3 TED talks on education

This blog post summarizes the content of three interesting TED talks on education:

• Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover


• Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums


• Sugata Mitra: How kids teach themselves

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover

Meyer argues that math textbooks prevent mathematical thinking and creativity by offering everything in small steps.

It is cool to see how he rewrites textbook exercises to make them more compelling and instructive.



Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums

In slums, education has to be pull, not push (as in mandatory, forced), because it competes with easy sources of money such as drug trafficking. Payoff has to be quick, what you learn has to make you productive immediately. In the industrialized world, education payoff and productivity are often postponed for years. In the developing world, there is a shortage of teachers, thus it becomes important to support peer teaching. One of the most important technologies is the cell phone. It should thus be used to support education.



Sugata Mitra: How kids teach themselves

Mitra did a “hole in the wall” experiment: He put a computer in a rural Indian area (accessed via a hole in a wall), left for 3 months and came back. The computer did not even have internet access, just a few CDs. When he came back, he talked to two children (8 and 12 years old) who played a game on the computer. They told him: “We need a faster processor and a better mouse”. Mitra, surprised: “How did you find that out?”. The children: “It was on the CDs”. Mitra: “How did you understand all this?” (the CDs were in English, but there was no English spoken in this area). Children: “Well, you left this machine which only talked English, so we had to learn English.” The children used 200 English words, not only with the computer, but also in their day to day conversations.



In later incarnations of this experiment, the first thing children did was to look for a web site that taught them the English alphabet. The overall result was that a computer enabled all children to teach themselves (regardless of any measurable factor such as economic wellfare, etc.). It had to happen in groups: Usually one child operated the computer and was surrounded by 3 children who advised. These children were again surrounded by 16 children who also advised, often incorrectly. The first 4 children had the same level of expertise and all children would pass a test on the topic learned via the computer. Adult intervention was not important. All these factors combined make this kind of education very affordable.

Can gaming make a better world?

Jane McGonigal certainly seems to think so. She argues that gaming is becoming increasingly wide-spread and that gamers exhibit the following positive traits while gaming:

• Urgent optimism: in a game, every problem can be solved. Conversely, solving problems in reality can be impossible and frustrating.


• Social fabric: gamers must form a team to solve a problem. One is forced to socialize, which is also the reason for multi-player games being so appealing.


• Blissful productivity: Gamers put in a lot of time and work quite hard to achieve their goals. Compare this to universities where students frequently complain about a lack of motivation.


• Epic meaning: McGonigal mentions the “World of Warcraft wiki” being the second largest wiki after Wikipedia. I’m not sure what her point is here. It seems related to the previous point, because without the meaning that games provide, gamers would not be motivated.

She then presents three games that helped to shape participants’ behavior in the real world:

• World without oil: simulates an oil crisis. Participants apply oil-saving habits that they have acquired in the game to the real world.


• Superstruct: Ups the stakes by simulating a reality where a computer predicts that humanity only has 23 years to go.


• Evoke: A game designed to elicit social innovations from participants.

McGonigal concludes that games can be used to solve real-world problems. This position is based on a few assumptions, some of which I partially disagree with:

• There is not enough problem-solving in the world. Not true. The problem is that there is too much optimization, but it all happens locally and/or at the wrong place (investment bankers maximizing their profits, politicians looking for votes, etc.). Many people try to “save the world”, but it often involves fighting someone else and increasing conflict (of which there is already too much). So my guess is that most of the (industrialized) world would profit from people taking it easier and letting the big picture seep in.


• Analysis is the best tool to solve the world’s problems. Many hard problems are based on emotions: wars, discrimination, racism, obesity, etc. Rational thought is often the wrong tool to solve these problems. Otherwise, rational people would not be obese or alcoholics. On the other hand, the social component of games can be used to influence people on a more emotional level. Compare this to how having more black role models on TV and in the movies must help with reducing racism. Some of the older Hollywood movies were atrocious in this regard... Visualizing something is a powerful first step towards making it a reality.


• Everyone’s contributions are similar. Expert contributions have a different quality from grass root ideas how everyone can contribute. The “global extinction awareness system” game seems to factor in expert knowledge, but fully integrating such knowledge into game play seems quite challenging to me.

I think that for real-world problem solving, the current games are a start, but they have to become more sophisticated. Instead, I would interpret McGonigal’s arguments differently: She makes a compelling case for using games for education. Game technology could help to transfer experience (via a simulation) and not just dry knowledge. Everything would have a lot more meaning. You could, for example, walk through ancient Rome instead of only reading about it. Peer teaching is desirable, not common in classrooms, and can be the result of the above mentioned social component of games. Another example are foreign languages. To me, learning a foreign language only made sense after I went to a country where it was spoken and experienced it in action. Accordingly, game technology can provide immersive language learning.

Education and the myth of the correct solution

Suppose you have to solve a problem. An idea that frequently comes up next for me is that there is a correct, a perfect way of solving it. The associated image is one of a solution that is “out there” and just has to found. Obviously, this image has a paralyzing effect, because you can fail, by not finding the solution. That is, it stifles creativity. Ken Robinson has talked about how our education system often fosters this viewpoint. To illustrate, he mentions divergent thinking (the full talk is also available), coming up with as many and as diverse solutions as possible, one of the elements of creativity: A study revealed percentages of genius-level divergent thinking among test subjects. Ages 3-5 the percentage was 98%, ages 8-10 it was 32%, ages 13-15 it was 10%, and finally ages 25+ it was only 2%. Something happens that makes the divergent thinking go away. This is sad, as many of the problems modern society is faced with can only be solved by this kind of thinking.

Thus, I think it is better to replace the mental image of the perfect solution with one that involves creativity. One actually creates something new, that never has been done quite this way before and never will be afterward.

How to guide an audience from novice to expert

The article "The Hero's Journey: Are You Experienced?" uses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to explain how people learn: Initially, when they are novices, they cannot handle a lot of contradictions. They want to be told what to do and everything must be simple and consistent. Combine this with the observation that abstractions must be built by amassing concrete examples, and one can derive a few rules for teaching (some of them borrowed from "Hero's Journey"):

• Don't start with an overview (of the subject, its history, etc.).
  
  


• Don't start with the abstractions (the result), start with the concrete examples.


• Keep things initially simple, add ambivalence later (to complete the knowledge).