Archive for the 'Research' Category

Next Entries »

What Cognitive Tutors Can (and Can’t) Teach Us About Personalized Learning

Published September 26, 2011 Education , Research , Technology 9 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

Many educators, and especially those interested in educational technology, are currently obsessed with the idea of personalized learning. It’s at the heart of some well hyped initiatives such as the School of One in New York, in which students have tailored schedules, called “Playlists”, that guide them from activity to activity and computer algorithms that generate specialized lesson plans based on a student’s prior performance. The EU’s iClass experiment is also based on this idea of personalization via technology.

The basic promise of personalization is easy to grasp – not every child in a classroom is at the same level, and there’s (presumably) no way for a teacher to teach to all of these differences effectively. In the past, many  educators largely relegated personalized learning to those in need of remediation, the so called “low performers” in a class. This remediation often took the form of tutors, an expensive but effective approach. Later we also saw (and continue to see) Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s, in ed lingo), usually reserved for high risk or special education students. But the idea of having every student engage in some form of personalized learning, evidenced in initiatives like the School of One, may seem unique, but it is not new. Cognitive Tutors, computer programs that aim to replicate the effective guidance and adaptability that human tutors have been proven to provide, have been in the personalized learning game since at least the 1980’s.

Cognitive Tutors essentially incorporate cognitive models of both novice and expert thinking around a certain domain, like math, into a computer program. A learner is challenged to solve a problem that relates to that knowledge with the program providing hints but also taking into account multiple paths towards solving that problem as well as some common misconceptions that are represented in its novice models (Koedinger & Corbett, 2006). Most of the tutors that I’ve seen deal with math and science, and are predicated on the idea that there is one right answer to a problem, though potentially multiple paths towards getting to that answer. Even the most progressive (and impressive) amongst technology of this sort, Dan Schwartz’s Teachable Agents, which flip the model of the cognitive tutor by having the student school the computer as opposed to the other way around, are still predicated on there being one right answer to a particular problem. To me then, I see these as highly sophisticated ways to teach the basics, ie, the stuff that we as a society already know. But what about what we don’t know? Isn’t that the sort of thing that we need to have our future leaders grappling with?

This leads me to what I believe cognitive tutors can shed light on in terms of the model of technology and learning that I’m developing for a course I’m taking, a model I originally introduced and contextualized here and which you can interact with here. I’ve included a static image of the model for reference here:

One of the key innovations that I include in the model is this “Technology Driven Personalization System”, and it’s this idea that I think cognitive tutors can speak to, not because of what they do but because of what they don’t do. The general idea behind this personalization system, for me, is some kind of coordinating body that’s paying attention to all the “nodes” in a youth’s learning ecology and making recommendations for the young person about what might be best to pursue based on that from a learning perspective.

What I’m seeing in the proposal I’m making about personalization here is far less structured than how cognitive tutors conceive of the idea of personalization. It does not assume that there is one “right answer” as to the learning trajectory a learner should follow, indeed, it doesn’t envision an end goal. In contrast to heavily scaffolded learning technologies like cognitive tutors and many games (a technology I’m a fan of from an educational standpoint), what I’m envisioning is much more something that’s about resourcing the young person to pursue their own interests and their own values, as opposed to an imposed standard of what’s important to know. My model assumes that we must trust youth to become active learners, but doesn’t assume that they already have access to the tools and opportunities they need to do so. This is the role of the system I’m presenting here.

At the same time, I acknowledge that every system has its own politics and priorities, and so the question of what kind of  ideology is baked into the system is a very good one. Ideally, what I’d like to see is a system where the inherent ideology is itself  based on the idea of having others bring their own ideologies to the system and ‘make recommendations’ based on them.  Since many teenagers are often not quite at the stage of having very clearly articulated value systems and interests, I can envision the system integrating data about them in multiple ways, some more explicit (profiles with interests they’ve filled out, information about programs they’ve gotten involved with, classes they’re currently taking) and others less explicit (having some sort of match question system, common on dating sites, that don’t directly ask you what you’re interested in or how you think but rather pose situations or hypotheticals for you to respond to that then serve as indicators). All of this would then be integrated to make a profile of a given learner and what they’d like to pursue, which brings us, of course, to the issue of privacy and surveillance.

As someone deeply concerned about issues relating to exploitation and privacy online, my own proposal makes me nervous. Most of us are currently in a situation online where we’re not the customer in places like Facebook, Twitter and Google – we’re the product. Personal data is being packaged and sold to the highest bidder in the form of marketers, and governments are increasingly surveilling their citizens in these spaces. And it’s exactly the kind of personalization and recommendation engines that exist in places like Netflix, Amazon and Facebook, ones based on the existing data about a user, that I would imagine powering a personalized learning system of the sort I’m envisioning. That’s why it makes me nervous, and it’s also why the point I make above about politics and priorities being embedded in the system is so important – given the level of information that something like this would have about a young person it’s essential that it be clearly designed off of the principal of resourcing a young person to pursue their own interests according to their own values.

Finally, I’d envision the system incorporating some of the designs that drive Diaspora*, the open source social network that arose in response to Facebook privacy issues in 2010. In Diaspora, users have full ownership over their data, can share or not share to whomever they want, and simple ways to control privacy are put at the forefront. I would imagine the same, and more, for a system that would have so much data about a young person. And if I truly did believe in the idea of self-determination on the part of the young person, putting them in the position where they were in full control over their footprint within this system would only make sense.

A Model not for Technology in Education, but for Technology & Learning

Published September 13, 2011 digital citizenship , Education , Participatory Culture , Research , Technology 15 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

For a while now I’ve been kicking around a hodgepodge of ideas about technology and its relationship to learning and education. Having worked in related fields for over five years now and gone to grad school to study more about this subject, I guess these are good questions to regularly ponder. Until  now though, I haven’t had a good opportunity to formalize these thoughts. As an assignment for the course “Computational Technologies in Educational Ecosystems“, we were tasked to create a model of our vision for technology in educational contexts, a really fantastic project that we’ll be refining over the course of the semester and that I’ll periodically post publicly about here on the old blog.

I decided to push the edges of the assignment somewhat, and rather than create a model for technology in educational contexts, I created a model for technology and learning writ large in the lives of youth. I’d be lying if I said the ideas here are all my own – for the most part, they’re a synthesis of ideas coming from emerging bodies of research and from colleagues I’ve worked with and been inspired by within the budding field of “Digital Media & Learning“, which in some respects positions itself as distinct from educational technology.

I share here I call a Youth Technology Learning Ecology, made up of a variety of “learning nodes” that youth interact with and which I believe can form better interconnections with one another in the future for the benefit of young people. What I’m really interested in is what digital culture and technology can offer us in terms of both inspiration for redesigning the learning systems that society has available for young people, as well as practical tools and practices that allow us to do that. I offer some initial thoughts on what a redesign of these systems might include.

To check out the interactive model, click the image below, which will take you to the Scratch website where you can interact with it. For best effect, I recommend enabling full screen.

I realize that right now not everything is totally clear in the model (it assumes some prior knowledge and some terms could use definition) and over the course of the semester I hope to refine it to clarify all of what I intend to be conveyed through it. In the process, I’m sure that the model itself will shift and evolve.

One of the big ideas in the model that I’d like to address is that of looking to “Interest Driven Affinity Spaces” (a fancy name for the places that kids geek out, online or off) as inspiration for reforming other learning contexts. I’ll start by referring to some of the readings that we did for the course this week, which offer some nice perspective on how people generally think about technology and education. In his classic book from way back in 1986, Larry Cuban shares an important insight about the ways that technology fads come and go in schools. The point is well taken. In looking to affinity spaces for inspiration though, I want to be clear that the model is not really advocating the integration of technology, even done thoughtfully, as one of many “passing fads” in schools, but rather for the rethinking of what counts as learning and what pedagogical practice and larger school cultures look like.

What’s hard to convey is that a shift to thinking about learning ecologies also implies a shift in our theory of learning, and both of those imply that schools need to be organizing themselves in much different ways. To engage in this reorganization, I believe that we can take a lot of inspiration from these affinity spaces that might considered “technology in the wild” (online communities, massively multiplayer games, fan sites, blog networks and many others) and what they do well, something scholars like Jim Gee and Mimi Ito have looked at in their work. The big idea about these spaces is that they provide youth with meaningful contexts and communities that not only keep them engaged and speak to their interests, but also are built around the development and learning of extremely complex practices and processes, have authentic and just in time feedback and assessment mechanisms as well as clear standards about what counts as “good work”. Schools rarely embody these qualities. This isn’t to say that we need for school to integrate these affinity spaces and their associated technologies, but rather to look at these spaces to see what makes them powerful learning environments and aim to bring those principles and characteristics into more formal educational settings. More importantly, I believe that we can not only shift the practices of any one setting, like school, but also the larger learning ecologies of which they are a part as well.

In his book, Cuban also makes a big assumption that anyone interested in technology and education is one way or another always going to point to technology’s ability to make content delivery more efficient. To me, this is off for a couple of reasons. First, it assumes that anyone interested in technology has an “accumulation of decontextualized bits of information” vision of what learning is, as opposed to one that uses participation in meaningful activities to foster dispositions, practices and processes that young people can tap in the future. Second, the ways that I think about “efficiency” deal mostly with reformulating pedagogy so that it’s actually effective by actively connecting to the other nodes in a child’s learning ecology. This is the second big point I’m aiming to get across in the model. Affinity Spaces are good to look to for inspiration, but there’s a huge opportunity to be tapped in aligning all of these various nodes a youth’s learning ecology so that they’re working together for the sake of that young person. This is where my (extremely underdeveloped) idea of a technology driven personalization system that accomplished this function comes from, an idea which I hope to develop more as the semester goes on. Importantly though, it represents a reframe of technology from being a “teacher’s helper” (or worse, their replacement), a view that starts not with the priorities of the formal educational system, which has consistently proven that it only values the transmission of decontextualized bits of information, but rather one that starts with the ways that youth are currently using technology in their everyday lives to further their own learning (though they rarely see it in these terms) and aims to connects these to all the other parts of a young person’s life.

Finally, another one of our readings validates this idea of looking to interest driven digital affinity spaces to inspire more effective pedagogy. Roschelle et al. (2000) [pdf] point out a number of processes that effective classroom technologies foster – active construction of knowledge, participation in groups, frequent feedback and connections to real world contexts. It is in fact just these kinds of processes that are at the heart of the kinds of deep learning activities that many youth are engaged in out of school through digitally mediated affinity spaces. The authors even reference these spaces, in the form of (now antiquated) electronic bulletin boards that dominated the early internet. Its heartening to see that in 2000, which is fairly early on in our current shift to a digital culture, there were already researchers that had identified practices technology can foster to provide more effective learning experiences.

I know that as it currently stands this is an incomplete model, and some things might be unclear, so feel more than welcome to leave a comment with any questions or thoughts and I’ll do my best to address them. And of course any critical feedback is definitely helpful on this first draft.

Swinging the Pendulum Too Far on Teacher Training

Published July 24, 2011 Education , Research 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

Photo by Pseudopam. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC

While it’s generally not my area of research, I’ve started to pay more attention to current debates about teacher quality and training that one inevitably encounters when in the education field. Even outside of taking any policy or curriculum courses, Learning Sciences students and professors at my University teach courses, mostly educational psychology, to undergraduate pre-service teachers and so invariably have to grapple with the questions about what it means to prepare those students well for their roles in the classroom. And so this article in the New York Times about teacher education programs caught my eye.

The article reports, mostly positively, on a new movement in teacher education that’s focused almost exclusively on in-field placements and instructional practice and technique. The movement builds off of, in my opinion, valid critiques of traditional teacher education programs in which students mostly spend their time in courses, with some field placements that are often largely observational. I know of at least one undergraduate teacher education program where the students don’t actually get into any sort of direct instructional role until their third semester spent in the field. That there are enormous retention problems for teachers in their first three years in the classroom is no surprise – they’ve been ill-prepared by a broken teacher education system.

Both personally and as student of learning, I’m not a huge fan of the model of education we find in higher education courses (with some recent exceptions). The best learning experiences I’ve had were after I left college and were a result of diving deeply into real problems, grappling with solutions, and watching others. The best learning theory agrees with my experiences here too. And yet I’m deeply disturbed by this new, entirely practice oriented teacher education movement’s apparent disregard for theory. Take a look at this quote from the article:

“I can study Vygotsky later,” said Tayo Adeeko, a 24-year-old third-grade teacher at Empower Charter School in Crown Heights. She was referring to another education school staple — Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet theorist of cognitive development who died in 1934. “Right now,” she added, “my kids need to learn how to read.”

Ok, never mind that I happen to be a huge fan of Vygotsky and have never read anybody that articulates how learning happens as well as he does. Never mind that the article also takes some pots shots at John Dewey, Howard Gardner and Paulo Freire, all people whose ideas, if they were actually well heeded, would result in a radically different, more creative and more equitable society. Never mind that. This comes down to a basic truth about the relationship between theory and practice.

Kant, among many others, put forth that theory without practice is empty, and practice without theory is blind (and yes, the irony of quoting a philosopher’s theory on this point is not lost on me). But I truly believe that any good teacher, and really any good practitioner or designer, will have balance between these two realms. In most of the tech world, for instance, companies both large and small engage in iterative design processes that lead to the emergence of design principles (aka, theory), which lay the groundwork for more effective design processes (aka, practice) down the line. Learning Sciences’ core methodology, design-based research, does the same.

I understand and empathize with the desire to be more practical and hands on in our approaches to education. Hell, this is everything that I study and advocate for and that I think young people’s learning environments, including but not limited to school, should be based on. But if we swing the pendulum too far on this one, if we cut out spaces that allow teachers in training to pull out patterns in their experiences working with kids, we do just as much a disservice to them as we’re doing now by not giving them enough direct experience.

Setting Intentions for Research: Integrity, Utility, Humility and Social Justice

Published September 26, 2010 Education , Practice , Research 2 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

When a person first sits down to meditate, it’s a common practice to consciously set an intention for that sitting. It might simply to be present with the breath, or to be kind to oneself during the meditation, or to work to notice certain kinds of thoughts. It’s a practice I’ve used before, and found it to be pretty powerful. And so as I enter my work and role as a researcher, I figured it could be useful to do the same.

Setting my intentions as a researcher for me provides a touchstone I can come back to, that others can remind me of, and that I can build upon and revisit as I learn more about what it means to be conducting this sort of work in the world.

After getting my toes wet this past month both reading research reports and engaging in the practice of research itself more intensively than I had in my last position, I thought I’d share some initial intentions that have been developing for me as I’ve considered how I want to do research in the coming years:

  1. Integrity. I want to conduct research that lines up with the way that reality actually is, rather than how I would like it to be. This means first being curious and honest with myself about my own biases, agendas and hopes as I engage in research. After that, it means representing my findings in a way that is truthful and accurate. There’s no shortage of misleading or downright false research out there, I want to practice research that is faithful to the principles that are at the heart this profession.
  2. Utility. As I spend time reviewing literature, I’ve come across articles of all sorts. I read one, though, that really caught my eye. The content of it was quite interesting, and the analysis it made was insightful. At the same time, it was entirely inaccessible due its density and jargon, and worse, made absolutely no recommendations for practically applying its findings, or even any directions for future research. After I read it, I vowed that to the best that I can, I want to make decisions to research things that will have real applicability for people trying to solve actual problems in the world, and I want to report on these usable findings in a way that is accessible both rhetorically and conceptually.
  3. Humility. This one can sometimes be a challenge for me, as I rarely find myself without an opinion on something. But I know being a good researcher means to come first from a place of not knowing, rather than of presuming one knows what one is seeing and analyzing, or worse, making judgments for how something should be done without deeply understanding its context. Also, I believe it’s important to voice how difficult it often is to live by our  stated values and good intentions, and want to be humble in the face of my own inevitable, but hopefully small and rectifiable, failings to conduct research that holds to the intentions I’m stating here.
  4. Social Justice. Someone wise once explained this concept to middle schoolers in a way that I love: “You know bullying & being mean to people? It’s the exact opposite of that.” It’s that simple. At the same time, the question of what it means to have a just society, better the world, reduce suffering and a million other variations on doing well by others is no doubt a complicated one. And so I intend my research to come from a place of not presuming “the answer” to this question, but rather of presuming that it may need to be answered again and again, always from a place of kindness and compassion towards others.

By giving voice to these intentions, it’s my hope that I give them power to inform the work I do as a researcher. I’m sure as I delve deeply into this practice that’s so new to me I’ll have more to add, but for now this seems like a good place to start.

Moving on, and why working at Global Kids was the best job I ever had.

Published June 9, 2010 Civic Media , digital citizenship , Education , Participatory Culture , Research , Technology 1 Comment
Tags: , , , ,

In January 2006, I began my job at Global Kids. I was the second full time staff member working in what’s called our Online Leadership Program, trying to figure out what value new media could add to our mission of youth development and empowerment around global issues. During one of my interviews for the job, I asked Barry Joseph, director of GK’s online programs, where he saw the program in five years. He replied quickly and unapologetically, stating that it wasn’t really possible to know, that the world of new media was developing so quickly and in so many different directions that it would be too hard to predict what would prove to have potential in terms of our mission.

It’s almost five years later now, and I’ve had an incredible opportunity here at Global Kids to explore so many of those unknown possibilities that Barry was alluding to as he hired me; using social networks for social impact, training youth to conduct peer education in virtual worlds, teaching social issue game design and creating new afterschool programs around DIY media production. After doing so much meaningful work, I’ve decided that it’s time that I moved on and took my next steps outside of the nurturing professional environment that this organization has provided for me over the years.

I’ve always said to myself that I would only leave my job under a couple of conditions: either I’d stopped being able to contribute something meaningful and unique the organization, or I’d stopped learning and growing myself. I’m thankful that neither of those is actually the case now, though our learning culture here at Global Kids is, in a very positive sense, a big contributor to why I’m leaving.

In my work here, I was not only challenged to constantly learn new things to be effective, but was also almost immediately thrown into larger national and international conversations happening about learning, youth culture, civic engagement and new media. At the end of the day after writing curriculum, running youth programs, or conducting professional trainings, I’d find myself riding home on the subway reading white papers and books about situated learning in video games, the future of Internet, or how civic life is changing online. And so after spending years at Global Kids collaborating with researchers in these areas, I’ve decided to spend some time stepping back from solely being a practitioner to engage in research myself.

In the Fall, I’ll begin work towards a PhD in Learning Sciences at Indiana University, where I plan to study how the rich informal learning that youth are engaging in through online participatory cultures can shed light on how more formal learning institutions like afterschool programs, libraries, museums and schools are designed as learning spaces. As a society, we’re on the cusp of revolutionary changes in the ways young people learn, and I hope to do my part through my research to help learning institutions not just keep pace but wholly change their practices to ensure that we’re creating the conditions in today’s youth for a more just and equitable society tomorrow.

I know that I can’t do justice here to all the things that I’ve loved about working at Global Kids. I feel like I’ve accomplished and contributed a lot here, working on more projects than I can count with more organizations that I can think of. I’ve worked both in the schools here in New York as well as through online communities like Second Life where I’ve run programs with youth that have inspired and humbled me, individuals that made me wish that I’d had such dedication to the broader world when I was in high school. I’ve moved certain areas of our work forward because of the freedom that I’ve been given to do so, and gained valuable skills through the diversity of initiatives we engage in. Most importantly, the work that I did here as I showed up day after day kept me passionate and dedicated, and know that there were important lessons we were learning as we engaged in often uncharted waters.

None of the work that I’ve done would be possible without an incredible team of colleagues and friends that I’ve had to the opportunity to work with at Global Kids. I’ve learned more than I could have imagined from the bright and committed people that this organization attracts, and I want to say thank you to all of you. A special shout out, of course, goes to Barry Joseph, my boss and de facto mentor for my tenure here. Barry’s sense of playfulness and adventure combined with an energy to create and accomplish have made the culture of our team singular, and he’s taught me more than anyone else about what it means to be a professional.

I know that this work will go on in unexpected ways in the coming years, and looking on from the outside will certainly be tough. I wish Global Kids so much luck and know that by continuing to work in solidarity with our youth you all will continue to have lasting impact.

Hi there.

Rafi in thailand, smiling

If you're reading this, then you've reached the web log of Rafi Santo. This is my little slice of the internet where I can share my passion (or whatever) with the world.

Research. Meditation. Learning theory. Spirituality. Activism. Cooking. New Media. Pedagogy. Photography. It's all fair game, and will likely coalesce into some unholy mixture thereof. But hey, that's the integral life.

Subscribe

Archives