In July, I spoke at The Amaz!ng Meeting 8 in Las Vegas. Sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation, it’s the largest meeting of critical thinkers and skeptics in the world. Unlike my usual talks about the abuse of science that I had given at previous TAMs, this time I wanted to tackle a much thornier issue: how we skeptics argue with believers of various stripes.

This isn’t directed towards any group in particular, so please relax and just enjoy the talk. No matter what side of an argument you’re on, there are some very valuable lessons to be learned here. I think this talk is particularly good for anyone wanting to get involved in politics or activism at any level.

Please reply in the comments, and I would really appreciate it if you would throw in whereabouts you do live. I’ll get it started.

If I could change one thing right now, it would be that Middlesex County/London owned and operated its own fibre-optic network and Internet service provider (ISP) with no bandwidth caps or throttling policies. It would be called MLfibre or FibreLDN and you could get a 100Mbps down (maybe 5Mbps up for residential and 50Mbps up for businesses) for under $100/month.

So… what would you change?

If you’re coming, I hope to see you there and I really hope my talk on MuniFibre gets you thinking about the possibilities!

Not good enough anymore

While researching innovative approaches to educating our children, I came across a pilot project that was run this past summer at a single school in New York City. It’s been dubbed “School of One,” and the approach is very similar to the types of things I mentioned as possibilities in “The Textbook of the Future?” To quote this New York Times article:

The program [...] consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of each day; the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day.

[...]

Now, he added, “we’re looking in a way that I don’t think anyone has looked at — at the way children learn, pacing them at their own pace, all of it tied to the mastery of content and skill and achievement.”

[...]

Once the students arrive at school, they receive their individual playlists identifying the lessons they have to complete for the day, which could involve virtual tutoring online, computer worksheets or small-group lessons with a classroom teacher.

This is exactly the type of thing I think we should be moving toward! If done right, School of One should ensure that all students get the education they need, via the best learning style for them, and by the end of the year all of the students should have had the chance to complete all of the core curriculum along with, hopefully, some bonus activities based on their interests. One child that participated in this program actually said that the educational games he played making solving mathematical equations fun! Imagine that!

Skype in the Classroom - Better

If you pair up my vision of the future textbook with School of One, with a little additional effort and funding I think you have a solid base for the future of education. In the article, an HR professional for the New York City school where this took place said that running schools this way should cost about the same as running a school the way it’s done now. Many detractors of moving to more technology-focused schools claim that costs would be much higher — that may not hold up after all!

In fact, many of the things that schools traditionally pay a lot of money for are available for free, as pointed out by The Innovative Educator. Chief among them – Microsoft Live@edu and Google Apps for Education. Both are completely free (as in puppies). A school using Google Apps can provide word processing, spreadsheet, website building and presentation software along with e-mail completely free to students and teachers! Just make sure the Internet connection is up and running (or install Google Gears for offline access).

I guess the chief reason for this post is to point out that things are happening despite the naysayers. School of One is exactly what I hope my son will experience when he begins school. With some luck, funding and pressure from parents, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for those of us who believe that the continuous evolution of major systems is the only way forward.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clearly I’m not expecting our children to have access to Sports Illustrated magazine while at school! But while many other nations, along with some districts here in Canada and the US, have been experimenting with laptops in schools, in one way I’m glad it hasn’t gone very far here. Why? Because tablets, such as the one seen in the video, are finally far enough along the technology evolution scale that they’re actually useful.

What I mean by that is you no longer need a stylus to interact with the computer. What I’m envisioning, instead of magazines, is an era where all students have laptops with instant access to the textbooks the school district (or other governing body) chooses and the textbooks are always up-to-date — almost like Wikipedia, but not provided by Wikipedia (though they can be a part of the equation).

OLPC

When I went to school, my fellow students and I constantly found factual and grammatical errors in our textbooks; textbooks that were often written the year we were born (though we were now 10, 13 or 18 years old). History textbooks that incorrectly stated a series of events or attribute discoveries to incorrect people (Christopher Columbus was certainly not the first to “discover” America, the Vikings found North America long before that) or contained incorrect answers to mathematical equations. How about a world where such things can be flagged, submitted to the publisher and revisions can be distributed as soon as a change is made?

I’m also thinking of an era where contextual menus let you share important finds within project groups (highlighting text and sending it around as something the group needs for its final report), or simply sharing interests with the rest of the class. An era where knowledge doesn’t end at the textbook, but where the menu can provide links to Wikipedia entries, search engines, videos on National Geographic or Discovery and the like. An era where a child’s natural curiousity for knowledge can be satiated almost instantly!

One other way this helps students is that such dynamic textbooks could easily bend to accommodate for other learning styles – visual, audible, and tactile.

Maybe your child learns best by seeing someone else perform an experiment. Perhaps they’d like to have both the audio and video running, so that they can follow along themselves but glance at the video (plus rewind and fast forward) to make sure they’re doing things right. Maybe they’d like to have a virtual sandbox on-screen where they can interact with a 2D or 3D representation before doing it in the real world. The possibilities are endless!

One major issue I had when attending school, especially getting into high end math, was that I experienced a lack of support at home. My parents are loving people, and smart, but the day they remember how to solve a quadratic equation — something they probably haven’t seen in over 20 years — is the day I volunteer for a demotion! What can be provided to students is a social networking-type area where they can help each other out after hours. Log on, chat about friends and gossip, whatever kids talk about these days… but let there be a dedicated area where kids can ask for and get help either from  within their school, other schools or possibly even the publisher.

At the end of the day, I don’t care who produces the textbooks – just that they work well and students are able to interact with them in a way that it properly enhances their educational experience. If they can’t do that, then clearly it’s not worth pursuing. The other obvious caveat is how would schools pay for textbooks that are constantly updated? Well I’d like to see a model where schools pay for a subscription to the textbook on a yearly basis and the vendor guarantees that the textbook is up-to-date and that any updates can be pushed as soon as they are verified.

If you would like to see the official demo video, you can watch it below (warning: contains images & video of SI Swimsuit Edition).

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE 01/28/10: Good news! I’ve found two organizations doing exactly what I’m talking about above. Check out Inkling and CK-12.