Graham Glass, etc.

School-hosted versus Web-hosted LMS

It's interesting to think about the pros and cons of school-hosted versus web-hosted learning management systems.

Most schools currently host learning management systems on their own servers, which requires a dedicated IT staff, backup system, and other related overhead. Blackboard, Moodle, Desire to Learn and other such systems are usually deployed this way.

The pro to this approach is that the student's grades are located on school computers, which gives the school a sense of security. The cons are that the school has to spend money on servers and an IT department. In addition, the student data is probably less secure than in a web hosted environment because it's a lot easier to break into a school IT room that into a remote data center.

The last paragraph enumerates the traditional arguments for and against web hosted systems. However, I think that an even bigger pro of using a properly architected web hosted system is that it allows the student's e-learning portfolio to be owned by the student rather than by the school, thereby allowing the portfolio to stay with the student as he/she moves between schools.

Amazon tracks my buying portfolio regardless of where I live; shouldn't a learning system track an education portfolio regardless of where a student is learning?

Concept Maps

I'm a big fan of concept maps, which are a graphical way of organizing concepts. For a good example  of concept maps, see HyperPhysics, which is a popular web site that contains nicely organized information about Physics.

I decided that it would be useful to create concepts maps for the entire K-12 curriculum. This would allow teachers and students to survey the entire landscape of concepts from a high level and then drill down for more detail about any particular concept. It's also a logical place to organize related information; for example, the "black hole" concept would include links to presentations, articles, blogs, quizzes and webquests about black holes.

The first step in implementing this was to pick a state curriculum for, say, science, and manually enter all the concepts it mentions.

The next step is to hierarchically organize the concepts by subject, and then figure out a way to graphically navigate the resulting structure.

I spend the last week manually entering and partially organizing all the concepts in the California state science curriculum. There were at least 2,000 concepts, so it was a pretty lengthy task.

If you're interested in seeing how it's turning out, here are some links:

• The entire California state curriculum: http://www.edu20.org/curriculum/show_all/14986
• The concepts required by the CA life sciences curriculum, grades 9-12: http://www.edu20.org/curriculum/show/14902
• All life sciences concepts (not fully organized yet): http://www.edu20.org/concept?subject=15
• An individual concept from Astronomy: http://www.edu20.org/concept/show/18890

Please note that the concept system has not been fully integrated into the rest of the edu 2.0 system; it's a work in progress. Nevertheless, we think that concept maps will be one of the most important and powerful aspects of the system.

Soon we will have entered a few more state curricula; then it will be possible to compare curricula for missing concepts, ordering of concepts, and other interesting aspects. Similarly, it will be possible to track students as they learn and test against their state's curriculum requirements.

What is Intelligence?

Here's one of the best essays on the nature of intelligence, by one of my heroes, Isaac Asimov.

Deeeeeeeeep Space

When you watch this amazing video of deep space, what do you think about?

My thoughts were:

• It looks beautiful
• I wonder what other kinds of life there are?
• I would love to explore it
• Most life in the Universe will be digital, immortal, and won't live on planets
• When will mankind grow up?

What were your thoughts?

Schooling and Filtering

One of the issues facing all schools is keeping its students challenged. If the range of abilities in a class is too great, some students are going to get left behind and others are going to be bored.

The Swiss education system addresses this issue by ranking children based on their abilities and then guiding them down different education paths. This in turn got me thinking about how I was schooled in the UK system.

I went to a fantastic school called the Haberdashers' Aske's School, which is an independent school located near London. Funnily enough, Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) also used to go there.

The way that Haberdashers' dealt with the problem (I don't know if they still do) was to test kids at around 10 years old and then separate them into different class groupings for math, science, and social studies. The top class had the 20 kids with the best test scores in that subject, and the bottom class had the 20 kids with the worst test scores in that subject. There were about 120 kids in my year, so each subject was divided into 6 classes.

At the end of each year the kids were tested again and the process was repeated. If you worked hard and increased your test scores, you could move to a higher class. Similarly, if you slacked off and reduced your test scores, you could move to a lower class.

I thought the system was fair and worked well. I wonder how many other school systems operate this way?

Wanted: Beta testers for Typepad Factoids

We've been developing a factoid widget for Typepad and have an early version working (see the left hand side of my blog for an example). If you add it to your typepad blog, it displays a new factoid from the edu 2.0 site every time you visit. Anyone can submit a new factoid and/or add the widget to their own blog (we only support typepad in this early version).

If you're interested in being a beta tester, please click on the "add this to your blog" link in the factoid widget on my blog or go directly to the edu 2.0 factoid widget page. If you try it and don't like it, you can easily remove it using your typepad widget manager.

Please send any feedback to [email protected].

EDU 2.0: Getting Close

Since the public beta of edu 2.0, we've been working on improving the user experience as well as adding various new features. For fun, we're keeping a daily journal of our progress.

Much of the time has been devoted to adding features like forums, email integration, RSS integration, 3rd party news feeds, and various social networking functions. They're all important features to have on an education site, but not particularly enjoyable to implement.

The rest of the time has been spent on adding more interesting features like support for project-based learning, webquests, and other types of educational material.

We hope to add the remaining must-have features like calendar support and user page creation in a couple of weeks, at which point we'll start marketing the site. We're revamping our home page next week to better communicate what the site does, based on early user feedback.

I'm most looking forward to working on the cool education ideas that I've been gestating for the last few years, but this first phase is essentially the price of entry to get to that point.

Once the final must-have pieces of edu 2.0 are in place, I'm planning on using the software to teach a computer science course on the Internet; I used to be a professional computer instructor and would love to share some of my lessons learned. I also have no doubt that using the system for delivering my own materials will yield a ton of ideas for improvement.