If you want to read a brilliant application of some of the ideas in Too Big to Know to our educational system, read A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. And by “application of” I mean “It was written a year before my book came out and I feel like a dolt for not having known about it.”

DT and JSB are thinking about knowledge pretty much exactly the way 2b2k does. What they call a “collective,” I call a “knowledge network.” With more than a hat tip to Michael Polanyi, they talk insightfully about “collective indwelling,” which is the depth of insight and topical competency that comes from a group iterating on ideas over time.

Among other things, they write provocatively about the use of games and play in education, not as a way to trick kids into eating their broccoli, but as coherent social worlds in which students learn how to imagine together, set goals, gather and synthesize information, collectively try solutions, and deepen their tacit knowledge. DT and JSB do not, however, so fetishize games that they lose site of the elements of education a game like World of Warcraft (their lead example) does not provide, especially the curiosity about the world outside of the game. On the contrary, they look to games for what they call the “questing disposition,” which will lead students beyond problem-solving to innovation. Adding to Johan Huizinga‘s idea that play precedes culture, they say that games can help fuse the information network (open and expansive) with the key element of a “bounded environment of experimentation” (116). This, they say, leads to a new “culture of learning” (117). Games are for them an important example of that more important point.

It’s a terrific, insightful, provocative book that begins with a founding assumption that it’s not just education that’s changing, but what it means to know a world that is ever-changing and now deeply connected.

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Google has posted my authors@google talk. Thank you, Google!

And Steve Hargadon has posted the hour interview he did last night as part of his Future of Education series, in which we talked about knowledge and education. Thank you, Steve Hargadon!

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I’ve posted a brief video interview with Avi Warshavsky of the Center for Educational Technology, the leading textbook publisher in Israel. Avi is a thoughtful and innovative software guy who has been experimenting with new ways of structuring textbooks.

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Eric Frank is the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, a company that publishes online textbooks that are free via a browser, but cost money if you want to download them. It’s a really interesting model. I interview him here.

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Carolina Rossini passes along the following:

Today, the Sao Paulo State Legislature Representative, Mr. Simao Pedro, assisted by his team, specially Lucia F. Pinto, and the OER-Brazil Project, has introduced an OER bill to regulate the educational resources developed directly and indirectly (contracts for products or services or public purchases) by that state, and determine that an open license should be applied (CC-BY-NC-SA). It also deals with repositories for such OERs.

Soon the text of the bill will be available from the ALESP website http://www.al.sp.gov.br/portal/site/Internet/.

You can follow the www.rea.net.br (in Portuguese) for more information and analysis, including the recent analysis on the Sao Paulo city OER Decree.

Well done, Sao Paulo!

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I forked yesterday for the first time. I’m pretty thrilled. Not about the few lines of code that I posted. If anyone notices and thinks the feature is a good idea, they’ll re-write my bit from the ground up.* What’s thrilling is seeing this ecology in operation, for the software development ecology is now where the most rapid learning happens on the planet, outside the brains of infants.

Compare how ideas and know-how used to propagate in the software world. It used to be that you worked in a highly collaborative environment, so it was already a site of rapid learning. But the barriers to sharing your work beyond your cube-space were high. You could post to a mailing list or UseNet if you had permission to share your company’s work, you could publish an article, you could give a talk at a conference. Worse, think about how you would learn if you were not working at a software company or attending college: Getting answers to particular questions — the niggling points that hang you up for days — was incredibly frustrating. I remember spending much of a week trying to figure out how to write to a file in Structured BASIC [SBASIC], my first programming language , eventually cold-calling a computer science professor at Boston University who politely could not help me. I spent a lot of time that summer learning how to spell “Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh.”

On the other hand, this morning Antonio, who is doing some work for the Library Innovation Lab this summer, poked his head in and pointed us to a jquery-like data visualization library. D3 makes it easy for developers to display data interactively on Web pages (the examples are eye-popping), and the author, mbostock, made it available for free to everyone. So, global software productivity just notched up. A bunch of programs just got easier to use, or more capable, or both. But more than that, if you want to know how to do how mbostock did it, you can read the code. If you want to modify it, you will learn deeply from the code. And if you’re stuck on a problem — whether n00bish or ultra-geeky — Google will very likely find you an answer. If not, you’ll post at StackOverflow or some other site and get an answer that others will also learn from.

The general principles of this rapid-learning ecology are pretty clear.

First, we probably have about the same number of smart people as we did twenty years ago, so what’s making us all smarter is that we’re on a network together.

Second, the network has evolved a culture in which there’s nothing wrong with not knowing. So we ask. In public.

Third, we learn in public.

Fourth, learning need not be private act that occurs between a book and a person, or between a teacher and a student in a classroom. Learning that is done in public also adds to that public.

Fifth, show your work. Without the “show source” button on browsers, the ability to create HTML pages would have been left in the hands of HTML Professionals.

Sixth, sharing is learning is sharing. Holy crap but the increased particularity of our ownership demands about our ideas gets in the way of learning!

Knowledge once was developed among small networks of people. Now knowledge is the network.

*I added a couple of features I needed to an excellent open source program that lets you create popups that guide users through an app. The program is called Guiders-JS by Jeff Pickhardt at Optimizely. Thanks, Jeff!)

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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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We’re divided into four groups. I get assigned to Kurt Squire‘s, who works on games for edu at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery in Ann Arbor.

What can we learn from games about transforming education? As technologies of change emerge, his group thinks about how to engage the public in a conversation about them? The write games that try to make discovery visible. “We want people to experience the thrill of discovering something new,” and then, having discovered them, have the public participate in science.

E.g., Virulent for the iPad. Design viruses that will carry medicine throughout your body.

Another example. Anatomy ProAm lets you role play being a doctor saving people. There’s 17% variation in diagnoses of breast cancer, and a 3-4x variation in cervical cancer. Doctors don’t like to admit this. This project was intended to make them more open to discussing the variances in diagnoses with their patients. Imagine getting not a second or third opinion, but two million opinions. The crowd wouldn’t replace the doctors, but aims at helping them. The game has four audiences: children, people in medical training, radiologists and doctors, and the general public. In the game, you get symptoms, and you train beams through the body. The game has been shown to improve understanding of radiology, knowledge about what’s difficult about radiotherapy (you have to avoid frying healthy tissue), about treating cancer, etc. It increased students’ interest in being doctors.; this was especially true for girls.

The next step is to make this multi-player. They’ve started a Facebook game. You’re given a case. You assemble a team of online FB friends. You chat. You submit your diagnoses.

Game communities are not age segregated: In WoW, the elderly and the young play without regard. Curtis imagines professional medical folks playing with kids and the general public. This is the power of games: Get people to engage authentically while spanning demographics, ages, etc. Also, by playing in FB, the game can know a lot about you. It should enable peer ratings, e.g., doctors say that this 14 yr old knows a lot about anatomy. Public assessments will be controversial and will stimulate discussions. In fact, you will be able to roll your own assessments.

We talked about Curtis’ session. The investment in agency is powerful, we agreed.
Now we go to new tables where we summarize what went on in each of our tables.

Table 1: Neurological discoveries. There’s a correlation between how the brain works and how you learn. If a kid has dysgraphia, you can give the kid exercises that change neural pathways. Adding a gambling-based point system stimulates dopamine and learning. It’s not competition so much as the knowledge that there’s a chance you might get it wrong.

Table 2: Conrad Wolfram talked about the ability to create manipulable mathematical knowledge objects. That should change how we teach math. We waste time teaching computation. We should teach how to translate problems into math and how to interpret the results; the computation is the least important part of it. But, someone objects, we embedded these mathematical models into the financial system without knowing the computations underneath them. Response: The problem was in building the models, which Conrad would like students to become more adept at; he is advocating that they don’t need to do the computations themselves by hand. But the countries that do best on the international tests are the ones who drill on computation. Because that’s what get tested? Because it develops high order skills?

Table 3. Stanley Yang presents a biosensor device to wear on your head. It tells you whether you’re concentrating or bored, which problems are challenging, etc. The biofeedback can be integrated into learning. E.g., language learning: It won’t tell you what the Korean word for an object in the room is unless you are actually concentrating on the object. Is there evidence of the results? It’s very early. They are developing it for games, too.

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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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