this; those students can then either join one of the surviving teams or write a case about a team.

The key is to have a method. That’s why the case method works. In 7-8 years, Nitin hopes a method for field exercvises will emerge.

The case method needs an amphitheater; try running it in a flat classroom and it won’t work. The field method will have an architecture based on hives. The instructor will be at the center of the room.

Q: What percentage are involved in social entrepreneurship programs?
A: 8% . Last year, 9% of graduating students went into social enterprises.

Q: You spend a lot of time on the how, not on the what.
A: We have no innovation on the “what.” There are plenty of people doing field studies. If there’s anything new, it will be in the “how.”

Q: BTW, a lot of what you’re doing are what’s happening in middle schools. What about the design process?
A: We’re not sure. That’s why in the Harvard Innovation Lab we’re creating a space to think about this. We’re also working on cultural entrepreneurship. By doing all that, hopefully we’ll discover something. (Students are the best innovators. They don’t always know what they’ve done.)

Q: Aren’t you inventing a formula for making MBA education even more expensive?Why not put Michael Porter online? Also, how will you help students reflect on what they’ve learned?
A: Lots of other schools offer lower-cost educations. Second, the reflection will happen after every encounter. We don’t yet know the precise methodology of the reflection cycle.

Business leaders often suffer from moral over-confidence. People think they won’t even be tempted to do anything immoral. People are more over-confident about their morality than about their intellectual abilities. It’s important for HBS to address this.

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Kiran Sethi, founder of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, says that even when our school systems fail, we continue to support them. She shows a video: When children do good, they do well: They are engaged with their community, and are out-performing India’s best schools in math and science. She has also influenced her city to create spaces for children, via her “Apoch” project: A protagonist in every child. “The city becomes a playground” providing events for children, for free. A clean up the parks campaign. Four cities, 50,000 children. Then “the world’s largest Design for Change” challenge: Feel, imagine, do, share. They have a curriculum and a toolkit. In 30 countries, 350,000 children are saying “I can” to cleaning up beaches, preserving tribal cultures, ending bullying…

VanDyck Silveira, CEO of IBMEC in Brazil. IBMEC is a business school branching out to be come a tech school. 80% of the world’s educational expenditures go to university students. Only 20% of funding goes to primary education. The poor end up financing the rich. Only 20% of Brazilians go to university. But, over the past twenty years, Brazil has developed a flourishing middle class. The less advantaged social classes have been mainly responsibly for the growth in higher ed in the last decade. IBMEC is a for-profit organization that has focused on quality rather than educating masses; it scores very highly in gov’t metrics.

Gordon Freedman [ pdf], VP at Blackboard, thinks about systems change. Blackboard has 5000 institutional clients. He speaks with educators in many countries and finds that we’re all in about the same place. “There are very few outliers in education.” The world of work and the world of kids have changed, but education is still basically the same. What’s now poised to make a difference? Neuroscience and the science of learning; computational modeling and simulation; information science and tech; knowledge economy and information society. Gordon Freedman crowbars educational change into three levels: traditional (work within the system); transitional (work around the system); transformational (Make a modern system). He says most of the people in this room are in the transitional system. Gordon wants to ask the transformational question of how we can make difference by bringing in people from outside of education. We should be moving from the industrial, institutional model, to an informational, individual model.

Funding education out of taxes no longer works. Schools are in deficit. We need organizations to look at the alternatives. New networks, peer learning, new knowledge, etc. “Everyone assumes there is a fourth grade or a sixth grade. Why is that?” Why aren’t we redesigning education with all of the leading resources available around the world; we need to break out of the education circle. And why aren’t we redefining students as capable young people who can participate in building a new education system?

Q: Kiran, where’s your funding come from?
A: Design for Change is open source software available to all.

Q: VanDyck…?
A: We have our own campuses and franchises that partner with excellent schools.

Q: Gordon, what is Blackboard’s business model?
A: We’re licensed by schools. We’re changing from looking at the classroom as being the basic unit to looking at the student as the basic unit.

Q: You said 18M Indians are in college. We need new models if we are to scale up.
Kiran: Until now, the gov’t focused on access to ed. Now we’re working on retention. One size won’t fit all. We need many models.

Q: If we make a new system, what should it look like? We all agree that the top down hierarchical model isn’t working anymore, and that private and public should coexist. But what about focusing on classrooms vs. individuals. We need a way to learn across and between levels. We can’t design the future, but we need to create an architecture for learning.
– Higher ed has dropped the ball. [A “-” indicates a change in speakers]

Shia Rashef is asked to talk about the University of the People, an open, online basically free university. (The students pay for exams: $10-$100, depending on the country.) They have 1,000 students, and 2,000 professor volunteers.

Q: We shouldn’t narrow ourselves to the future of the educ system instead of the future of education. Basic skills will probably be learned outside the schoolhouse. The educational system is failing men in so many societies [?].

Q: Education for what?
Gordon: Strong curious minds.
Kiran: More design thinking, incoroporating diversity
VanDyck: Creating leaders, people with free minds, entrepreneus

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Joel Klein, former Chancellor of NYC Schools and now with News Corp.

He begins by noting that he doesn’t think an innate desire to learn drives us all to everything we need to learn. He had no interest in physics until a great teacher got him interested.

He says K-12 is broken. It’s broken for yesterday’s challenges, and certainly for tomorrow’s. The US is getting a porr return on its education investment. From 1970 until now, we have 60% more teachers in the US. But scores on reading, math, and science are flat lines. Any business would shut this down. Only 35% of students leave HS ready for college. Internationally, we are way at the bottom, including countries that spend way less than us. He recommends we read The Race Between Education and Technology. We are not producing enough students qualified for the work force. How can develop a disruptive delivery system that will get the kids the skills they need?

The system now is designed entirely wrong. It’s top down. The Chancellor decides on class size, e.g. Why can’t the schools decide that? There’s accountability at the top: You dance to the tune of the politicians and the unions. The worst part of his job was, he says, to be in an environment that did not constantly strive for excellence and that did not embrace innovation. So, he built it on local accountability: every school got a letter grade so that parents would be disruptive. The grades were based on where they were. He shut down 100 schools out of 1200. He opened up 400 competition-driven HS’s + 100 new charter schools. Seniority, lifetime benefits, lockstep pay all work against excellence. He created innovation zones. This has resulted in higher scores. (He gives an example: He came across a student who was texting his tutor in Mumbai who was more focused on him than was his local teacher.)

From his slide:

• Schools must become intelligent, data driven and accountable.

• Contents must be digitized, highly engaging, accessible, and flexible. Games work, for e.g.

• Learning by extend beyond the classroom.

• Education must be highly customized. Change the ways, the pace, the differentiation. Not diff content for every kid.

• Human capital must be dramatically redefined. In the past we’ve bet on the quantity, not the quality of people. Instead we should find where the most effective changes would be.

He ends by citing a WSJ article calling for a move away from the manufacturing model, that could lead to having half as many educators (!), smaller schools, higher graduation rates, and test scores.

Q: Spain’s scores are lower, but there is less of a sense of urgency.

Q: I agree with your solutions, but I analyze the problems differently. The US health care system is actually performing worse than schools, but we don’t use the rhetoric of shutting it down. The causes are underlying poverty, etc.
Q: In Britain, the best marks come from Chinese students on school lunch programs, so the argument from poverty is weak.
Joel: NY and Boston poor kids are way ahead of the same in Detroit and LA. It’s not poverty. It’s education. I talk about shutting things down because we have a monopoly provider. Nobody would agree to placing their kid randomly in a NYC school; everyone wants choice. It’s the poor who don’t have it.
– The real issue is fairness.
– The skills divide is going to kill us.

Q: Three massive, broken industries are heavily unionized. How much of the massive failure of the ed system is due to the unions?
A: There’s no doubt that that’s an important part of it. Monopoly providers are self-interested. A choice model would protect people.

Q: It’s not just the unions but the broader mass-production system. Higher ed is highly competitive, but lives within rigid, top-down, hierarchical systems. It’s not poverty but the infrastructure of mass systems.

Q: In the next sessions, how can we look for political will without a leader?
A: A long discussion over drinks…

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This is a PechaKucha session: Each presenter talks to 20 slides, each for 20 seconds, run on a timer.

Patrick Newell begins. The Japanese educational system worked well post-war but now it is forcing children into doing mindless work to prepare themselves to enter an elementary school or higher school. The school system does the basics well. But they’re declining, in part because of the unions, aging boards of education, male-domination, and an inability to fire teachers. The power of the red marker: they’re so afraid to make mistakes. E.g., Japanese kids rank lower on spoken English than, say, Koreans, because they worry about making mistakes. Japan is torn between advancing into the globalized world and focusing on unity. Japan tends not to change, except in response to disaster. How does Japan move forward? Through inquiry, curiosity, getting past being exam-driven. Their economy demands that they be more creative. It has to go from focusing on the “sage on the stage” to empowering the learner. Neural science is confirming what we’ve always known: really being connected with all five senses helps us learn. Also, give students the digital tools, an end goal, and get out of the way. Japan needs to learn new means of assessment. Multiple intelligences: Japan could be strong in collective intelligence.

Dali Yang, prof of political science at U of Chicago and in Beijing. China has undergone massive changes in science and tech in the past 30 yrs. The number of college grads is going up steeply, starting in the new millennium. Chinese gov’t investment in sci and tech is becoming a much greater percentage of GDP, although lower than in the US. Citations and patents are also increasing rapidly; its share of patents has more than doubled. But the expansion of college grads has devalued the degree; many grads find it hard to get a job. This has invited growing interest by foreign companies,educators, and investors. Many western universities have low-intensity commitments in China. But some universities have full-fledged campuses in China. New models of collaboration are beginning to emerge: registered entities that offer a wide range of offerings, but not degrees. U of Chicago is in the business district of Beijing. In Beijing there are 750,000 college students. A symbol: U of Chicago is returning to China a raptor skeleton it had stolen from China. He talks about some initiatives, e.g., programs about copyright, political economy. Another symbol: The arts program. U of Chicago is quite committed to this and to expanding it. But, while college intake has increased, the number of Chinese children is declining; this has implications for the educational system.

Sridhar Rajgopalan asks why with all our progress, our educational systems are not getting better and better. The learning levels for the very poor are very low. Sridhar has tests that enable benchmarking that start conversations about whether students are really learning, rather than resting satisfied that more students are in school. There is mechanical learning, but not a lot of understanding. Sridhar’s group develops sheets for teachers to help them teach children basic ideas that they are missing. They also have in-school communication programs. Most important, it helps them analyze why the misconceptions happen. E.g., students think the largest angle is the one with the longest arms. “MindSpark” is a “personalized adapative learning tool.” “The real power of tools like these will come not from animation but intelligence.” Students who make different mistakes are guided through different thought processes. The aim is to provide personalized education at scale. Results: All children benefit, but the weakest students benefit the most. This is only on partially about tech. It’s mainly about the science of learning: How do students learn better. Interdisciplinary. It’s important to develop a body of systematic knowledge: When children are learning, these are the misconceptions, this is how to detect it, this is how to correct. .

Diego Sanchez de Leon, Head of Talent and Organization Performance at EALA Accenture. He sees the integration of work and learning. Learning will be continuous, on demand, just in time, integrated with work. Learning will be contextual, embedded in what we do every day. Individual leadership. This applies better to technological learning than to behavioral learning. We need to reach a balance between the two. This means more of a demand output. People need to have the mindset to learn. That means self-management, self-awareness, self-assessment. They need multi-channel blending and choice; e.g., some people like to listen to books when they drive, others don’t. Unit duration is going down: from weeks of learning down to seconds. That gives us a sense of continuous learning. Learning is collaborative, and we need to learn how to measure that. There will be more transparency of value of skills vs. cost. We need to get better at balancing rights and obligations. We may well see the same amount of spending spent on fewer people. We need to master multiple content resources. We need a common design method and tools for developing learning areas. The shift in investment will go to learning and experience and less to developing materials. Finally, we will reuse everything on the job for learning. The aim is to increase our assimilation capacity: our ability to do things.

Discussion: Chris Meyer, our host, asks: What did you respond to positively?

– Personalization, mass customization of ed via technology

– People assume that we need to get away from the factory model of education. Was the factory model so bad? It created mass literacy and numeracy, homogenous population. If you move away from it, you risk the base knowledge that makes innovation possible. We have seen rebellions against the factory modely since the beginning of the 20th century, which has led to huge failures among poorer children and has broadened inequality.
– I have a lot of evidence that the factory model leaves behind poor learners. Do you have evidence?
– Yes. In Britain. Private schools that have continued with traditional models have completely dominated the progressive schools that have emphasized individual learning. The history of 20th c England is the proof.
– During the industrial age, mass ed worked. We’re in a different context now. We’re in a different era.
– The rates of people going to college in the UK are flatlining because people are ill-served by the old model.
– Let’s stay out of the old trad vs. progressive ed debate. We’re in a new place. Mass edu is a type of instruction well-suited to some tasks, but there are times kids need another pedagogical style.
– Personalized is great, but we need to teach thousands of students
– We need a balance.
– As a Brit, I disagree with the causes of the failures of ed. Also, we need to contrast base knowledge with how to work things out. To what extent do we need to educate people with the base knowledge vs. the processing of that ed? Progressive teaching of traditional curriculum vs. transforming the curriculum because the subjects have changed.
– Fiscal austerity worldwide. Cuts to ed budgets. Even providing the basic needs is a challenge. But there are also special opportunities.
– Institutions focus on costs. I heard “free,” but free to whom? We are just reallocating costs.We have to convince decision makers that this is in the best interests of their constituents. Also, don’t ignore the “great number of feral people” out there. We need to civilize them.
– Times have changed. The nature of education and knowledge for our children is different, so ed has to be diff
– The basics are important. But the world has changed. This includes how you measure, especially for workers who are learning.
– Separate what we teach kids from how we teach them. Knowledge is being depreciated in ed. The teacher is not the only source, of course, but kids need to know algebra. What counts are not the techniques but the standards. So much has become “self-referential knowledge”: what does this mean to you, rather than mastering the skills.
– Hundreds of millions of people in the world are excluded from any kind of ed. Tech enables us to reach them. First let’s use what we have to deliver ed to those who have nothing. Also, looking at social networking: people are teaching each other. Why don’t we use it much more to bring it into education?
– The key thing is the individual learner.
– The factory model is not working in India. We need to build rigor into how we teach, and use the tech model too.
– How do you create excellent teachers. In the 19th c in France, they were educating great teachers. Now that’s gone downhill, especially in the lower grades. This is a problem.
– We’ve been working off of a scarcity model of knowledge. Instead of a push technology, we have students pulling knowledge to them. The goal of ed has to be some kind of balanced competency, but we’ve focused on the metrics of teaching rather than the metrics of learning. Also, we should have students at this event.
– 48% of US college grads never read a book again. Healthy human babies are incredible learning machines. We’re predisposed to learn throughout our lives. Students are learning every day although they may not find interesting what teachers are teaching.
– Many ideas people think are new are not. We’ve seen generations of experimentation. The amount of knowledge to acquire to enter the world is bigger than ever before. Self-direction has to be acquired. You have to learn to discipline yourself before you can be self-directed, and the factory model is required for this.

– How do you build collective intelligence?
Patrick Newell: Schools are about human interaction and collaboration. There’s as much value in that as in the content conveyed. Have students work within groups. Get the balance right between tech and human.
– [Note that I’m using a “-” to indicate a shift in speakers] Students are risk-takers. Edu systems are increasingly risk-averse.
– “Mass customization” is about modules, e.g., an algebra model. We need to be aware that there is some finite set of modules students need. We’re not talking about infinite number of ways of teaching something.

– We should be defining the user requirements.
Chris Meyer: We’re trying to understand: what does edu need to offer society going forward? How relevant is the history to this?

– If we listened to Diego’s presentation, we would rethink teaching.

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I’m at a small conference — about 40 people — that is considering what would be “an effective education for the 21st Century.” It is the 16th edition of the Future Trends Forum, sponsored by the Fundacion de la Innovacion, sponsored by Bankinter, in Madrid. It promises to be an intense day and a half.

The group’s organizers have agreed to live blogging. I’ll do the best I can, although it’s likely to be difficult.

Chris Meyer begins the morning. He quotes from Chris Dede about moving from industrial era education to preparing people for 21st century “work, citizenship and life.” What kind of new institutions might be created? Chris M. says this is more driven by demand than supply, especially as people live longer. During the conference, we’ll be looking at innovations in parts of the world where the institutions are not as firmly fixed, to try to get a glimpse of what might emerge.

I opened the morning with a ten minute talk reviewing the survey members had completed, and talking about knowledge as a property of the network. If I get a chance, I’ll post it.

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At the final panel of the conference. Judith Donath is moderating.

Charlie Nesson asks: “When we talk about our space, who are we?” In Jeff Huang‘s presentation, it seemed like he was given the perfect hypothetical — a desert — to build a public and private place. “In cyber terms, we are people of the Net. What then is our domain? It’s the public domain. And if you are to build the public domain, then I believe the wisdom to follow from a lawyer’s point of view is the same wisdom that has more or less informed the world of real property. If you want an orderly world of real property, you build a registry. If you want an orderly world of bits, you build a registry.” This is Charlie’s new project: a registry of the public domain. They’re starting with IMSLP.org: a musical score library. It has 93,000 musical scores in the public domain., exquisitely put together.

The Net divides into two domains, says Charlie, one that is free and one that is not. Free means free of copyright and other encumbrances. Charlie wants to build our domain on a foundation solid in law. The registry he’s building identifies works as public domain, with links to the registrars attesting to this. He wants it to be populated by librarians with public domain collections. But, the problem with registries is litigation risk, i.e., the threat of lawsuit. “So the essence of this idea is to couple the registrar with a pro bono commitment of legal service from a law firm of repute to defend litigation based on infringement.”

Where do you find the institutions that want to protect privacy, asks Charlie. How about libraries, he suggests?

“I’m tough on privacy, Judith,” says Charlie, in response to a question. “I’ve never liked it.” He explains it’s so often based on fear and looks backwards.

Martin Nowak looks at cooperation evolutionary term in which a donor pays a cost and a recipient gets a benefit. He explains game theory’s Prisoner’s Dilemma. Why do people cooperate? “Natural selection chooses defection,” rather than cooperation. In a mixed population, defection becomes increasingly more popular. So, natural selection needs help to favor co-operation. Martin categorizes the factors into five mechanisms: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity spatial selection and group selection.

Direct reciprocity (I help you, you help me). If you play the Prisoner’s Dilemma several times, the economics changes, as The Folk Theorem shows them. Martin quickly summarizes Axelrod and Rapaport. [Too hard to live blog. Read Ethanz. Really. Now.] Errors turn out to ruin cooperation, so you need a process that allows for forgiveness. Martin’s doctoral dissertation showed that if everyone plays randomly, the right tactic is to always defect. A tit for tat strategy corrects that, and generous tit-for-tat (I may still cooperate even if you defect) provides a math model for the evolution of forgiveness and cooperation. There are always oscillations; cooperations are never stable. We need structures that rebuild cooperation quickly after it is destroyed because it always will be destroyed.

Direct reciprocity allows allow for the evolution of cooperation if there’s a prospect of another round. Indirect reciprocity (I help you, someone helps me) leads to cooperation if reputation matters. You need natural selection to care about reputation, so to speak. “What you need for indirect reciprocity is gossip” to spread reputation. For that you need language. “You could argue this is the selection process that led to language.” “For direct reciprocity you need a face. For indirect reciprocity you need a name.” (David Haig) Our brain has both capabilities. If interactions are completely anonymous you run into problems. Also, you need gossip to be relatively honest.

Spatial selection = neighbors help each other. Martin flips through some graphs that shows that it selects for coop if you have a few close friends. Likewise, evolutionary set theory says that people wanting to join particular groups can also lead to coop.

Judith: What about strong vs. weak ties?
Martin: We assume equal ties. There’s a trade-off between wealth and vulnerability.

Nicholas Negroponte asks himself a question every morning: Is he doing something that normal market forces would do anyway? If so, he stops. He wants to do that which market forces will not do.

There are now 3M One Laptop Per Child laptops in the hands of kids. This isn’t huge since OLPC would like to get laptops into the hands of about 500M kids. Before that, people assumed computers teach by imparting content. Instead, you want to see children teaching. 20-30% of the million Peruvian kids with OLPC machines are using them to teach their parents how to read.

Nicholas goes through some points he made in a talk at the UN recently. Among the points: Measurement is overrated. You only measure when the changes are so small that you can only see them by measurement.

Judith: When we see well-off kids sitting side by side looking into screens, we think it’s a nightmare of anti-sociality, but when we see your adorable photos of third world kids in the same position, it looks desirable?
Nicholas: I don’t see the well-off kids that way. And why don’t we make OLPC’s available in the US? Because the issues are deeper than that.

A: Talk about anonymity…?
Jeff Jarvis: It’s foundational to democracy. It’s getting a bad name because of trolls. But it must be protected.

Q: This discussion is soaked in privilege. There’s much inscribed in the language that affects how people act. When you idolize the public space as a place where all can share their ideas safely, it feels really far away for me.

Q: (Charlie) Nicholas, you’ve said that Uruguay has given all 500,000 of its kids OLPCs. Given your position on measurement, what change will we see?
Nicholas: Their curiosity, the way they approach problems, the way they look at things…I think you’re going to see a nation that is far more creative than many other nations. Nicholas tells a story of kid whose homework got 100K hits.
Martin: Who teaches them how to use it?
Nicholas: It’s genetic :) We’re going to do a scientific experiment in which we drop OLPC laptops out of helicopters onto remote villages and come back in a year and see how many have learned how to read.

Q: (urs gasser) One vision says build a great tool and see what happens. The other is to study human behavior scientifically. (Nicholas vs. Martin). How difficult is the translation from findings from science about human behavior to adapting them to technology?
Martin: I’m fascinated by mathematics, but we do apply it to practical issues. In the field of cooperation, we’d like to bring the models closer to human observations. For example, many cultures like punishment, but I think it doesn’t work well to create cooperation because it creates complications. Reward seems better. So, we study that. We do the same experiment in multiple cultures. In Romania, for example, people differentiated between public and private outcomes, because they lacked faith that public engagement had positive outcomes.

Q: (zeynep) The Net has let the cooperative side of human nature be more manifest. Does your work in evolutionary biology take account of this?
A: The coop we see in the animal world must rely on direct observation. Humans can communicate. We don’t have to rely on our personal experience with another to decide whether to coop. The Net can help us to evaluate others quickly.

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Discovery, the metadata ecology for UK education and research, invites stakeholders to join us in adopting a set of principles to enhance the impact of our knowledge resources for the furtherance of scholarship and innovation…

What follows are a set of principles that are hard to disagree with.

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No, kids, you probably don’t.

I used to be a terrible, horrible, miserable hobbyist programmer. I enjoyed it a great deal, but land-o-lakes was I dumb!

I learned out of books, most of which are still bending the shelves they sit on. A good programming book is a pleasure. It teaches you the principles and the basic moves. But, programming is fun because it’s so specific. You need to measure the length of a line displayed in a particular font, or you want to set the opacity of a circle based on its diameter, and the book you’re using just does not happen to hit those examples. The time I used to spent guessing and poking around was not instructive and did not build character. It was simply what you had to do when you were dumb.

I am still a terrible, horrible, miserable hobbyist programmer. But my ability to solve problems, and, yes, eventually even to learn, has gone up orders and orders of magnitude because of three inter-related things:

1. All problems only arise the first time in a population once. Therefore, most problems have already been addressed by someone before you. They’ve either been solved by someone else or, if there are no solutions, someone has already discovered that.

2. It’s now so easy to make your work public

3. The hacker ethos has resulted in superb developers making their work available as examples and as entire libraries.

The second and third together has resulted in an enormous and public repository of questions, answers, examples, and explanations. (For example, see Rebecca Murphey’s introduction to JQuery…and then consider the centuries of engineering time libraries like JQuery have saved us. (Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb for the link to Rebecca’s book.))

4. Search engines are so damn good that we can find our way through that gigantic, unplanned repository.

You know every single thing I’ve just said. Still, it’s just good to remember now and then how amazing it is that we all know this as if it were always so. Especially if for you it has always been so.

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I’m at CollabTech at Case Western, and came in late on a session about blurring the lines of ontrol in classrooms.

As I come in, Bill Deal is talking about encouraging students to tweet material related to the class. The students took to it, posting links to materials from around the Web. They averaged about 15 tweets (if I got that right). He says he’s tried other tech in classrooms, but this one really worked. In response to a question, he says that there was no interaction among twitterers outside of the class; they discussed using a hashtag, but some students wanted to keep their tweets private-ish.

Bernard Jim talks about his experience teaching 17-student seminars in which the students are expected to produce knowledge, not just consume it. He says the physical geography of the classroom puts all the tech at the front of the room, under the teacher’s control. [Surely they have laptops, though.] He begins each session by playing a song relevant to the day’s topic, and invites the students to play their music. The students initially resist this, but then take it up. The aim is for them to take possession of the tech in the classroom. He also wants them to understand that their cultural experiences are relevant to the course. (Bernard is a cultural historian.)

For example, he has them reading Burke on the sublime, who references Milton. “So, I’m teaching an 18th century philosophy who references a 17th century poet, to 21st century students who can be put off by a movie if it’s in black and white.” Burke asks what a frightening sound is: “a low tremulous intermitting sound.” So, Bernie plays a YouTube of the Halloween theme, to try to connect their experience to Burke.

Sometimes the students bring in their own references. E.g., in a class on letters discussing a letter from Abelard to Heloise (or was it vice versa), they brought in “Dramatic Reading of a Break-up Letter.”

In a different class they were talking about hypermasculinity, as in some of Michelangelo. The students responded with College Humor’s Power Thirst.

He also has a class on puzzles, which is “an extremely interactive class.” Once a week they have a puzzle challenge. On Pi Day (3/14), they took the Pi Day Challenge, up on the big screen. “You have a whole bunch of students yelling at me, which is what I like.”

Q: Do you ever get inappropriate student suggestions?
A: Yes, sometimes.
A: [bill deal] One tweet was “Great film of boobies” that turned out to be about birds.

Michael Kenney who teaches chemistry provided Kindles to 50 students. A third loved it. A third thought it was great for reading books, so they gave it to their parents [he says jokingly]. And a third sold it on ebay. Within class, it usefully kept all their texts in one place, although the lack of a file structure was a problem. But he got sued. ‘[He doesn’t say why and I didn’t find any info on a quick search.]

So, now they use the Entourage eDGe, which has a touch-sensitive Android tablet on one side and an ebook reader on the other. He’s hoping students can use these as their lab notebooks. [See Jean-Claude Bradley’s open notebook idea.] So far, he’s having the same results as with the Kindle. For one thing, the OS is underpowered and out of date. The eDGe concept “is very good, but it’s not going to replace” analog devices. His sits on a shelf, unused.

Q: [me] Have you connected with J-C Bradley.
A: Yes. Our aim is to have a cloud-based note-taking system. Bradley’s ideas are very good,.

Christine Hudak [twitter:infomatics1] , in the nursing school, has her students use twitter feeds to keep up with the ever-changing info. All the nursing students had to tweet, because social media are now being used with patients in hospitals. No personal tweets were allowed, although some students ignored that rule. They also had a private Facebook group page that they used for info sharing and communicating about projects; it was strictly student-driven. Christine didn’t see it until the end of the semester, and was very impressed. The page is being passed on to next year’s class.

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