e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • What Homework and Adaptive Platforms Are (and Aren’t) Good For

    I was delighted that we are able to publish Mike Caulfield’s post on how ed tech gets personalization backwards, partly because Mike is such a unique and inventive thinker, but also because he provided such a great example of how “personalized learning” teaching techniques are different than adaptive content and other product capabilities.

    The heart of his post is two stories about teachable moments he had with his daughters. In one, he helped his middle school-aged daughter understand why an Iranian author was worried that people in the Western world have harmful stereotypes of Iranians. In the other, he helped his high school aged-daughter see how her knowledge of the history of rocket science could be useful in answering a question she was asked about Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. Mike’s stories show truly significant learning of the kind that changes students’ perspectives and, if we’re lucky, their lives. It is not just personalized but deeply personal. He was able to reach his daughters because he understood them as humans, well beyond the boundaries of a list of competencies they had or had not mastered within the disciplines they were studying.

    For now and the foreseeable future, no robot tutor in the sky is going to be able to take Mike’s place in those conversations. This is the kind of personal teaching that humans are good at and robots are not. But neither are the tools we have today useless for this sort of teaching. Vendors, administrators, and faculty alike have broadly misunderstood their role and potential. In this post, I’m going to talk about both how these tools are useful for the kind of education that Mike cares about (and I care about) as well as, perhaps more importantly, why we are so prone to getting that role wrong.

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  • Our LMS Subscription is Available Today

    Today we are pleased to announce that our LMS subscription service is available for purchase. As promised, we have kept the promotion on the blog to a minimum, providing details instead to people who specifically sign up for the mailing list. But since today is the big unveiling, it seems appropriate to tell you all a little bit about it and what it means for where we are going with the blog and our work.

    The subscription is called “e-Literate Big Picture: LMS.” As you might guess from the title, there will be other “e-Literate Big Picture” subscriptions. Each of these will provide regular updates and in-depth analysis that go beyond the free analysis that we will continue to provide here on the blog, focused particularly on helping campuses make good decisions about how to evaluate, acquire, implement, and support educational technology in ways that will have the most positive impact for students and faculty. They will extend the work of the blog with analysis that is more actionable.

    In the case of this first subscription, we have been able to augment our analysis of the LMS  market with data and analytics support from our partner LISTedTECH. Their database contains information on LMS selections of more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, plus thousands of more worldwide. The database goes well beyond who is using which LMS today, as it also contains information on LMS migrations (decommission, implementations, pilots, etc) over the last 15 years. This information has given us an unprecedented chance to both test hypotheses we’ve had about the LMS market as well as form new ones. The bottom line is that we have gained insights into how the LMS market is changing that we believe are new. (more…)

  • The Battle for “Personalized Learning”

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    So here we go again. Another terminology war. First there was the battle for open. Then the battle for MOOCs. Somewhere in there was the battle for edupunk.

    I stay out of terminology wars because, even though they are often about very real and important issues, the emphasis on finding a single correct definition tends to distract rather than focus the conversation.

    It’s a different with “personalized learning” because there is no fight over its meaning right now. Rather, it seems to have no specific meaning at all. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with “adaptive learning.” But not always. And not exactly. More often it means, roughly, “robot tutor in the sky.” Shorter version: “WHEEEEEE!!!” Or maybe, “Wingardium leviosa!”

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    Phil and I have decided to claim this prime piece of linguistic real estate. We are asserting squatters’ rights.

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  • No Filters: My ASU/GSV Conference Panel on Personalized Learning

    ASU’s Lou Pugliese was kind enough to invite me to participate on a panel discussion on “Next-Generation Digital Platforms,” which was really about a soup of adaptive learning, CBE, and other stuff that the industry likes to lump under the heading “personalized learning” these days. One of the reasons the panel was interesting was that we had some smart people on the stage who were often talking past each other a little bit because the industry wants to talk about the things that it can do something about—features and algorithms and product design—rather than the really hard and important parts that it has little influence over—teaching practices and culture and other messy human stuff. I did see a number of signs at the conference (and on the panel) that ed tech businesses and investors are slowly getting smarter about understanding their respective roles and opportunities. But this particular topic threw the panel right into the briar patch. It’s hard to understand a problem space when you’re focusing on the wrong problems. I mean no disrespect to the panelists or to Lou; this is just a tough nut to crack.

    I admit, I have few filters under the best of circumstances and none left at all by the second afternoon of an ASU/GSV conference. I was probably a little disruptive, but I prefer to think of it as disruptive innovation.

    Here’s the video of the panel:

  • Pop Quiz

    Which CEO has recently said or done all of the following:

    • Suggested to an audience of VCs and ed tech entrepreneurs at the GSV conference that the importance of big data in education has been overstated
    • Told that same audience that the biggest gains from adaptive learning come when it is wrapped in good pedagogy delivered by good teachers
    • Asked former CIOs from Harvard and MIT, both of whom are senior company employees, to develop collaborations with the academic learning science community
    • Accurately described Benjamin Bloom’s two-sigma research, with special attention to the implications for the bottom half of the bell curve
    • When asked a question by an audience member about an IMS technical interoperability standard in development, correctly described both the goals of the standard and its value to educators in plain English

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  • The First e-Literate Subscription Product

    Not too long ago, Phil and I wrote a post about our long, slow process of realization that our blogging at e-Literate and our consulting at MindWires are not two mostly unrelated things but really two halves of a whole. And we teased the idea that these two worlds would be coming together soon.

    Today we’re ready to pull back the curtain a little bit on what we’ve been working on for the short term and offer some hints about what we’re thinking about for the medium term. We have some fairly audacious ambitions for the long term, but we don’t expect to get there overnight. In fact, we are going to start with a humble and somewhat unlikely (but hopefully useful) first paid subscription offering, which we will be making available in just a couple of weeks under the e-Literate brand. It will provide information and analysis above and beyond our continuing free content here on the blog (to which we remain strongly committed).

    We’re going to be releasing an LMS market dynamics report, in partnership with LISTedTECH. We’d like to explain why we’re starting there, what we hope the report will accomplish, and where we will go from there.

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  • We Need a More Robust Learning Sciences Research Community

    My latest Chronicle column is on how inherently difficult it is to evaluate learning science claims, particularly when they get boiled down to marketing claims about product efficacy, and how deep academic distrust of vendors makes this already incredibly difficult challenge nearly impossible.

    Here’s where I stand on vendor participation in ed tech and learning science research:

    On the one hand, vendors have access to data and resources that, for a variety of reasons, are difficult or even impossible for universities to access. They sometimes have millions of students using their products and relatively few internal barriers to doing certain kinds of large-scale effectiveness research (although to a certain degree, territoriality, bureaucracy, and poorly designed data architectures are universal problems). On the other hand, vendors should not under any circumstances be allowed to define the research agenda and arbitrate the validity of learning sciences claims for all of education. Theoretically, there is a simple solution to this. Higher ed knows how to do science. It knows how to review scientific claims. Vendor research should be put through the peer review process. They should publish enough information that their results can be evaluated and, when feasible, duplicated. Their reputations should be based in part on who is doing (or, at least, properly using) good scientific research. After all, most of the researchers at these companies are PhDs who are trained in the academic research process. There is no reason in the world why these companies can’t contribute to real, rigorous, peer-reviewed dialog and progress in the field. (more…)