Big data will open the way to the future of education, says
the CEO of Knewton.
The company is piloting its products at Arizona
State University. Whatever we used to call education will cease to
exist. Big data will change everything.
“The so-called Big Data movement, which has been largely co-opted by the for-profit
education industry, will serve as “a portal to fundamental change
in how education research happens, how learning is measured, and
the way various credentials are measured and integrated into hiring
markets,” says Mitchell Stevens, an associate professor of
education at Stanford University. “Who is at the table making
decisions about these things,” he says, “is also up for grabs.”
Want to know the future? Watch Knewton: “Big Data stands to play an
increasingly prominent role in the way college will work in the
future. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University
has been demonstrating the effectiveness of autonomous teaching
software for years. Major educational publishers such as Pearson,
McGraw-Hill, Wiley & Sons and Cengage Learning have long
been transposing their textbook content on to dynamic online
platforms that are equipped to collect data from students that are
interacting with it. Huge infrastructural software vendors such as
Blackboard and Ellucian have invested in analytics tools that aim
to predict student success based on data logged by their client
universities’ enterprise software systems. And the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation has marshaled its outsize influence in
higher education to promote the use of data to measure and improve
student learning outcomes, both online and in traditional
classrooms. “But of all the players looking to ride the data wave
into higher education, Knewton stands out.”
Read more:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/25/arizona-st-and-knewtons-grand-experiment-adaptive-learning#ixzz2wkgLQ1ZS
Inside Higher Ed
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Big data industry and Obama unlocking FERPA so that 3rd party contractors can access the data for free is the agenda.
Click to access ed_data_commitments_1-19-12.pdf
The End of Family Privacy Rights
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita100.htm
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/25/new-school-testsdontmakethegrade.html
Good piece on the CC tests, where they interviewed someone other than Arne Duncan and the Fordham Institute spokesperson.
This is lovely:
“In Montclair, the first sign of conflict came last summer, when newly appointed district superintendent Penny MacCormack declared that in preparation for the PARCC exams, come fall, all local schools would create tests of their own: quarterly assessments drawn up by district administrators. Several hundred parents and high school students signed a petition asking for the new assessments to be delayed, but MacCormack refused.
Then, in October, just as the first quarterly tests were about to begin, 14 of the 60 assessments turned up at a scavenger website. The school board responded by issuing subpoenas against the test critics — a plan that backfired when it turned out that a school district staffer had merely saved the tests to a server with no password protection.”
Ooops! Withdraw that subpoena, quick!
I can tell that superintendent has created a collaborative partnership with the people there.
That’s what issuing subpoenas always says to me: works well with others.
Do they learn these management techniques at the Broad Foundation?
“That’s what issuing subpoenas always says to me: works well with others.” hehe.
This is the way Capitalism ends, doesn’t it? Once it has outsourced everything, and made everything cheap and disposable and junky, it goes after whatever public services are left. It seeks to privatize the post office, the schools, the national parks. It consumes everything in its path until there is nothing left for it to consume or make money from. It burns up and away. It is sad but predictable given our history. What comes around, goes around. Everybody is going to make their money until the curtain falls. This is the next bubble. What can they wreck after education?
“What can they wreck after education?”
Nothing. There are no other free universal public systems in the US other than K-12 education. When this one is gone, that’s it.
I bet Florida will the be the first state with a wholly privately-owned, privately-run K-12 public education “system”.
They’re the furthest along on all the necessary pre-conditions.
There’s still the national parks (can’t mine resources from the earth and pump oil there), Social Security, unemployment benefits and Medicare—all supported by taxes just like public education. These programs benefit more than 300 million Americans but they don’t benefit the billionaire oligarchs of America—the top 0.01%. All these tax supported public programs do is slow up the acquisition of great wealth, power and the short term profits of Corporations.
What can they wreck after education? Plenty.
The Mother Lode is Social Security, which the Overclass hoped Obama would succeed in undermining. That’s why he was so enthusiastically supported by Finance in 2008.
He’s tried, parroting Pete Peterson’s deficit fear mongering and trying to limit future SS payments by changing the cost-of-living formula, the “chained CPI.”
It’s one of the ironies of contemporary politics that it’s only the clinical insanity of the House Republicans that has kept Obama from succeeding in his attacks on Social Security. They just can’t take “yes” for an answer.
Then there is Medicare, and the Postal Service, busy auctioning off historic buildings to real estate developers…
These people won’t rest until they’re charging us for the air we breathe.
Mike,
They need one more piece to completely wreck public education. That is federal choice. The Re-Authorization of ESEA will do that. See HR 5 and SB 1094. This will nationalize all education where all schools become government schools..
Abolishing Representative Gov’t, Common Core, , Choice, Charter Schools
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita104.htm
“Everybody is going to make their money until the curtain falls.”
Well, not “everybody”. Every public service we’ve ever privatized ends up with low wages at the bottom and corporate-sized salaries and bonuses at the top. This one will be no different.
A small group of people will make a whole lot of money, and most everyone else will make 15 dollars an hour, but other than that I agree.
I do wonder about it. I wonder about what will happen when people realize they want from public owners of public schools to renters or purchasers of a service, whether there will be blow-back against the politicians who sold it off.
“We” won’t own public schools anymore than we own a private school where we purchase tuition, yet, we will have paid for the schools.
We’ll be renting the asset we all paid for. How about that for zany! 🙂
Who goes from an owner to a renter, with no compensation? Dopes, that’s who. People who took bad advice.
Sounds a lot like cancer.
Thanks for the warning, but it may be too late.
First we have the NSA using super computers to monitor all of our e-mails and phone calls.
Then we have private sector Data Brokers who are selling our personal information. 60 Minutes did a piece on this a few weeks ago. If you haven’t seen it, you may want to:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-data-brokers-selling-your-personal-information/
H. G. Wells warned about this in “Nineteen Eight-Four” and now it has come to pass. I don’t think there is any turning around.
The only defense we have to keep this information from being used by a few (for instance, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdock, the Koch brothers, the Walton family and Wall Street Hedge Fund billionaires) who want to control us is to fight for the democratically run public schools and deny private sector schools tax payer money.
Whenever a few sociopath individual think they know what’s best for the rest of humanity, that’s a loud warning that the collapse of civilization as we know it is pending.
The most recent PDK/Gallup Pole on Public Education clearly shows what the public thinks about what’s happening to teachers and the public schools and the vast majority of people are not on the side of the oligarchs.
Click to access 2013_PDKGallup.pdf
I cross-posted this at Oped news, where I attempt to connect people to the hidden assault on public education and teachers.
This is my post that accompanies this link.
“As you know if you follow my posts, I talk about the assault on public education, so that two things will be accomplished. First, control of what our future Americans can do, or will know is assured by bogus ‘core curricula’ written not by educators but by the hidden promoters, such as Eli Broad and the Koch Brothers.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
Second, so that magic elixirs that do nothing for enabling learning, can be sold at great profits to public schools (San Diego and Los Angeles come to mind as tablets and software are touted as cure-alls).
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
If you are interested in the truth about reforms and what it really takes to teach, the blog of Diane Ravitch is one place to go…and also read her book “Reign of Error!”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/book-reviews/reform-reform
“Who is at the table making
decisions about these things,” he says, “is also up for grabs.”
I’ll bet it is– to the highest bidder.
“It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me to his house, he would sell me for a slave.”
– John Bunyan, as quoted by C.S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man”
Gadget worship and techno-Utopianism – certain, like all Utopias, to devolve into nightmare – married to profiteering and authoritarianism: the spawn of this marriage is frightening to think about.
It is more like a rabid beast that will have to be killed. It is here and growing, we had all better be fighting already.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] was, from its inception, about creating tags for software–a single set of standards to correlate computer-adaptive learning software to. A “standard” in the sense of a set of specifications necessary for creation of uniform products.
And what was to be the purpose of these products?
The single biggest cost of education is the salaries and benefits of teachers, followed by the cost of facilities.
From the beginning, this has been about replacing teachers with software. Thus the big push at Arizona State–a proof of concept laboratory. Thus the buzz about flipped classrooms. Thus the “class size doesn’t matter mantra.”
Those few educators and union leaders who have supported the Common Core have not recognized this. They have not understood why Bill and Pearson paid to have these “standards” created.
The new standrads are about, as Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff said on the Harvard Business School blog, “creating national markets for products that can be brought to scale.”
And those products are meant as replacements for the people whom Randi Weingarten and Dennis Van Roekel represent.
Imagine: 200 students in a room, all doing virtual learning. A teacher’s aide-level employee milling around to make sure that everyone’s tablet is working and to help when someone encounters a problem with the software.
That’s the vision, folks.
The Executive Vice Provost at Arizona State recently said in an interview that within three years 80 percent of all classes at his school will be taught using computers. Not distance learning–they’ve learned that kids won’t stick to that. The model they are following is the one that I just described. 200 kids in a room working in software. Someone walking around assisting.
This is the plan, and Bill Gates articulated it DECADES AGO in his book The Road Ahead.
The ed tech people used to talk among themselves about creating “teacher proof” products. Now they are designing products to be teacher free.
But they had to have a single national standard first to correlate those products to. One set of national tags. That’s what I have been saying on this blog for two years now.
That’s why the Common [sic] Core [sic] was created.
Bill Gates has been talking a lot about college in the last year and a half. And what does he say? Too many kids are dropping out, and it’s way, way too expensive.
Solution? Cut the costs dramatically through software. Create a new generation of tests to trim the pool of entrants. Create standards and standardized assessments for public colleges (standards to tag the college ed tech to and standardized assessments to be taken on computer).
In other words, create a two-tier college system. Standardized ed tech college for the children of the masses. Real colleges for the children of the elite.
And so bring those costs of training the next generation of prole workers WAY, WAY DOWN.
Welcome to the Big Data future of education, folks.
You are all going to be out of jobs.
And your unions will have helped to make that happen by pushing these “standards” and so enabling this Orwellian ed tech vision.
Here’s the ridiculous thing about that vision: If people weren’t needed for teaching if there were devices that could teach in their place, then teachers should have disappeared after Gutenberg. My point: teachers are needed. And not just assistants to make sure that the tablet is on and working.
But these deformers have absolute contempt for teachers. Listen to them. They say obvious crap (Children need to be willing to persevere to complete a task. Kids should read closely.) as though THEY HAD JUST DISCOVERED THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.
They want teachers gone.
They want teachers gone, and are making sure to scapegoat, shame and humiliate them on the way out.
But Randi and Dennis will still have their seats at the table won’t they?