e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: KNEWTON INC

  • The Rise of Antisocial Deconstructivism

    Phil and I gave our first ever joint keynote at the OLC conference this week. We didn’t want to just do dueling PowerPoints, so instead we tried a format that I have been calling a social constructivist keynote. Each of us would present on a topic for a few minutes, and then the two of us would talk about it for a few minutes. We planned the arc of the topics we would cover in advance, but we didn’t rehearse the talks for each other or script the conversation. The discussions came pretty close to the kind of bull shooting conversations that we have all the time. We set a time limit of eight minutes for each segment so that we could get through our presentation with enough time to bring the audience into the conversation at the end. It seemed to work pretty well.

    In the course of the conversation, we spontaneously came up with a term that we both like and that seemed to resonate with the audience: antisocial deconstructivism. ((“Antisocial deconstructivism” should not be confused with “antisocial deconstructionism,” the latter of which is redundant. Anyone who writes like Derrida did clearly is actively hostile to the idea of shared meaning making as something that provides net positive value, or even the desire to communicate with other humans.)) It’s the approach of breaking learning down into teeny, tiny bits, tied to fine-grained competencies and micro-assessments, that students learn on their own by following a prescription that is created for them, possibly with the help of a robot. To be clear, the term isn’t entirely meant to mock. There are times when antisocial deconstructivism is an appropriate pedagogical technique. For example, it’s pretty good for helping nursing students memorize medical terminology or IT students learn the basic components of a network. It can be good for learning some math kinds of skills, depending on your philosophy of math education. Any situation in which you are working fairly low on Bloom’s Taxonomy might be OK for it as an approach. Procedural knowledge that either doesn’t require higher order problem solving skills or where problem solving skills are best built incrementally by slowing increasing problem complexity is a particularly appropriate type of candidate for antisocial deconstructivism.

    But we do mock it when it is presented not as a pedagogical technique but as a pedagogical ideology. It’s the idea that anything worth learning can be learned best, most cheaply, and “at scale” this way. It’s the fetishization of one tool in the teaching toolbox as the technological society’s Great Leap Forward. The worst, crudest examples of MOOCs, Competency-Based Education, and personalized learning software hype are all manifestations of this stunted (and self-interested) view of education. Antisocial deconstructivism is like botulism. A little bit injected in just the right spot by a trained expert can smooth out some wrinkles that bother you, treat a chronic headache, or refocus a lazy eye. A little more injected in the wrong places and you can quickly start to look like a parody of the thing that you are trying to be. Any more that, and what you have is not a tool but a toxin.

    You might be suffering from antisocial deconstructivist toxicity if you find yourself believing any of the following:

    • Short videos of lectures by Ivy League professors, coupled with little quizzes at the end, will almost always provide a better education than a class taught by a live, human, non-Ivy League professor.
    • Short vendor-produced articles or animations, coupled with little quizzes at the end, will almost always provide a better education than a class taught by a live, human, non-Ivy League professor.
    • We think of our product like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile.

    If you exhibit any of these symptoms, then get yourself to a great teacher immediately and have them demonstrate for you what it is that videos, quizzes and robots cannot do.

  • Yes, I did say that Knewton is “selling snake oil”

    My comments in today’s NPR article about Knewton are getting some attention on Twitter. One comment in particular, actually. The one where I accused Knewton CEO Jose Ferriera of selling snake oil. To understand the basis of the comment, you have only to look at the quote from Jose earlier in that selfsame article:

    We think of it like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile.

    Can it read what I’m thinking now?

    And then there’s this:

    We can take the combined data power of millions of students — all the people who are just like you — [who] had to learn a particular concept before, that you have to learn today — to find the best pieces of content, proven most effective for people just like you, and give that to you every single time.

    Really? Every single time?

    Objectively speaking, I don’t know much about Knewton’s platform or the value that it adds. The only efficacy studies I have seen are for Pearson products, and those studies do not differentiate between Knewton features and Pearson-native features in terms of impact. If you dig deep enough on their site, you can find some information on the techniques that they use. For example, this overview paper, while not perfect, is a credible attempt to explain the techniques that the platform employs and the benefits to the users in layperson’s terms. If Knewton were doing more of this, I wouldn’t be as critical. There are still questions about the value of the product, but they are on the same level with many other products in the adaptive learning category. A company like Knewton should be working hard to demystify what their product does and providing hard, reproducible evidence that they add value.

    But much of what Jose says, at least to the media, is the opposite. No responsible educator or parent should adopt a product—even if it is free—from a company whose CEO describes it as a “robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind” and give you content “proven most effective for people like you every single time.” I’m sorry, but this sort of quasi-mystical garbage debases the very notion of education and harms Knewton’s brand in the process.

    If you want to sell me a product that helps students to learn, then don’t insult my intelligence. Explain what the damned thing does in clear, concrete, and straightforward language, with real-world examples when possible. I may not be a data scientist, but I’m not an idiot either. If you can translate the technical mumbo jumbo into sensible teaching insights for me, then you just might make a sale. But most people wouldn’t buy a used car from somebody who describes their product using language as hyperbolic as “robot tutors in the sky.” The same principle should hold for educational technology.

  • OER and the Future of Knewton

    Jose Ferriera, the CEO of Knewton, recently published a piece on edSurge arguing that scaling OER cannot “break the textbook industry” because, according to him, it has low production values, no instructional design, and is not enterprise grade. Unsurprisingly, David Wiley disagrees. I also disagree, but for somewhat different reasons than David’s.

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  • Knewton (Quietly) Pivots

    Knewton CEO Jose Ferriera has an interesting and revealing blog post up about “the coming adaptive world.” In part, it is a response to a report on adaptive learning by Education Growth Advisors. Jose writes, “Despite our constant protestations to the contrary, observers often confuse Knewton with the many adaptive learning app makers who are now popping up. Or they confuse app makers with platforms. Or they think we’re all competitors.” It’s a bit of a red herring, since the report does distinguish between platform and publisher business models. That said, the meaning of the distinction between these two categories isn’t drawn terribly clearly, and it’s fair for Knewton to try to clarify its market positioning. But in doing so, Jose reveals what appears to be a shift in their thinking about the market for a platform like theirs which tells us something important about the ed tech market in general. (more…)