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Closing the Gap Between Educators and Entrepreneurs

January 17, 2013 | 9:35 AM | By

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There appears to be no shortage of new businesses looking to apply technology to education. An entire ecosystem has emerged in recent years to develop and promote the latest product or service for the classroom or district. But a major hurdle remains: the divide between what entrepreneurs build and educators need.

The ecosystem stimulating the “edupreneurial” activity ranges from startup instigators (Startup Weekend EDU) and startup showcases (LAUNCHedu, SIIA Innovation Incubator), to startup incubators (Y Combinator, Imagine K12) and startup investors.

But in many cases, enthusiastic edupreneurs are propelled from this starting ramp to run full speed, like Wile E. Coyote, into an oversized anvil — actual teachers. It doesn’t matter how good the concept, how cool the technology, or how pressing the need. There can be a fundamental disconnect between passion and reality.

“Solutions have to be easy to implement. They have to make the teacher feel inspired, rather than stupid.”

And that can keep good ideas out of the classroom.

To dissect the disconnect, the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest recently brought together a group of insiders: traditional education company executive Randy Reina, senior vice president of digital product development at McGraw-Hill Education’s Center for Digital Innovation; a not-so-recently-startup edtech company CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson, who’s chair and president of DreamBox Learning; and teacher/entrepreneur Lindsey Own, a Seattle-area middle school science and health teacher and co-organizer of Startup Weekend Seattle EDU.

A handful of key themes emerged, casting light not just on what entrepreneurs need to know, but on issues parents and educators should expect as ed-tech startups get more attention. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, entrepreneurship, MIT, Startup Weekend EDU

Guide to MOOCs: Free, Quality Higher Education

May 14, 2012 | 1:41 PM | By
By Katrina Schwartz

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Coursera, Harvard, Higher Education, Minerva, MIT, MITx, MOOC, Open Source, Stanford, Udacity

Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning?

April 24, 2012 | 1:01 PM | By

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

“It was totally clear to me that content is only the starting point.”

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, MIT, MIT OpenCourseWare, MOOC, open education resources, Open Source, Stanford

Introducing Programming to Preschoolers

February 23, 2012 | 8:15 AM | By

Flickr: AngryJulieMonday

By Heather Chaplin

Since MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group released Scratch in 2007, kids ages 8 to 13 have built more than 2.2 million animations, games, music, videos and stories using the kid-friendly programming language.

Scratch allows kids to snap together graphical blocks of instructions, like Lego bricks, to control sprites—the movable objects that perform actions. Sprites can dance, sing, run and talk.

Now, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Lifelong Kindergarten is collaborating with Tufts University’s DevTech Research Group to make Scratch Jr, a new version aimed at kids in preschool to second grade. The expected launch date is summer 2012.

The new project raises questions about childhood development and digital learning, and just how early kids should be introduced to computers.

Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group, spearheaded the creation of Scratch. Having worked with a network of afterschool programs using digital media, Resnick was struck by the lack of software that enabled kids to go beyond playing with other people’s media. There was nothing that encouraged them to make their own interactive stories and games.

“Computers for most people are black boxes. I believe kids should understand objects are ‘smart’ not because they’re just smart, but because someone programmed them to be smart.”

“What’s most important to me is that young children start to develop a relationship with the computer where they feel they’re in control,” Resnick said. “We don’t want kids to see the computer as something where they just browse and click. We want them to see digital technologies as something they can use to express themselves.”

There’s been a lot of buzz in the last few years about what it means to be literate in the 21st century. To Resnick, teaching kids to program was like teaching children of another generation how to write.

“At one point, there was a growing realization that people needed to learn how to write as well as read,” Resnick said. “They needed to be able to express themselves as well as understand how other people expressed themselves. Now it’s the same with new media. It’s not enough to be able to interact with new technologies; you have to be able to create with new technologies.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, computer science, early-education, MIT, Mitch Resnick, programming, Scratch

A Case for Lifelong Kindergarten

September 26, 2011 | 5:00 AM | By

Flickr:wwworks

Could it be that the best way to learn happens in kindergarten? It’s an intriguing proposition, one that’s being explored at M.I.T. by folks like Mitch Resnick, the creator of the famous computer programming site for beginners called Scratch.

Resnick brought up the idea last week at the New York Times’ School for Tomorrow summit, and proclaimed that “schools should be on the edge of chaos,” a comment that lit up the Twitterverse.

Resnick is one of three recipients, including Robert Beichner, a physics professor at North Carolina State University, and Julie Young, president of Florida Virtual School, of the McGraw Prize in
Education. The three of them worked on a paper that exemplifies how technology should work seamlessly with learning.

Here’s Resnick’s excerpt from the paper, which in turn excerpts parts of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown.

By Mitch Resnick:

At the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology our goal is to design technologies that empower people to explore, experiment, and express themselves in new ways. My Lifelong Kindergarten group develops tools that engage people in creative learning experiences, emphasizing the type of interest-driven, collaborative activities that traditionally exist in kindergarten.

“In the spirit of the blocks and finger paint of kindergarten, [let's] expand the range of what people can design, create, and learn.”

We are inspired by the way kindergarten students learn through a spiraling process in which they imagine what they want to do, create a project based on their ideas, play with their creations, share their ideas and creations with others, and reflect on their experiences – all of which leads them to imagine new ideas and new projects. This iterative learning process is ideal preparation for today’s Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, creativity, MIT, Mitch Resnick, Scratch

Why Should Fifth Graders Learn to Program?

June 14, 2011 | 10:40 AM | By

Scratch

Click on the image to play this game designed by a student at a Los Altos elementary school.

By Sheena Vaidyanathan

“I think I fixed it, can I upload my program?”
“Can you test my app?”
“I just need to add a help menu.”

These are not remarks at a Silicon Valley technology startup, but from an animated conversation in a classroom of 10- and 11-year-olds in the Los Altos School District in California. These fifth- and sixth graders are experiencing the excitement of computer programming through Scratch, a tool designed by MIT. They are creating their very first fully functional program.

As part of a district-wide program called Digital Design that I teach, every student from fourth through sixth grade is exposed to computer programming in addition to 2D and 3D design. The first assignment this trimester was to create a drawing program – a computer version of the popular Etch-A-Sketch toy. Students learned some fundamental programming concepts, then wrote their own programs. The project was deliberately open ended and the creative results surprised me.

This is a case of everyone learning programming in school, not the select few who know that they want to and can afford to take an expensive computer camp.

Most of these students have never programmed before, and certainly did not think of themselves as computer experts. But in less than two hours (three classes), they created programs with help menus, keyboard shortcuts, menus to change colors, brushes, paper and more. Imagine what they could do with a little more time and experience!

Drawing Programs Samples

The second project was to create a simple video game, and it was constructed in five classes. Students learned programming concepts such as iteration, conditionals, and variables in the context of game design. As before, the the students showcased their originality. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, computer science, MIT, Scratch