“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”

Friedman raves about this approach, saying that it would give more students access to “quality higher education” at a cost that’s much lower than the fast-rising price of attending in person.

He also marvels that this would “enable budget-strained community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms” by having students watch recordings of “the world’s best lecturers on any subject”.

However, is that what people want from a college education? Can you call what Ng does “teaching”, or is it more about managing a large group of self-directed learners? For someone who isn’t self-directed, is the only alternative then accumulating a pile of student loans?

As someone who wasn’t thrilled by most of my undergraduate classes in college and actually likes self-directed learning, this is not judgement, just questions.

I also wonder, just as college-level classes were pushed down into high school in the form of the AP program, when will this type of massive approach to instruction arrive for us here in K12?

A district accountant somewhere is probably already thinking that one teacher working with only 150 kids per year sounds awfully expensive.

However, I was struck by a comment made by one member of the state House of Representatives in Ohio, who also happens to be a current college student with lots of loans: “students need to understand that attending college is not an entitlement”.

Maybe not. But if you look at it through the eyes of most high school students and their parents, we’ve made college attendance something of a societal inevitability.

First you have politicians from the president on down setting increased college attendance and graduation as vital to rebuilding the nation’s economic structure. It’s a matter of world competition! The Obama administration has established a goal to make the United States “first among developed nations in college completion”. Even many of those legislators voting to cut support to both students and schools also support the same argument.

Then there is the culture and structure of our K12 schools where, at least in this area, the message is drilled into the kids almost from the first day of Kindergarten that the only goal worth pursuing after graduation is college. Almost everyone gets funneled into a “college prep” schedule with no consideration for any other post-high school path, and certainly little for the interests and needs of the individual.

So, what’s the choice? Skip college and miss getting that “good job” (not to mention being considered a “failure” by the popular culture) or go and be saddled with a huge debt, even if you “settle” for a state school.

If we as a society really believe that a college degree is something that will benefit both the country in the long run and almost every high school graduate, then we have an obligation to cover the fundamental costs. You cannot reconcile a societal norm of every kid going to college while slashing the support to make that happen. 

Of course, as with everything else we think is important, that’s going to take money. Not to mention some major restructuring in the way that colleges and universities do business (and higher education is very much a business), starting with separating out the stuff that has little to do with getting a good education (high profile athletic programs that are little more than pro farm teams leap to mind first).

But if “college for all” is just political talk, if our “leaders” are not willing to make some hard budget choices to make it happen, then let’s stop feeding that illusion to our kids. Instead, provide students with multiple options and help them find other, less expensive and possibly more satisfying, avenues to follow after high school graduation.

Actually, that second option is a excellent one anyway.

We have the principal masquerading as a girl on the social networking site to keep tabs on his students. And the online fight that spilled out into the real world in the form of a physical assault at school. Plus an assortment of attempts to legally restrict kids and/or adults based on perceived online threats. With a teacher-posting-stupid-things story thrown in for good measure.

It’s certainly a provocative collection of stories, the kind your local “film at 11″ local news might present to goose ratings by stirring concerns about kids and/or teachers using social media (and maybe already has).

Of course, these incidents involve fewer than a dozen participants in Facebook’s 700,000+ community and the writer of the article ends with the conclusion the big media outlets should also arrive at.

Social media can go wrong in so many ways for students, teachers, and administrators, yet it can also be a terrific tool for bringing communities together and for strengthening relationships. And most of the issues here have analogues in the “grown-up” world of employer/employee relationships, and another set of analogues when it comes to government and intelligence agency use of social media posts to spot fake marriages, monitor “chatter,” and even ban people from entering the country.

In other words, technology is not the problem. Without Facebook, these same people would find other channels in which to act stupidly, although probably not with as much transparency.

I wonder if the word “displace” shouldn’t be replaced with the word “supplement”?

Based on my personal, very not-research-based experience, the functionality of my iPad has developed grown over two years so that these days my laptop usually remains on my desk while the tablet goes with me for most daily activities.  I still have a desktop machine at home (an old Mac Mini) but it now exists only to store and serve media and files. I expect that once the capabilities and reliability of all those many clouds improve, that unit will become unnecessary.

So, for me at least, the laptop has become the desktop and the tablet is the portable device, pulling into the same relationship the laptop and desktop had a few years ago. For a while, the convenience of the laptop was nice but it didn’t have all the power and features needed for some tasks. That changed over time and my laptop is now a complete desktop replacement.

The same will happen with tablets and whatever lightweight, portable communications devices are coming (Google glasses anyone?).

As part of this evolving world of portable devices, the research company speculates about something they call “frames” which would act like wireless docking stations.

Frames will be large, stationary displays that a person can use to wirelessly show video, documents and any other tablet-based content. They’ll be laden with sensors, so people can interact with them through touch, voice and gestures (via motion sensors similar to those in Microsoft’s Kinect).

Forrester envisions frames as fixtures in homes, offices, hotel rooms, coffee shops and conferences. Forrester analysts expect them to reach the mass market in 2015, when they will spark an acceleration in the displacement of laptops.

Conference centers and offices maybe but I really don’t want to show the whole coffee shop what I’m working on.

Anyway, I sometimes use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPad but I’m not sure I see the point of having a whole setup like this in a fixed location. If these frames are coming I certainly hope they are better than the physical docking stations for current laptops. For a while, everyone in our offices wanted one, until they discovered just how badly they worked, not to mention being incompatible with the next model computer they received.

In the end these predictions sounds like a report for IT managers in businesses, not a reflection of how most people seem to want to use portable devices. It certainly doesn’t sound like my experience, but then I’m probably not reflective of the audience the research company is trying to reach.

It also asks students to consider some interesting questions about failure in their own lives and those of people they know.

Can failure be useful? Can you think of examples, from your own life or someone else’s, when it has led to something positive?

How is failure defined and dealt with in your family, your school, the activities you do outside of school, among your friends and in your community? Which of those definitions and responses to failure seem fairest or best to you? Why?

What can be done to avoid failure? Should people try to avoid it?

What is “failure” and what is “success”? Who decides?

Missing, however, is any real consideration of failure as it applies to school. What happens if you fail the midterm in English 7? What recovery options do you have for getting a bad score on the SOLs?* Suppose you get a 1 on an AP test?

We really don’t deal well with the concept of failure in school, especially in helping students learn from it and discovering options for recovery. Maybe in sports, possibly the arts or other “non-academic” contests. But for most kids, failing a class or a grade means they will repeat it.

But the most likely scenario is that they get to cover the same content, often using the same materials and teaching techniques, often in the compressed time frame of summer school. And usually with only slightly better results, not anything we might call “success”.

Doing the same thing in the same way hoping for different results.

Is that how people recover from failure in real life?

*For those outside of Virginia, that’s the acronym for our spring standardized tests.

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could swap out “Apple” and insert the name of our school or district? And mean it?

So, I am left with the view that we need a far better way to describe successful schools. Test scores alone are not the way. They may define a school where students spend every day engaged in test prep. They may describe a school producing complaint student-robots.

When we rely on standardized tests as the only, or even the most important, tool for assessing student learning, schools become test prep academies so administrators can avoid the dreaded “failure” label.

Most of them make a lot of sense, and not just on Facebook.

Think before you type. Even if you delete an account (which takes Facebook about a month), some info can remain in Facebook’s computers for up to 90 days.

Regularly check your exposure. Each month, check out how your page looks to others. Review individual privacy settings if necessary.

Protect basic information. Set the audience for profile items, such as your town or employer. And remember: Sharing info with “friends of friends” could expose it to tens of thousands.

Know what you can’t protect. Your name and profile picture are public. To protect your identity, don’t use a photo, or use one that doesn’t show your face.

So, why aren’t we teaching that stuff in school? Helping kids understand how to build a responsible and safe online presence.

As to the uproar over “cyberbullying” on Facebook elsewhere in the article, isn’t one child bullying another a concern regardless of where it takes place?  Bullying occurs on playgrounds, in locker rooms, and in malls. We don’t ban playgrounds, close locker rooms, and impose age limits on malls.

The problem is with the people involved, not the location, and that is how the problem should be addressed. This is less about Facebook and more about the need for adults to pay closer attention and communicate with the kids in their lives.

He also makes this excellent point about how our attempts to “protect” kids from the web is doing them no favors.

Last night, a good friend of mine complained on Twitter that Google had knocked his 10-year-old son off when he revealed his age. My friend got mad at Google. Oh, no, I said, get mad at the FTC and COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and its unintended consequences. It makes children lie about their ages and puts us in a position to teach them to lie. It has made children the worst-served sector of society online. The intentions are good. The consequences may not be. [emphasis mine]

In the end, Jeff is very correct in his belief that the fear mongering which comes from reports like this too often leads to inappropriate, overly-restrictive, and even dangerous legislation.

Ok, nothing significant to all that. Still, the thought of building schools to accommodate standardized testing is a little depressing.

But I guess it’s the next logical step now that we’ve completely wrapped the curriculum for most students around the concept of all testing, all the time. Or “gathering data” in the current vernacular.

It’s hard, however, to convince some of my colleagues that kids are not born with some magic innate technological talent. I try to tell them that, more than anything, their students simply have more time to spend playing with various electronic devices and absorbing all the little tricks that seem like genius to those who don’t. Invoke the 10,000 hour rule.

However, knowing how to trick out a smart phone or understanding the complexities of Facebook doesn’t mean those students also have any clue how to use all that power to advance their learning. Or even the basics of common programs you use like PowerPoint.

A little research to back up this idea comes from a new study conducted by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC). The subjects were college students in the UK so maybe the findings don’t directly apply to the kids in US classrooms, but I doubt some of what they found is far off from those in our overly-large school district and other similar parts of the country.

• 97.8 percent of students owned a mobile phone;
• Just over three quarters — 77.4 percent — owned a laptop and 38.1 percent owned a desktop computer.
• 70.1 percent felt their access to computers was sufficient to meet their computing needs.
• The mobile phone was chosen by 83.2 percent as the device students would miss the most if it was taken away.
• A small minority of students don’t use email or have access to mobile phones.

Students 20 years old or younger reported being more engaged in instant messaging, texting, social networks and downloading video media than students who were aged 25 years or more. Only 4.3 percent of those 20 or younger never used social networking sites, and for those 35 or older this rose to 78.5 percent.

In other words, they’re coming to your classroom understanding IM, texting, social networks, video downloads and carrying some powerful tools that involve reading, writing, collaboration.

So, what are we doing to leverage those communications skills and the devices in their pockets to improve their learning?

Sorry, I forgot it’s May. Testing season. No time to worry about all that learning stuff.

Remember when stores moved locations it was to the next street over, or another space in the mall?

TED-Ed (Lessons Worth Sharing), takes presentations from their collection and elsewhere, blends in some animation to give them more context and interest, groups the videos around nine subject areas, and adds some additional instructional resources.

Although many of the articles reporting on their opening this week compare this to the Khan Academy, TED-Ed is very different and much more substantial. For one thing, this new site is more about ideas and concepts rather than providing step-by-step instructions for rote processes.

Like Kahn, TED-Ed tracks your use of the materials. But instead of a self-assessment section based solely on multiple choice questions, the site asks users to do more in-depth thinking about the presentation they’ve just watched and offers additional resources to explore.

However, the more interesting, and potentially more powerful, part of TED-Ed is the ability for teachers to create their own lessons around the material (what they call Flip This Lesson) and share them with the larger community. Even better is the open invitation to submit ideas for lessons and to participate in the creation process. It opens some interesting tools for teachers to enhance and extend their instruction but also intriguing possibilities for student creative involvement as well.

No, it’s too soon to declare that TED-Ed is the catalyst that will forever alter public education (I suspect someone has already made a similar declaration), but it is an excellent start and something worth watching as it grows.

Watch the short tour of the site and see what you think.

With all recent the stories about Google’s privacy policies (or their lack privacy concerns?), more than a few observers have pointed out this little piece of their newly unified terms of service agreement that seems to apply to material you store in their cloud.

I’m not sure I want to give Google the rights to “create derivative works” or “publicly perform” my stuff, even if I cancel my account. Do you?

I imagine the Google lawyers are mulling over all the criticisms and will probably make some changes to the TOS for Drive. In the meantime, I’ll stay with Dropbox which seems to have a better grasp of this whole private storage concept.

By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.*

Of course, all of this is null and void if the feds come knocking on their door demanding to peek in my little corner of the cloud.

As they could, without a warrant or my knowledge, under the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA) now being considered in the US House. Go visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation to see why and how to voice your opposition to this latest attempt to violate your privacy in the name of “security” (to keep you Cyber-Snuggly).

And, as always, understand the terms of service before relying on any web service.

Let’s be careful out there.

*And the fact that they also call my intellectual property “stuff” is attractive. :-)

Just the latest in a growing collection of hundreds (maybe thousands) of similar declarations made in publications large and small over the two years since the iPad was released, trying to make a cast for how revolutionary the device (and tablets in general) is/will be to “education”. 

Certainly Apple has sold a bunch of them (something like 67 million world wide), include many that are part of well-publicized projects in some K12 schools and colleges. There are even a few studies suggesting students benefit instructionally from the interactivity the device provides.

But changing education? Not likely.

Just in my lifetime we’ve had a long parade of technologies for which claims of “changing education” were made and still very little about what we call school is different from when I sat in a classroom as a student. The institution of what we call school is extremely resistant to meaningful modification, including from the pressure of new tech.

What’s different with the iPad is the way that some of us, still a relatively small minority, are increasingly using it in new ways for our personal learning.

However, that’s more about a networked device becoming more portable and easier to use than anything else. Not much different from the way that lighter, more capable laptops made personal learning easier than it was when the computer was too big to move from a desk.

The iPad, and other interconnected mobile devices yet to come, does have the potential to make major changes to the way kids communicate, collaborate, and learn. Potential that could be used by schools and teachers that are willing modify their traditional approaches by sharing control over the learning process with students.

But iPads changing education just by existing? Not likely.