Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
This demo video by Bret Victor is a perfect example of an innovative “direct manipulation 2.0” interface.
If I give my presentation again about scientific direct manipulation, I will certainly include it.
Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor on Vimeo.
(via John Gruber)
I’ve previously written about the coming transition to software-based tutors. Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy, apparently gave a recent talk at TED at Bill Gate’s invitation. Khan goes further than my previous blog post in citing some of the real educational advantages of software-based tutors over human tutors. Khan began his website as a way to tutor his cousins from near and far, but he soon realized that the advantages went far beyond cost and scale. Excerpt from a Wired article about the talk:
“[The cousins] were saying something very profound,” Khan said. “They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin.”
What this meant, essentially, was that having a video lesson that they could pause and repeat at will, made it easier to learn without tiring their tutor.
…
“In a traditional classroom you have homework, lecture, homework then you have a snapshot exam,” he said. “And whether you pass or not, the class moves on to the next lesson.”
Even the ones who get 95 percent of the lesson correct, still have 5 percent they didn’t grasp, and with each subsequent lesson, the percentage they don’t understand increases.
…
“The traditional model penalizes the student for experimentation and failure but does not expect mastery,” he said. “We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.”
All of this is possible because students can cost-effectively learn at their own pace. And of course, Khan has really only scratched the surface of what is possible. For example, it’s easy to imagine branching videos that let students delve deeper into certain topics if they didn’t fully understand the explanations given in previous videos.
I think that eventually, the idea of a mathematics “lecture class” will be considered hopelessly outdated.
Steve Jobs, concluding the March 2, 2011 iPad 2 media event:
I’ve said this before, and I thought it was worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts — married with the humanities — that yields us a result that makes our hearts sing.
And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in, and they’re looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies, and they’re talking about speeds and feeds, just like they did with PCs. Our experience, and every bone in our body, says that that is not the right approach to this; that these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC; that need to be even more intuitive than a PC; and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.
And we think we’re on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture — not just in silicon, but in the organization — to build these kinds of products. And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in this market, and I hope that what you’ve seen today gives you a good feel for that.
Words for the wise.
I’m not sure when I put this article about CS education reform into my Instapaper, but I learned something new:
In the early 1960s, the professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth College because they thought educated people, and future leaders of America, should have some first-hand experience with computing.
I like this precedent of developing tools for students first, and business markets later. Focusing on students (and particularly “100-level” classes) is a great motivation to keep things simple and easy to learn. When/if the technology eventually gets powerful enough to compete with other tools, it will win because real people might actually want to use it.
I used to think that math was the perfect subject to teach via computer software (instead of lectures). My rationale was that computers are already good at math; and software-driven customization for each student is most useful for topics that require a solid knowledge of previous topics (e.g. algebra builds on multiplication and fractions).
This TED talk by Dan Meyer challenges those assumptions. He suggests that good math education starts with good discussions. It uses open-ended questions whose answers may be as unpredictable as responses to works of literature. It emphasizes how math relates to intuition and the real world, and deemphasizes arithmetic and equation solving. In other words, it humanizes math, a notion which makes a lot of sense in a world where computers not only compute sums but can easily solve, graph, and symbolically manipulate indefinite integrals. (On a cell phone. For free.)
Indeed, a lot (most?) of cutting-edge science today involves calculations so complicated that it would never even occur to the scientists to complete the math by hand.
So why bother teaching students in detail how to do the things that computers will always be better at? Meyer’s approach focuses on the human side — understanding when and why to apply mathematical tools. It’s not immediately clear how computers themselves will figure into this educational mission.