Comment by notabel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notabel | Hacker News Reader

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I have to disagree with you, and vehemently. Centralization is exactly the problem.

I was lucky enough to be educated in an International Baccalaureate program that stressed interaction between students and teachers, convivial debate rather than lecture, and analytic essays instead of rote recall. The strength of the program came from its decentralization, relying on good teachers rather than central planning. The teachers and students worked together, as collaborators.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but in education, it generally gets in the way of the greatest teacher: intellectual discourse. A teacher and 10-20 students talking with each other[1] is an optimal model for learning. Educational technology generally takes the personal interaction out of things, and certainly makes the process less engaging.[2]

[1] Very different from a teacher talking to, or at, students.

[2] I'm talking about secondary education. For primary ed, technology can be very useful. But that is a very different environment.

Well, I see now that there are two kinds of centralization.

1) The system is top-heavy, and administrators pick out what teachers teach. This is centralized planning.

2) The content that teachers generate (assignments, quizzes) is put into a centralized pool, which other teachers can browse through to come up with new ideas for their teaching. This is centralized content.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear, but I didn't mean centralized planning, I meant centralized content. If there is some way to know what a teacher taught and how well it worked which other teachers could use as a reference, then it becomes a memory. Teachers can improve upon other teachers' previous works.

Right now, each public school teacher is almost universally independent. My idea is that as each assignment is completed online, the assignment goes into the memory pool. Teachers can browse all content. Students and teachers can rate and comment on the assignments. This seems like it would encourage good collaboration and interaction.

I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms. In my education, there were effectively no assignments, and certainly none that could be completed online. Consider my senior English or Latin classes: the only "assignments" were to read, and occasionally to write, generally on a self-generated topic.

In class, similarly, there was very little pre-planned content. In Latin, we simply went through the previous night's translation, line by line, with discussion breaking out whenever someone was perplexed or intrigued by something.

In English, there was perhaps a bit more planned content, but not much: the teacher would have something to talk about, and start out talking about it, but within 5-10 minutes we would have moved out of the prepared material into our own discussion.

Now, in the sciences, yes, there is definite content, and there, surely, there would be value in a central content store, but it would need to be developed outside the institutional structure, or your 2) would rapidly become 1). (Yes, I'm a bit jaded: I went to an amazing program, but it was housed at a horribly administered school.)

"I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms."

Yes, I agree. I'm passionate about somehow improving the lives and education of the average public high school student. My hypothesis is that the answer is increasing the availability of student-student, student-teacher, and teacher-teacher communication, with the memory pool to store previous content. The internet is a wonderful thing, however programs like Blackboard fail to take into account group interaction. (They claim they do, but their groups are isolated to individual classrooms; I'm talking about networking across the entire world.)

"...but it would need to be developed outside the institutional structure, or your 2) would rapidly become 1)."

Exactly. This is why I feel it can only be created by a commercial entity, possibly a corporation.

Also, I agree that your method of learning is superior, however the entity that creates this must accept that public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly.

Another problem is dealing with online predators. Any kind of social software created for schools is going to create huge waves of uproar unless people are sure that predators, real or imagined, can't communicate with students. I'm thinking that in order to communicate with other students, you must be a part of a classroom that has at least a certain amount of students and has a certain amount of content. Stifling communication is unsettling, but I don't see another way.

"public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly."

I can certainly agree with you about that. IB has been around for 30 years, and just got any foothold in American 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to one of the early public IB schools.

Public education is way behind, especially in technology. I just made "my first website" in a CS class 3 weeks ago. And I built it with the same HTML code I taught myself at age 9.

I also am not a huge fan of the amount of "busy work." This is just the work that professors are required to give you to fulfill some degree requirement. Almost nothing I've learned in college has been applicable to any of my business-related work, although I don't think we can hold an undergraduate degree up to much glory.

[This is just about your first paragraph.]

The question is whether that is a problem. I for one don't really think that traditional secondary ed is the right place for teaching tech. Tech moves too fast.

We need to fix the school systems to more effectively cover their domain: sciences and humanities. Technology, however, is best learned as we learn it: free-form, self-directed, online. There is no need to merge that into curricula.

(Note, there's a difference between technology and CS: CS is algorithmics, theory; it's a branch of math, really. Technology is applied: websites, programming languages, things of this sort. Any curricular approach to technology is doomed to constantly lag the tech education available extracurricularly.)

There are two distinct classes of work that are called "busy work". The first is heinous, the second is often loathed, but great.

There's real busywork: work assigned just to take your time, create something to grade. That's crap, it should go away. (And in my collegiate experience, largely has.)

Then there's "impractical stuff": people often malign work they do that doesn't directly apply to the real world, but I think that it is often worthwhile. Consider MIT's famed 6.001: few of its students ever use Scheme, or any functional language, professionally, but the work in Scheme is never the less worthwhile. (Disclosure, I love functional languages.)

One thing I'm hoping is that if teachers use the service I described above, they'd be less inclined to create busy work - it would be obvious to the rest of their community that that's what they're creating, and so they'd have an incentive to not do that.

Unless they make all their content private and don't participate in the community, which is an option too.

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