You knew this was coming, didn’t you?
The XPRIZE awarded $10 million in awards to programs that teach children basic skills without a human teacher! One of the funders of the award was our very own Betsy DeVos, who loves teachers so much that she wants to get rid of them. They cost too much, and they tend to want unions. They even think for themselves, which is dangerous.
The XPRIZE Foundation has announced KitKit School and onebillion as the winners of the $10 million Global Learning XPRIZE.
Launched in 2014 with support from the Merkin Family, Dick & Betsy DeVos Family, and Tony Robbins foundations, Elon Musk, and other funders, the Global Learning XPRIZE challenged innovators to develop scalable solutions that enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and math skills within fifteen months. Each of the five finalists received $1 million to field test their solutions in Tanzania, where three thousand children learned on tablets donated by Google that were preloaded with one of the five solutions. The two winning organizations will share the $10 million grand prize for enabling the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing, and math.
According to XPRIZE, two hundred million children globally cannot read or write, while one in five school-age children are not in school. Based in Seoul, South Korea, and Berkeley, California, KitKit School developed a program featuring a game-based core and flexible learning architecture designed to help children learn independently, irrespective of their knowledge, skill, or environment. London- and Nairobi-based onebillion’s software solution merged numeracy content with literacy material to offer directed learning and creative activities alongside continuous monitoring that enables the software to respond to children’s individual needs.
Selected from among nearly two hundred teams from forty countries, the other three finalists were CCI (United States), Chimple (India), and RoboTutor (U.S.). All five finalists’ solutions are open source and available in both Swahili and English on GitHub. XPRIZE will work to deliver tablets preloaded with localized versions of the finalists’ software.
The really cool thing about the scripted curriculum is that the designer can not only program skillsbut control content and determine what children learn.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Expect Bill Gates-funded SETDA (State Education Technology Directors Association) to promote teacher-less education for the poor and middle class. What a travesty, the public employees that we pay, work to enrich the education oligarchs.
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If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s futuristic mind control straight out of the “fiction” novels of years past.
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Human teachers “…think for themselves, which is dangerous.” We need to seriously think about just WHO is creating curricula in days of computer education.
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“Each of the five finalists received $1 million to field test their solutions in Tanzania, where three thousand children learned on tablets donated by Google that were preloaded with one of the five solutions. ”
Why not put this CR*P on a developing country? Is this ‘great program’ going to be in Swahili? The government is planning to discontinue the usage of English in schools.
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Over 100 different languages are spoken in Tanzania, making it the most linguistically diverse country in East Africa. The country does not have a de jure official language,[citation needed] although the national language is Swahili. Swahili is used in parliamentary debate, in the lower courts, and as a medium of instruction in primary school. English is used in foreign trade, in diplomacy, in higher courts, and as a medium of instruction in secondary and higher education, although the Tanzanian government is planning to discontinue English as a language of instruction altogether. Approximately 10 percent of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language, and up to 90 percent speak it as a second language.
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The Tony Robbins of alleged sexual harassment?
Brainwashing/ digital programs for education/Tony Robbins- a bigger audience for his garbage about walking through fire?
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And they literally used a few thousand children as guinea pigs. That’s extra appalling.
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that was my first thought
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Tanzania is having problems providing a quality education to students. The average number of students in a primary class is 66, though classes can get as large as 200 students. In 2010 68,000 students dropped out of primary school. Source: https://borgenproject.org/education-tanzania-10-important-facts/
Is it obvious that this is worse than being in a primary classroom with over 65 other students or 155 other students?
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I had a lending library of books on tape that I had poor students sign out to take home each night. It was very popular among my poor ELL families. Parents would thank me because children had little to do in their tiny apartments. Whole families were reading these simple books, and parents were learning English from their children! When CDs came along, everyone advised me to use them. I resisted because the CDs would be more fragile, and the players might get “lost” in the hands of older siblings.
I wonder how long tablets will last in the hands of young children in Tanzania. My grandson starting wearing glasses in first grade, and he is now in third. We have replaced the glasses many times over when they get lost or broken. No matter where children live in the world, I doubt that fragile equipment will stand the test of time and children.
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Ask Amplify how long its tablets lasted in the hands of schoolkids in New York.
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The Amplify tablets in North Carolina melted
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Many years ago, I edited a new edition of a middle-school physics text written by a famous American scientist–a guy who had collaborated with Fermi, in Chicago, on the work that would earn Fermi the Nobel Prize. He told me about how, back in the 1950s, he and many other scientists had worked with federal politicians to develop of vision for the future of education. Here was the idea: you could harness this new technology, television, to bring the very best teachers and the most exquisitely prepared lessons to every student in every school around the world. “But look, Bob, at what has become of this! Television! It had the potential to lift up the entire population, but look what it has become!” His voice shook with anger, and there were tears in his eyes as he spoke.
If you are under a certain age and have been to a big state school, you’ve probably had the unfortunate experience of
There is much good that can be done with educational technology. Here’s an example: suppose that you are interested in the history of world religions. Perhaps you are a Christian, for example, and are interested in the hundreds of Christian sects that grew up in the first couple centuries CE that were later suppressed by the official church. Well, you can go to http://www.sacred-texts.com/ and download and read HUNDREDS of writings by these sects–noncanonical gospels and acts, and these are astonishingly interesting. Suppose that you want to know about the history and scholarship related to the many books that make up the Hebrew Bible. You can go online, here: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145, and watch, FOR FREE, the magnificent videotaped lecture series Introduction to the Old Testament, taught by the breathtakingly learned and interesting Professor Christine Hayes of Yale.
Wonderful.
However, if you are a teacher in the United States today, especially of English or math, you’ve been forced again and again to have your students use one educational technology product after another that has been sold to your school or district. And inevitably, the same story plays out:
Hype. There’s a meeting and a lot of hype. This new product is going to CHANGE EVERYTHING! It’s going to personalize learning. It’s going to be usable anywhere. It’s soooooo much fun! It supports collaboration and flipped classrooms! It enables real-time monitoring and intervention! It’s going to provide data. It has customizable avatars!!!
On boarding. Lots of confusion, but eventually, it all works. Sort of. On some of the school’s equipment.
Implementation. For the first week to week and a half, things are going pretty well. The kids seem to enjoy it. It’s something different–a break from their routines.
Reaction. The kids start groaning loudly whenever they are told to fire up the program. They beg to do anything else.
Rebellion. The kids refuse to use it. It appears that they would rather have every hair on their bodies pulled out with tweezers than to do one more module. By now, most English and math teachers, many science teachers, and some history teachers have seen this again and again and again.
Every freaking time. You would think that the geniuses designing this depersonalized education software would hang around long enough, in a few classrooms, to see this happen and to try to figure out why. (Hint to developers of Depersonalized Education Software: better commit lots of marketing resources up front, because you are only going to be able to sell this crap during the hype phase.)
Well, the answer is pretty simple: people like to be taught by people. Real, flesh-and-blood, present-in-real-life people. That’s because teaching and learning are, and have always been, interpersonal transactions. When it really works, it’s because someone who knows something and is passionate about it shares this with someone who doesn’t, and that interaction is contagious in a good way.
Educational software has a great future as a) supplemental material to be used for occasional remediation on specific points and b) occasional audio-visual presentation or demonstration material. I like pizza. but I wouldn’t want to have to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for the rest of my life.
And, the designers of this crap need to learn when to stop. Consider, for example, Khan Academy. This started out delightful. It was simply a bunch of sets of quirky videos by this superb, brilliant, funny teachers, Sal Khan. Yeah, there were occasional mistakes in them. But they were really instructive and entertaining. I watched hundreds of them. Great fun. Then came the money from Bill Gates, and Sal’s entertaining videos were fleshed out into a full-scale Common-Core-based instructional system and buried under mountains of online worksheets and tests. Awful. The kids HATE IT. And the beautiful thing that Mr. Khan created has gotten lost.
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Great comments. How do you get the really good ideas to work? How do you assure their failure?
It is not just the present group that has assured failure by implementing all from above. Robert Owen did well in Lanark but not so well in New Harmony.
It takes humans who can discriminate between what is working and what is not.
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How do you distinguish between the good stuff and the bad? You build RESOURCES, not TOTAL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS. (Here’s a great pair of Flash animated videos that show you the difference between a reciprocating engine and a rotary engine, between a four-cycle engine and a two-cycle one. The animations take you inside them, and you see them in action, and the video picture is worth a thousand words.) And you empower teachers by giving them the authority to pick and choose, to use what works and reject what doesn’t. And you give them the time in their schedules to meet with one another and discuss these matters and make decisions.
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I looked at some Con Academy videos when Sal Kahn was doing them himslf and must admit to not being particularly impressed.
Because I was educated as a physicist (and credentialed as a physics teacher), I looked at a few of his physics videos.
First, his knowledge of basic physics was/is abysmal. He was/is hopelessly confused about very elementary stuff like vectors and scalars -at one point referring to a displacement as a “distance” and claiming that distance can actually be negative! (note to Sal: the distance formula takes a square root as the last step, which means the distance can’t possibly be negative).
I can only imagine how confused he made those who were watching the videos. There will probably be a whole generation of scientists who think that the distance between two cities can be negative.
Second, I did not see anything at all creative about his videos. As far as I could tell, they were pretty much what you get in a typical lecture class. That does not mean they were bad, just nothing out of the ordinary.
Third, you can’t learn physics from videos alone. You have to do experiments.
Sol failed miserably on all counts.
Bill Gates was very impressed with Kahn’s videos but that should come as no surprise because in science, at least, Gates is as ignorant as Kahn.
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The distance between two cities can’t be negative? LOL.
I enjoyed his style in those early videos.
Re: “You can’t learn physics from videos alone.” Makes sense to me. And this raises a key issue with ed tech: It should not be used as the sole or even the major means of delivery of content. It’s best if used as an occasional resource, in the same way that teachers, back in the day, used filmstrips.
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Better not call Sal!
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‘Sal bad man!
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Better Not Call Sal! LMAO. Hilarious, SomeDAM!
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As a history teacher, Khan’s history videos are similarly awful.
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“Each of the five finalists received $1 million to field test their solutions in Tanzania, where three thousand children learned on tablets donated by Google that were preloaded with one of the five solutions.”
Did they create a control group taught with traditionally trained teachers selected for their excellence in the classroom, teach each group for 15 years, and then observe how the two groups responded? Did they consider how each group felt about their education 40 years later?
We all know that experiments in education never do this, and so are doomed to the repeated failure we witness. Without knowing whether a system is valued in 40 years, it is just an experiment. Why did we not do this experiment on American children? Would the billionaires have done this to their own children?
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Control group?
What’s that?
Roy, I think you are expecting far too much of these people (Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg at Al) if you expect them to follow the scientific method for their “experiments” (or even to know what that is)
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It’s rare, in education, that one can control for the relevant variables. And certainly, Ed Deform steams ahead without any testing of the proposed disruptions. Were the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] submitted to critical examination by subject-matter experts? No. Were they tested at all? No. Were they tested against competing standards or approaches? No. Has ANY validation ever been done of so-called measurements of individual standards in ELA–any correlation of those measurements to independent measures of them? No. There’s a terrible irony to the fact that the champions of “data-driven accountability” practice pseudoscientific numerology.
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Whether it is ironic or not depends how one interprets “data driven”
There is actually one reading of “data driven” for which there is no irony whatsoever
Data driven
The data are driven —
Along for the ride —
They never are given
A chance to decide
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Another fine verse!
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So, there are the present issues, and there are the long-term ones. Here are the long-term ones that really bother me:
Centralization and standardization of online delivery of educational products “at scale” (to use one of Gates’s favorite phrases) creates a default, de facto Thought Police–a centralized group, a default, de facto Commissariat that controls what is going to be taught. There is a reason why the legislation that created the US Department of Education forbade it from getting involved in curricula. Same reason.
The ancillary learning management system databases become superb tools for centralized surveillance and social engineering. Consider, for example, the Chinese Social Credit System now being rolled out.
Such centralized systems enable control over who gets advancement and who doesn’t. Even now, if you want to become a teacher in Florida, you will have to pass several Pearson-designed tests. The professional licensing exam Florida teachers ASSUMES, in its questions, that you buy into the whole standards-and-testing regime. The correct answers are a) that the new standards are higher, b) that high-stakes testing is valid and reliable, and so on. If you don’t at least pretend to buy into the Deformy ideology, your professional ambition will END. You will be weighed and found wanting. We’ve already ceded that kind of power to these people. How far do we want to go down THAT road?
Such standardized systems stop innovation cold. If it’s not something on some bullet list prepared by the Ministry of Truth, it’s not to be taught, and if it’s not a teaching method approved by the Thought Police, it’s not to be used.
Depersonalized learning will be used for the masses. It’s training for Prole children. But the children of the wealthy elite will continue to get personalized service–real, human teachers, and the children of the Proles will get education by Borg. Do we really want such a two-tier system, one for the Eloi and another for the Morlochs? Do we want having a person as a teacher to become a luxury service like having a personal shopper or chauffeur? Seriously?
Truly Orwellian. And it’s happening, folks. Coming to a once free, democratic school near you.
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The prize winner’s website tells you a lot.
When you open the link to CCI—Curriculum Content International—you can see that the clients for this “production shop” know how to construct programed instruction (print, digital, multi-media) in multiple subjects— ELA, math, science, social studies, and world languages. Clients include Scholastic, Houghton/Mifflin/Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Wiley, Pearson, Hillsborough County Schools, Detroit Public Schools, NYC Department of Education, as well as Jet Blue’s inflight magazines for Kids, BurgerKing Kids Club’s worksheets, among others.
In other words, if you want to publish materials but outsource the nitty-gritty of pre-publication work (writing content, securing image rights, hiring illustrators, doing layouts and links), then CCI is a place to get those services. Then you can brand them as your own. CCI will also feature some examples of “your” materials on its website.
At the website, click on “Translations,” and you can see some of the cartoony characters and graphic novel formats enlisted to teach about healthy eating, literature, and other subjects.
Click on “Digital” to see how some of the content is put into animated game-like formats for use with a tablet (e.g., iPad), and with elementary-level images that resemble colorful work sheets. In the upper grades conventional text pages appear to be reproduced for an e-reader or iPad.
The examples at the CCI website show that this company is producing and marketing instructional material in social studies for Scholastic, in ELA for Houghton/Mifflin/Harcourt, in math for Prentice Hall with Common Core and test prep, and in science for Everyday Learning Fun (preschool, early elementary).
My impression is this. Much of this content is conventional and made marketable by creating minor editorial and graphic modifications from various publishers, in addition to using many “stock” source materials in the public domain. Bob Shepard has much more experience than I have, but raiding and recycling is common place in publishing for schools and much of the work at CCI seems to have the US market with state standards as the first order business. But the “global” market is within reach. Here is why.
CCI offers also offers “culturally sensitive” translations services. This is one of the features that likely made it a winner of the Global Learning XPRIZE for self-instruction in the “basics” of reading, writing and arithmetic. Google offers free translation services, including Swahili, where “two plus two = mbili pamoja na mbili, and there is an audio for pronunciation.
I was unable to locate CCI contracts with the public schools listed on its website. A search for Hillsborough County Schools turned up four contracts, but no details other than the destination of some materials to magnet schools.
I also looked at the GitHub website where open-source programming is encouraged. I was particularly interested in copyright issues, primarily because some of the CCI website materials seemed to be under copyright protection of some big name publishers. I found no clear answers. https://github.community/t5/How-to-use-Git-and-GitHub/Copyright-Infringement-Detection/m-p/8059?advanced=false&collapse_discussion=true&q=copyright&search_type=thread
I think this award was made by people who were enchanted with (and possibly funders of) the Bridge International program in Africa. In the BI for-profit schools, curriculum materials are developed in the US for digital delivery by teachers in Africa. The teachers follow scripted lessons with a built-in management system for tests, attendance and the rest. Local hires do some cultural tweaking of the US curriculum as required for intelligibility and marketing.
I view the quest for “global” delivery of curriculum materials via tech as neo- colonialism. Nothing is really free in the open-source environment. That is bait for an ever-expanding “ecosystem” (a favorite word of techies) with more and more on-screen text and imagery delivered by thousands of anonymous content designers and managers in the code-loving land of OZ. As Bob Shepherd notes, the intimations of this technological march were present in the 1950-1960’s when even 8 mm film loops were fabulously innovative.
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Thanks, Laura: on that note: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/a-warning-to-parents-about-online-learning-programs/
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Neo Baloneyalism
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I love reading the con versions here…so unique! Thanks
Susan
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Good news!
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Summit Learning, the Zuckerberg-backed platform, says 10% of schools quit using it each year. The real figure is higher.
BY MATT BARNUM – 1 DAY AGO
When nearly 100 students walked out of their Brooklyn high school in protest last year, saying they were spending too much of their days in front of a computer, the story took off.
The students were complaining about their school’s use of Summit Learning, a curriculum and online learning system backed byFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the organizations behind Summit pushed back, saying the issues raised by the Brooklyn students weren’t representative of what was happening at the nearly 400 schools using the program.
One piece of evidence they offered: just 10% of schools quit using the platform each year, a number that ended up in multiple newsstories.
New data obtained by Chalkbeat — from Summit itself, in response to a public records request — shows that figure is misleading. Since the platform was made available, 18% of schools using it in a given year had quit using it a year later.
Asked about the discrepancy, a Summit spokesperson explained that its 10% figure comes from averaging the dropoff rates for each of the first three years. The number of schools adopting the platform was 19 in the first year and 338 in the third year, so Summit’s approach is skewed heavily in favor of the first year’s low attrition number.
Looking just at schools that signed on to the platform last school year, a quarter of them are no longer using Summit this year…
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/05/23/summit-learning-the-zuckerberg-backed-platform-says-10-of-schools-quit-using-it-each-year-the-real-figure-is-higher/?utm_source=email_button
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“The really cool thing about the scripted curriculum is that the designer can not only program skillsbut control content and determine what children learn”
The proverbial elephant in the room.
Unfortunately, it’s only visible to those who have knowledge of the subject matter.
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It’s up at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/XPRIZE–10-Million-Prize-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education-Costs_Education-Curriculum_For-profit-Education-190529-115.html
With this comment.
The two winning organizations will share the $10 million grand prize for enabling the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing, and math….according to a test..
While, good computer programs that use repetition and review to help memory, and thus can assist teachers to help kids practice, and learn some things like arithmetic, spelling and other areas of a curriculum, only a teacher can interact with a human child, and know if real learning of complex thinking is being learned.
WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE is a phrase that Harvard used when they researched the real PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING, with the Pew teams from the University Of Pittsburgh.
Few people really grasp what this entails, but professional teachers dol I am not talking about trained, TFA novice teachers… I mean the real thing… the educated, experienced professional.
Oh..I forgot, the public schools were emptied of such practitioners , ignorer to dcause catastrophic failure, and thus, charter schools would replace them… even though PROFIT not learning is the guiding factor.
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