Wednesday, February 11. 2009One more request, President Obama: Open source?
It looks as if our open letter to President Obama
isn't alone. A recent post on Ars Technica kindly points us to another open letter from a group of open source vendors and advocates calling for the new administration to consider open source software in government IT initiatives and infrastructure. Of course, we've been thinking about open source software's power and potential in education for quite a while. Our recently described vision for educational technology depends vitally upon open source materials and the value of community input. That's why we release our software as open source and invite you to visit our source code library to download any or all of it, examine it for yourself and – we hope – submit your own ideas, suggestions or improvements. Wednesday, February 4. 2009Comparison of Ruby 1.8.6 1.9 and JRuby running on Java 1.5 1.6 and 1.7
Ruby is a powerful and dynamic open-source object-oriented language we have been using extensively at CC in the last few years for the web applications that manage and coordinate authoring and deployment of activities based on the SAIL/OTrunk framework . Ruby 1.9 looks to be about twice as fast as Ruby 1.8.6. A year ago programs written in JRuby were often slower than ones written in version 1.8.6 of C Ruby. Now for some benchmarks JRuby is twice as fast as Ruby 1.9.
Ruby 1.8.6, 1.9, and JRuby running on Java 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 compared
Tuesday, February 3. 2009Opening the conversationMonday, February 2. 2009Building OpenJDK on Mac OS X 10.5.6
The next version of Java being developed is v1.7.0 and the OpenJDK version is being released as open source under the GPL license. I've written a wiki page describing how to build and install this new version of Java on Mac OS 10.5.6. Build OpenJDK Java 1.7.0 on Mac OS X 10.5
Thursday, January 24. 2008Evolution Readiness Progressions
The basic concepts of evolutionary theory are contained in the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, Washington, DC, 1966) as well as those of the various states. For example, in the table below we show the alignment between the "big ideas" of evolution and the science standards for three states: Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas. The “learning progressions” in the second column are adapted from the Atlas of Scientific Literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007), while the quotes in the third column are from the Massachusetts Science Framework; we also index in that column the corresponding standards from the Missouri “Show-Me” Standards and the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards. Beginner Level
Intermediate Level
Advanced Level
Sunday, November 4. 2007Evolution: a Powerful Model but a Fragile One
The word "model" means a lot of different things to different people. A model airplane looks like a real airplane, only smaller; a paper airplane flies like a real airplane, only not as far or as fast. Both are models, neither is the kind of model I have in mind. For the purposes of this discussion I'm defining a model as a description of a phenomenon in terms of things that can't be seen, felt, or heard, but that explain what's going on. Models may involve things that are too small to be seen, or too big; processes that take place too slowly or too fast. The plate tectonics model, for instance, informs us that the Himalayas are being formed, even as we speak, by the earth crumpling like a car fender, as India crashes (rather slowly, to be sure) into Asia. Science is all about models of this kind, and an important goal of science education -- and of the Concord Consortium -- is to give students some examples of models and show them how to use those models to make predictions, to guide experimentation, and generally to make sense out of their own and other people's observations and experiments. Scientific models are constantly subject to revision as new experiments are performed, new data collected, and new interpretations advanced to explain existing data. It is important, therefore, that we teach our students about this process as well, giving them the sense that science is perpetually a work in progress, rather than a set of unchanging "facts."Take, for example, the theory of evolution, a model that systematizes the description of an enormous body of data in terms of three simple propositions:
Genetics is only one example - evolution depends critically on models drawn from many other sciences. Geological models of the age of fossil-bearing rocks, critical to giving evolution theorists enough time for the hypothesized processes to take place, bear directly on the feasibility of the evolution model. So do models of mutation rates in different organisms, which themselves depend on models of the environment in which those organisms lived a long time ago. And the burgeoning new science of genomics, by comparing DNA sequences across present-day species, gives us the ability to trace the evolution of those species with a precision that Darwin could never have imagined. All this interdependency makes evolution a particularly fragile model, as its opponents often point out. The discovery of a single errant fossil,* like the human footprint supposedly found amid dinosaur tracks, could in principle bring the entire elaborate edifice crashing down. But its very fragility confers on the evolution model its extraordinary power. Evolution is fragile because it is so broadly applicable. In providing a model for how the multitude of species arose on this planet, it feeds into and constrains dozens of other models. It is powerful, in other words, for precisely the same reason that it is fragile. *For an in-depth discussion of this issue try http://paleo.cc/paluxy.htm. Thursday, February 1. 2007The What Works Clearinghouse
Education Week of January 24, 2007 has two articles about the What Works Clearinghouse (www.whatworks.ed.gov). One of them notes that the WWC is costing the Department of Education $435 million over five years!!! This is a lot of money. The WWC does not conduct any original studies. Instead, it reviews existing studies of education “interventions” (such as elementary school math textbooks). Surprise, surprise … most of the “interventions” that it investigates don’t have much good evidence to support them.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to figure out how much money it would take to actually conduct good research about math and science education interventions: textbooks, computer software, supplementary materials, etc? Certainly hundreds of millions of dollars. Perhaps billions. Where is that money going to come from? Nowhere fast--at least not anytime soon. And where is the money to develop and test new instructional materials? Especially significantly different, technology-based interventions. This whole topic of “evidence-based practice” would require a book, or two or three. (And of course there are some that are at least related.) The No Child Left Behind Act actually defines “scientifically-based research,” which is a very strange idea. (Can you imagine the Congress defining medical research?). And the same Act also requires (strong language) that billions of dollars of federal monies be used only for proven ("scientifically-based") practices. Of course, that "requirement" is impossible to adhere to, partly because the evidence base is so weak. (Not to mention the Reading First scandal, in which it was discovered that the manager of the $1 billion federal Reading First program was biased for some programs and against others, independent of the research.) Then there’s the whole question of appropriate outcome measures. Take the goal of teaching students to write well. There is now evidence (a) that if you teach students using a word processor (and other technology tools) they write better and (b) if you test students with paper and pencil those who have learned to write with a computer may be disadvantaged. Virtually all writing in the real world, especially of any length, is now done with computers. But very few students are tested that way--yet. Contemplating the government’s decision to invest more than $400 million in the What Works Clearinghouse should give one pause. Is this a wise investment? What do you think? Wednesday, November 29. 2006Blended learning environments for effective teacher professional development in rural areas of Colombia
The Colombian Ministry of Education and three regional secretaries of education (Turbo, Atlántico, and La Guajira) have worked in collaboration with the Concord Consortium and Metacursos to offer the CONGENIA pilot project. CONGENIA is the Spanish acronym for “Genuine conversations about topics important to learn.” This project is co-sponsored by the Colombian government and USAID through the dotEDU project. This project has been implemented in three regions where there is a critical need to improve the quality of education. Results from “Pruebas Saber,” a set of standardized tests that measures basic education competences of all 4th and 8th graders in Colombia, show in 2005 that students in the selected regions perform below national and state averages. Other indicators, such as retention and promotion rates are also in the “red” zone. To address this issue, three teachers colleges and fifteen elementary schools with computers and a connection to the Internet were selected to participate in the project. The CONGENIA project has offered teacher professional development with a combination of online and onsite interaction between participating teachers and facilitators—blended learning environments—to help teachers reflect on their practices and to coach them in the introduction of changes that lead to the solution of critical educational problems in their institutions. Effectiveness of teacher professional development (TPD) goes beyond participation of teachers in events that seek to increase their competencies as educators. It needs to produce positive changes in the way they teach and their students learn. CONGENIA thus added another dimension to the blend: we integrated work, learning, and training by fostering technology-based local and global communities of practice over an 18-month period, beginning in July 2005. CONGENIA invited participating teachers to videotape classroom sessions at the beginning and at an advanced stage of the project in order to reflect on their own teaching practices, to share their thoughts in face-to-face and online forums, and to discover and record changes in methods. Each teacher selected at least one episode from his/her classroom. Teachers at participating schools shared their teaching episodes and discussed them locally. Additionally, distributed study groups of elementary teachers discussed issues related to content areas, relevant literature reviews, and current video-documented practices in the three regions in a blended format. Participation in both local and global communities of practice helped teachers understand the meaning of “genuine conversations,” a core concept in CONGENIA. When they viewed their own classroom video episodes, teachers discovered that their classes were teacher-centered and that conversations with students were mostly didactic. Online and face-to-face workshops helped teachers realize that project- and inquiry-based learning strategies could foster student participation and allow teachers to become co-learners, willing to listen to student thinking and able to build knowledge collaboratively. CONGENIA has been an occasion to rethink teacher preparation and TPD strategies in participating teacher colleges. It also has been a way of making synergies in participating elementary schools between continuing TPD and institutional efforts that seek to improve the quality of the education provided to students. Blended communities and blended learning environments have accomplish their function in CONGENIA. The experience—as documented by teachers in institutional video cases—is very positive. It is now time to expand this successful initiative to other regions.
Concord, MA, November 20
Monday, October 23. 2006Report from the ATE Conference
ATE (Advanced Technological Education, one of the NSF education programs) is different!
For one thing, their audience is different: two-year community colleges and secondary “vocational” schools. A far cry from the Caltechs and MITs that NSF normally hobnobs with. Still, as I found at my their meeting last week, ATE is far from “NSF Lite.” For one thing, in contrast to the rest of the science ed programs, ATE’s goal is not to prepare their students for the next run of the academic ladder – for the most part, the graduates from ATE-funded programs, go straight into the high tech job market, where they will work as technicians, lab assistants, or network administrators. This means that the program is driven, for better or worse, by external market forces, and is correspondingly insulated from some of the kookier pendulum swings of educational policy. This leads, among other things, to a refreshing concern with bringing course materials up to date. While the “academic” educators tweak a curriculum that considers Mendel’s Laws (1866) synonymous with genetics, and relegates Relativity (1905) to the chapter on “modern” physics that never gets covered, ATE is busy funding initiatives on hybrid cars, nanotechnology, renewable energy sources, and biotechnology! Our CAPA project, of course, is about none of those things – we are the only project in the portfolio, in fact, that deals with assessment, rather than content. But there again, I’m finding the ATE community ahead of the curve. Performance assessment (inferring kids’ understanding by their manipulations of models, rather than their answers to questions) has been something of a hard sell to the more academic programs of NSF (to say nothing of the Department of Education!) In contrast, the community colleges and technical high schools recognize that not everyone “tests well” on multiple-choice items – their clientele, in fact, comprises a disproportionate number of intuitive problem-solvers who are “good with their hands” but score poorly on tasks requiring abstractions and the extensive use of language. I talked to a lot of people at the meeting, and when I explained why I was there everyone “got it.” I collected a lot of business cards. It was a peculiar feeling to attend a PI meeting where the only familiar faces, aside from NSF folks, belonged to my co-PI John Chamberlain of CORD, and Bob Tinker and Amy Pallant, who were there representing the Molit project (you should have seen Amy’s hotel suite – ask her about it sometime!), But was a more exciting meeting than the ones I’m used to, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s. Tuesday, September 12. 2006Negative Wall Street Journal articleFriday, August 4. 2006NSF and K12 ReformTuesday, August 1. 2006Fixing Physics FirstWednesday, July 12. 2006A Little Knowledge Can be a Dangerous Thing
Dr. Gale Sinatra of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, gave a brown bag lunch at CC on the topic of using beliefs and dispositions to make judgements about scientific theories. Summary A Little Knowledge Can be a Dangerous Thing: Using Beliefs and Dispositions to Make Judgments about Scientific Theories In our work on epistemological beliefs and acceptance of biological evolution (Sinatra, Southerland, McConaughy, Demastes, 2003; Sinatra & Southerland, 2002; Southerland, Sinatra, & Matthews, 2001) we have argued that learning about evolution involves epistemic conceptual change. That is, conceptual change in the domain of science involves a change in students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing. In this presentation, I will present the results of three studies investigating the relationship between knowledge, epistemological beliefs, and acceptance of scientific explanations of phenomena. Students with high and low levels of biology knowledge will be compared in terms of their acceptance of scientific theories and their epistemological beliefs and dispositions. The results of all three studies show that students' who view knowledge as changing and who hold a more open-minded disposition toward change, report greater acceptance of the scientific view of human evolution. We posit that epistemic conceptual change is a result of increasing appreciation of the epistemic and ontological assumptions of the nature of science. I conclude with a description of a "nested" view of conceptual change as involving cognitive and affective change. Finally, challenges for research and instruction are discussed. Continue reading "A Little Knowledge Can be a Dangerous Thing" Friday, July 7. 2006CC Announces new Arctic Voyage Blog
Take part in an Arctic expedition this summer -- in comfort! Ed Hazzard, a former physics teacher and part of a team at the Concord Consortium that develops innovative uses of technology for science teaching, is traveling on a 45' wooden sailboat around the perimeter of Baffin Bay during July and August. Ed will make observations and take simple measurements, using tools that could be used in classrooms at a relatively modest cost. A blog is located at http://arctic.concord.org. Carolyn Staudt, his liaison at CC, will suggest parallel activities that students could do in their own regions. Tuesday, June 27. 2006CC is at ICLS
Several Concord Consortium staff members including Janice Gobert, Paul Horwitz and Barbara Buckley, are attending the 7th annual International Conference of the Learning Sciences this week in Bloomington, Indiana. They are running a full day workshop on Monday entitled "Authoring, Assessment & Open Source: Implications for Research and Classroom Application." This workshop will present several complementary educational technologies that support science learning through curriculum authoring and delivery, scaffolded student activities, and the logging and reporting of student interactions for purposes of research and assessment. Participants will have hands-on experience with authoring environments that allow the design of highly interactive curriculum, fine-grained data logs and reports, and scalable portal functionality. These technologies take advantage of open source models to support dynamic communities of exchange. |
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