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edintheclouds · 7 years

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How Maker Mindsets Can Be An Easy Fit For Rural Schools

Article by By Leah Shaffer originally published in Mindshift on March 8, 2017

Students work on air quality monitors designed to capture data in their communities. (Courtesy of Brock Hammill)

The maker movement has expanded greatly in recent years and much of the attention has focused on cities with high population density and large well-funded school districts. In rural districts, teachers are also developing maker projects to help students gain the benefits that come from hands-on experiences, while better understanding the needs of their communities. Take for instance the work being done by Brock Hamill at Corvallis High School in Montana. The students in his science class construct air sensors and analyze data in a way that helps address a problem unique to their community. Air pollution poses a problem for that region of Montana because of nearby forest fires and, in the winter, use of wood-burning stoves. “We can just get days and days and days of smoke,” said Hammill, and it can get to the point where sports practice and games must be canceled. Working with a teacher training program at the University of Montana, Hammill borrowed expensive air sensors for his students to use for a couple of days each semester. But he wanted his students to have more access to sensors, so he set about making his own. His first task was to see if he could even make a sensor from scratch and then test its accuracy so that his students could do the same. “I took it as a challenge to see what could we do,” he said. First, Hammill created step-by-step instructions on his website to provide students some structure for such a new project. He then used a $500 grant from Montana State University to purchase enough equipment to make seven air sensors. All of his students were able to build those sensors in class, a project that included putting together hardware and software that could transmit data to the internet. Then students had the opportunity to make modifications to the air sensors, such as having the light color change to represent different air quality measures. Students — who had unfettered access to their sensors — also worked on making them more adaptable to different environments. “They were working on wearable models you could just use a battery with and put in your pocket,” said Hammill. This would let students publish their real-time exposure to air pollutants at their exact location. Students also had the challenge of making a sensor that would register volatile organic compounds, such as paint fumes. “They were just changing code left and right, making it work,” he said. “They liked it, too, because they’d never worked hardware and software together. They’d change the code and run it and show other groups.” The air sensor project helped students understand a problem in their community while giving them much-need computer programming skills. “It’s just hard for these rural schools to get a computer programming teacher,” he said. OLD-SCHOOL MAKER Rural districts might already be offering a maker program and not realize it. Organizations such as 4-H and Future Farmers of America teach agricultural education skills that involve a lot of “making.” Students might be designing, programming and learning about technology under the auspices of such a curriculum. Jacob Bowers teaches a variety of agriculture classes in his town of Pella, Iowa. In that program, high school students learn how to fly drones over farm fields and analyze data from those flights. Thanks to a grant from the Carl Perkins Vocational and Technical Innovation Act, Bowers purchased drones to be shared by his and neighboring districts. Along with learning how to fly the drones, students learn data analysis. Bowers also gets permission from farmers to look at their field data, which come from more expensive drones. Students spend less time flying and more time figuring out how to program a drone to take the footage they want, he said. For instance, a drone can be equipped with a UV camera to determine the health of a field. Depending on the type of light bouncing back at the camera, farmers can determine how much fertilizer is needed on the field. The same thing works for a temperature camera. Based on the temperatures coming back, students can figure out where different soil types are located.

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Having the students figure out fertilizer plans is the big challenge to master. With efficient use of fertilizer, “we save the farmer money and it’s a little less hard on the environment as well,” said Bowers. Bowers isn’t just teaching kids how to crunch numbers on spreadsheets. In his greenhouse class, students design hydroponic systems. “They actually work together to build a more sustainable hydroponic system that can make a lot of produce,” he said. Next year, he plans to teach a metals class where students learn to run a small business creating metal signs. They’ll learn to run the books, find clients and use design software to make different products for those clients. All this is in the spirit of maker education. But how tech-driven the program is depends on the teacher, said Bowers. The big takeaway is “identifying what skills are going to be applicable 20 years from now,” he said. That’s why he focuses on fertilizer figures and data analysis, because that’s something students will likely always need to understand if they work in agriculture. As other teachers have seen, students who struggle with academics often shine in a maker space. Bowers sees that in his hydroponics class. “They’re excited to walk in and be able to show other students what they know.” TAKE IT SLOW Giving students access to skills they normally might not be exposed to is a big value of the maker culture. But when maker spaces are new to a school, schools might experience some growing pains. Noelle McCammond worked as technology support for the Corning Union Elementary School district and helped design the maker space at Maywood Middle School with Michelle Carlson, an educational consultant who helps bring maker spaces to schools. They tried to make the first maker project open-ended, but students didn’t really know where to start and needed more structure. “Our student population and our teachers really struggled with it,” said Carlson. They had to walk back the process a little bit and spend time just cultivating that idea of being creative and seeing what’s out there, said McCammond. “We had to be really structured and give them clear roles,” she added. But as students got more comfortable with maker equipment, teachers were able to give them time to tinker.

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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Creating Powerful Student Learning Experiences with Escape Rooms

Post in Getting Smart by Amber Chandler - March 31, 2017 Many of you have probably participated in an Escape Room, the latest in experiential entertainment. If not, the premise is simple: you are locked in a room with up to eight people, and you must solve a series of puzzles to unlock clues that will eventually help you “escape.” There are all kinds of themes; I’ve been in a Nazi invasion, a Zombie apocalypse, and a murder mystery, and we escaped in two out of three of the rooms. I’m pretty hooked on these rooms because I love group dynamics, and it is very interesting to see who leads, who follows, who goes off on their own and who has the type of mind that sees patterns or reads clues well. Of course, as soon as I completed my first experience I was dying to make one for my own classroom. I’ve yet to pull this off, but I will be doing my first classroom escape room this spring. As I’ve planned, I’ve found amazing resources to make the process seamless (I hope!). Here’s what I’ve learned: Teach 21st-Century Skills Before I started planning this spring adventure, I wanted to make sure that I had legitimate reasons for creating an escape room. Of course, the reason could simply be that it is fun and team building, but I knew that there were plenty of 21st-century skills at work too. As I adapted and developed the puzzles, it was clear that students will need critical thinking, persistence, collaborative skills and the ability to multi-task. To learn more, check out this podcast, and this great article that expand on what having 21st-century skills really means. The article interviews Tony Wagner, who addresses how these skills must complement what is needed in the workplace. Marie Bjerede writes, “In his book, The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner lays out seven “survival skills” that are needed in a modern workplace: Critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration across networks and leading by influence; agility and adaptability; initiative and leadership; effective oral and written communication; accessing and analyzing information; and curiosity and imagination.” The chance to create this level of engagement is exciting and promotes the skills that forward thinking educators are interested in. Build Real Student Engagement In some circles, the phrase “student engagement” has started to have a negative connotation. Some are looking at it as compliance, like this piece by author Peter DeWitt. He definitely makes the point that sometimes when students seem engaged–nodding their heads, sitting up straight, and participating–we feel self-congratulatory that our students are engaged. Though I agree with his premise, I think that student engagement is crucial for success in school, even the compliant kind he describes. Students must learn to “do school” with certain mindsets and signs of outward engagement. However, activities that engage students because of their curiosity and their desire to solve a problem takes engagement to an entirely different, and better, level. If you are starting to wonder about how student engagement can work for you, check out this great comprehensive guide put out by Great Schools Partnerships that details how engagement can be viewed as intellectual, emotional, behavioral, physical, social and cultural. Depending on what type of escape room you use or create, you could be addressing a few of these or even all of them. Use Existing Resources As important and timesaving as I know it is, I tend to do everything myself. I’ll look at what other educators are doing, but I just haven’t been able to take someone else’s plan and go with it. That is all about to change! There are truly amazing, ready-to-go escape room plans that are already aligned to standards, so I’d be crazy to spend hours creating essentially the same experience for my students. Why not utilize what already exists for my first foray into doing an escape room? Then, next time, I can tweak it or elaborate in a different direction. Jennifer Casa-Todd, an accomplished Canadian educator, has an excellent blog that helps connect the experiences to standards but also includes real-life examples that I am drawing from. This blog by DJ Embry for GoGuardian is helpful because it talks specifically about timing pitfalls, what supplies you need and how to modify the experience for a room full of students. If you have the funding, BreakoutEDU has an excellent array of kits that eliminate the legwork. The Plan I’m planning my escape room around the theme of “Writer’s Block.” The clues will lead them through a circuit that includes brainstorming (they’ll have to come up with something that we don’t list, kind of like the game Taboo), using resources (there will be a computer research component), using figurative language (this will be a section where they have to identify it in a passage and figure out the clue) and finally they’ll need grammar (the escape code will be embedded in a complete sentence) to escape. I’m going to incorporate the tips that I’ve picked up, as well as try to make it my own. Am I nervous? A little. There are lots of things to think about, but with these resources, I think I’ve got it covered. I have no doubt that my students’ engagement won’t be the compliant kind, but instead an immersive experience that epitomizes why we should work towards student engagement in the first place. We can’t do activities like this every day, of course, but I look at this type of day as a booster shot to ensure a healthy interest as students walk in the room wondering, “What are we up to today?” For more, see: How to Create a Breakout Room Activity in Your Classroom A Powerful Way to Exercise Student Brains Brain Training Breakthroughs: Improving Student Growth and Behavior

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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An excellent essay from Alfie Kohn pointing out that ed tech is pointless unless it's allied to a strategy for learning.

The Overselling of Ed Tech

03/11/2016 11:38 pm ET | Updated 13 hours ago

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that the idea of using digital technology in the classroom tends to be either loved or hated. After all, anything that's digital consists only of ones or zeroes. By contrast, my own position is somewhere in the middle, a location where I don't often find myself, frankly. I'm not allied with the Waldorfians, who ban computers from elementary and middle schools, but neither do I have much in common with teachers whose excitement over the latest export from Silicon Valley often seems downright orgasmic.

Basically, my response to ed tech is "It depends." And one key consideration on which it depends is the reason given for supporting it.

Some people seem to be drawn to technology for its own sake -- because it's cool. This strikes me as an unpersuasive reason to spend oodles of money, particularly since the excitement is generated and continually refreshed by companies that profit from it. Their ads in education periodicals, booths at conferences, and advocacy organizations are selling not only specific kinds of software but the whole idea that ed tech is de rigueur for any school that doesn't want to risk being tagged as "twentieth century."

Other people, particularly politicians, defend technology on the grounds that it will keep our students "competitive in the global economy." This catch-all justification has been invoked to support other dubious policies, including highly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all national curriculum standards. It's based on two premises: that decisions about children's learning should be driven by economic considerations, and that people in other countries should be seen primarily as rivals to be defeated.

But the rationale that I find most disturbing -- despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it's rarely made explicit -- is the idea that it will increase our efficiency . . . at teaching in the same way that's persisted for a very long time. Perhaps it hasn't escaped your notice that ed tech is passionately embraced by very traditional schools: Their institutional pulse quickens over whatever is cutting-edge: instruction that's blended, flipped, digitally personalized. This apparent paradox should give us pause. Despite corporate-style declarations about the benefits of "innovation" and "disruption," new forms of technology in the classroom mesh quite comfortably with an old-school model of teaching that consists of pouring a bunch o' facts into empty receptacles.

We can't answer the question "Is tech useful in schools?" until we've grappled with a deeper question: "What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?" If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and questions of the learners themselves, well, then we'd be open to kinds of technology that truly support this kind of inquiry. Show me something that helps kids create, design, produce, construct -- and I'm on board. Show me something that helps them make things collaboratively (rather than just on their own), and I'm even more interested -- although it's important to keep in mind that meaningful learning never requires technology, so even here we should object whenever we're told that software (or a device with a screen) is essential.

Far more common, in any case, are examples of technology that take for granted, and ultimately help to perpetuate, traditional teacher-centered instruction that consists mostly of memorizing facts and practicing skills. Tarting up a lecture with a SmartBoard, loading a textbook on an iPad, looking up facts online, rehearsing skills with an "adaptive learning system," writing answers to the teacher's (or workbook's) questions and uploading them to Google Docs -- these are examples of how technology may make the process a bit more efficient or less dreary but does nothing to challenge the outdated pedagogy. To the contrary: These are shiny things that distract us from rethinking our approach to learning and reassure us that we're already being innovative.

Still more worrisome are the variants of ed tech that deal with grades and tests, making them even more destructive than they already are: putting grades online (thereby increasing their salience and their damaging effects), using computers to administer tests and score essays, and setting up "embedded" assessment that's marketed as "competency-based." (If your instinct is to ask "What sort of competency? Isn't that just warmed-over behaviorism?" you obviously haven't drunk the Kool-Aid yet.) Those of us who once spoke out against annual standardized exams were soon distressed to find that students were being made to take them several times a year, including "benchmark" tests to prepare them for the other tests. But we couldn't have dreamed that companies would try to sell us -- or, tragically, that administrators and school boards would be willing to buy -- dystopian devices that basically test kids (and collect and store data about them) continuously. Even the late Jerry Bracey never imagined things could getthis bad when he referred to how we were developing the capability "to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all."

If you haven't given much thought to the kind of intellectual life we might want schools to foster, then it might sound exciting to "personalize" or "customize" learning. But as I argued not long ago, we shouldn't confuse personalized learning with personal learning. The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students' test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Even if we were willing to use test scores as a measure of success -- something I don't generally recommend -- a recent review found that studies of tech-based personalized instruction "show mixed results ranging from modest impacts to no impact" - despite the fact that it's remarkably expensive. In fact, ed tech of various kinds has made headlines lately for reasons that can't be welcome to its proponents. According to an article in Education Week, "a host of national and regional surveys suggest that teachers are far more likely to use tech to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning." Last fall, meanwhile, OECD reported negative outcomes when students spent a lot of time using computers, while Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes(CREDO) concluded that online charter schools were basically a disaster.

Lucid critiques of ed tech -- and of technology more generally -- have been offered by educators and other social scientists for some time now. See, for example, the work of Larry Cuban, Sherry Turkle, Gary Stager, and Will Richardson. (Really. See their work. It's worth reading.) But their arguments, like the available data that fail to show much benefit, don't seem to be slowing the feeding frenzy. Ed tech is increasingly making its way even into classrooms for young children. And the federal government is pushing this stuff unreservedly: Check out the U.S. Office of Education Technology's 2016 plan recommending greater use of "embedded" assessment, which "includes ongoing gathering and sharing of data," plus, in a development that seems inevitable in retrospect, a tech-based program to foster a "growth mindset" in children. There's much more in that plan, too - virtually all of it, as blogger Emily Talmage points out, uncannily aligned with the wish list of the Digital Learning Council, a group consisting largely of conservative advocacy groups and foundations and corporations with a financial interest in promoting ed tech.

There's a jump-on-the-bandwagon feel to how districts are pouring money into computers and software programs - money that's badly needed for, say, hiring teachers. But even if ed tech were adopted as thoughtfully as its proponents claim, we're still left with deep reasons to be concerned about the outmoded model of teaching that it helps to preserve -- or at least fails to help us move beyond. To be committed to meaningful learning requires us to view testimonials for technology with a terabyte's worth of skepticism.

Follow Alfie Kohn on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@alfiekohn

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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Stop Innovating in Schools. Please.

An oldie but a goody from Will Richardson.

Too often when we talk about "innovation" in education, we point to that new set of Chromebooks or those shiny new Smartboards as examples of our efforts to change what we do in the classroom. That is, after all, what "innovation" is all about, to "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." Over the last few years, many schools in the developed world have done a pretty good job on the new products front, earning billions of dollars for vendors who sell their gadgets or code under the guise of "innovation" of some degree or another. We've definitely got more stuff. And it's arguable that our methods are changing, even if just a bit; the Maker Movement in schools, when fully embraced, is one such example of shifting roles in the classroom.

But on balance, is all of this "innovation" really changing us?

Not so much. Our efforts at innovating, regardless of method, idea, or product, have been focused far too much on incrementally improving the centuries old structures and practices we employ in schools, not on fundamentally rethinking them. And the vast majority of "innovation" I've seen in my visits to schools around the world doesn't amount to much change at all in the area where we need it most: using those new methods, ideas, or products to shift agency for learning to the learner. To put it simply, innovation in schools today is far too focused on improving teaching, not amplifying learning.

hat needs to stop, especially now when the ability to learn at a moment's notice is increasingly more important than the knowledge we carry around in our heads. As we approach 4 billion people in the world with Internet access, there's little question any longer that those who are learners will have more opportunities for growth and success than those who are learned. And if our work in schools does not have a laser focus on developing our kids as powerful, passionate, persistent learners, we're not preparing them for their futures.

But innovating through the lens of the learner means fundamentally changing the way we think about schools and classrooms, not just layering on technology. Ironically, it means setting aside the new and, instead, getting back to the old, to what author and educator Seymour Papert calls our "stock of intuitive, empathic, commonsense knowledge about learning." As learners ourselves, we know that real learning that sticks with us over time occurs when it's built on passion, when it has an authentic purpose and audience, when it's relevant to our lives in the moment and beyond, when it's not constrained by time, and more. This isn't rocket science. Yet generally in schools, we provide few if any of those conditions that we know are required for that type of deep learning to take place. We don't let students pursue the questions most in their minds. More often than not, the sole audience for the work students do is the teacher, and it serves no real world, authentic purpose. Our kids' passions and interests are ignored in favor of compliance to the curriculum.

he real innovation that we need in schools has little to do with technologies or tools or products designed to improve our teaching. The real innovation, instead, is in relearning why we want kids in schools in the first place. As author Seymour Sarason says, the overarching purpose of school ought to be that children should want to keep learning more about themselves, others, and the world when they leave us. Yet, Sarason writes, that purpose is mostly ignored. I've yet to find a school that has created an assessment to see if, in fact, students leave at least as interested in learning as when they entered. In all likelihood, they don't want to know the answer.

Innovation in schools of any type needs to start with the idea that the goal is not to force kids to abandon their passions and interests for our curriculum when they come to school, which is what we currently do. Instead, as Sarason says, we must start with their questions and curiosities, and bring our world to them. If we are to develop and sustain the types of learner-citizens that we need in the future, we need to meld the worlds of school and of children, but we start with the children. In Letters to a Serious Education President, he writes:

"We have to change our schools, but if that is not preceded or accompanied by a change in our thinking, in our preconceptions, in how we regard what and where children are, in our imaginativeness and boldness — absent these changes we will again confirm the maxim that the more things change, the more they stay the same (123)."

hich is why despite the shiny new tools or the seemingly unending string of new learning approaches (flipped, blended, collaborative, personalized, project-based and on and on), nothing has really changed. Kids are still bored in school. We still assess the stuff that's easy to measure at the expense of attending to the more important stuff that isn't, things like creativity and curiosity and determination. Our cultures focus on teaching, not learning, and very little "innovation" as it's currently constituted has impacted that at all.

How we innovate depends largely on how we define learning. If we believe that learning is defined by "student achievement," i.e. test scores or GPAs, then the vendors peddling their gadgets and code will continue to reap the profits of selling into our desires for better. But if we believe that the most powerful learning that kids do can only be measured by their desire to learn more, then any innovation we introduce must focus on creating fundamentally different experiences for kids in our classrooms, with or without technology.

(Cross posted from WillRichardson.com)

Want to explore more of these ideas around learning and education? Check out my latest TEDx Talk "The Surprising Truth About Learning in Schools."

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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Reflections from Professional Learning Retreat

Article by Sunnie Giles in Harvard Business Review - March 15 2016

DAVE WHEELER FOR HBR What makes an effective leader? This question is a focus of my research as an organizational scientist, executive coach, and leadership development consultant. Looking for answers, I recently completed the first round of a study of 195 leaders in 15 countries over 30 global organizations. Participants were asked to choose the 15 most important leadership competencies from a list of 74. I’ve grouped the top ones into five major themes that suggest a set of priorities for leaders and leadership development programs. While some may not surprise you, they’re all difficult to master, in part because improving them requires acting against our nature. Demonstrates strong ethics and provides a sense of safety. This theme combines two of the three most highly rated attributes: “high ethical and moral standards” (67% selected it as one of the most important) and “communicating clear expectations” (56%). Taken together, these attributes are all about creating a safe and trusting environment. A leader with high ethical standards conveys a commitment to fairness, instilling confidence that both they and their employees will honor the rules of the game. Similarly, when leaders clearly communicate their expectations, they avoid blindsiding people and ensure that everyone is on the same page. In a safe environment employees can relax, invoking the brain’s higher capacity for social engagement, innovation, creativity, and ambition. Neuroscience corroborates this point. When the amygdala registers a threat to our safety, arteries harden and thicken to handle an increased blood flow to our limbs in preparation for a fight-or-flight response. In this state, we lose access to the social engagement system of the limbic brain and the executive function of the prefrontal cortex, inhibiting creativity and the drive for excellence. From a neuroscience perspective, making sure that people feel safe on a deep level should be job #1 for leaders. But how? This competency is all about behaving in a way that is consistent with your values. If you find yourself making decisions that feel at odds with your principles or justifying actions in spite of a nagging sense of discomfort, you probably need to reconnect with your core values. I facilitate a simple exercise with my clients called “Deep Fast Forwarding” to help with this. Envision your funeral and what people say about you in a eulogy. Is it what you want to hear? This exercise will give you a clearer sense of what’s important to you, which will then help guide daily decision making. To increase feelings of safety, work on communicating with the specific intent of making people feel safe. One way to accomplish this is to acknowledge and neutralize feared results or consequences from the outset. I call this “clearing the air.” For example, you might approach a conversation about a project gone wrong by saying, “I’m not trying to blame you. I just want to understand what happened.”

Empowers others to self-organize. Providing clear direction while allowing employees to organize their own time and work was identified as the next most important leadership competency. No leader can do everything themselves. Therefore, it’s critical to distribute power throughout the organization and to rely on decision making from those who are closest to the action. Research has repeatedly shown that empowered teams are more productive and proactive, provide better customer service, and show higher levels of job satisfaction and commitment to their team and organization. And yet many leaders struggle to let people self-organize. They resist because they believe that power is a zero-sum game, they are reluctant to allow others to make mistakes, and they fear facing negative consequences from subordinates’ decisions. To overcome the fear of relinquishing power, start by increasing awareness of physical tension that arises when you feel your position is being challenged. As discussed above, perceived threats activate a fight, flight, or freeze response in the amygdala. The good news is that we can train our bodies to experience relaxation instead of defensiveness when stress runs high. Try to separate the current situation from the past, share the outcome you fear most with others instead of trying to hold on to control, and remember that giving power up is a great way to increase influence — which builds power over time. Fosters a sense of connection and belonging. Leaders who “communicate often and openly” (competency #6) and “create a feeling of succeeding and failing together as a pack” (#8) build a strong foundation for connection. We are a social species — we want to connect and feel a sense of belonging. From an evolutionary perspective, attachment is important because it improves our chances of survival in a world full of predators. Research suggests that a sense of connection could also impact productivity and emotional well-being. For example, scientists have found that emotions are contagious in the workplace: Employees feel emotionally depleted just by watching unpleasant interactions between coworkers. From a neuroscience perspective, creating connection is a leader’s second most important job. Once we feel safe (a sensation that is registered in the reptilian brain), we also have to feel cared for (which activates the limbic brain) in order to unleash the full potential of our higher functioning prefrontal cortex. There are some simple ways to promote belonging among employees: Smile at people, call them by name, and remember their interests and family members’ names. Pay focused attention when speaking to them, and clearly set the tone of the members of your team having each other’s backs. Using a song, motto, symbol, chant, or ritual that uniquely identifies your team can also strengthen this sense of connection.

Shows openness to new ideas and fosters organizational learning. What do “flexibility to change opinions” (competency #4), “being open to new ideas and approaches” (#7), and “provides safety for trial and error” (#10) have in common? If a leader has these strengths, they encourage learning; if they don’t, they risk stifling it. Admitting we’re wrong isn’t easy. Once again, the negative effects of stress on brain function are partly to blame — in this case they impede learning. Researchers have found that reduced blood flow to our brains under threat reduces peripheral vision, ostensibly so we can deal with the immediate danger. For instance, they have observed a significant reduction in athletes’ peripheral vision before competition. While tunnel vision helps athletes focus, it closes the rest of us off to new ideas and approaches. Our opinions are more inflexible even when we’re presented with contradicting evidence, which makes learning almost impossible. To encourage learning among employees, leaders must first ensure that they are open to learning (and changing course) themselves. Try to approach problem-solving discussions without a specific agenda or outcome. Withhold judgment until everyone has spoken, and let people know that all ideas will be considered. A greater diversity of ideas will emerge. Failure is required for learning, but our relentless pursuit of results can also discourage employees from taking chances. To resolve this conflict, leaders must create a culture that supports risk-taking. One way of doing this is to use controlled experiments — think A/B testing — that allow for small failures and require rapid feedback and correction. This provides a platform for building collective intelligence so that employees learn from each other’s mistakes, too. Nurtures growth. “Being committed to my ongoing training” (competency #5) and “helping me grow into a next-generation leader” (#9) make up the final category. All living organisms have an innate need to leave copies of their genes. They maximize their offspring’s chances of success by nurturing and teaching them. In turn, those on the receiving end feel a sense of gratitude and loyalty. Think of the people to whom you’re most grateful — parents, teachers, friends, mentors. Chances are, they’ve cared for you or taught you something important. When leaders show a commitment to our growth, the same primal emotions are tapped. Employees are motivated to reciprocate, expressing their gratitude or loyalty by going the extra mile. While managing through fear generates stress, which impairs higher brain function, the quality of work is vastly different when we are compelled by appreciation. If you want to inspire the best from your team, advocate for them, support their training and promotion, and go to bat to sponsor their important projects. These five areas present significant challenges to leaders due to the natural responses that are hardwired into us. But with deep self-reflection and a shift in perspective (perhaps aided by a coach), there are also enormous opportunities for improving everyone’s performance by focusing on our own. Dr. Sunnie Giles is a professionally certified executive coach, leadership development consultant and organizational scientist. She is President of Quantum Leadership Group. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and PhD from Brigham Young University.

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World

Article by Sunnie Giles in Harvard Business Review - March 15 2016

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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Who Needs Charters When You Have Public Schools Like These?

New York Times, April 1 2017.

David L. Kirp APRIL 1, 2017

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Starting in kindergarten, the students in the Union Public Schools district in Tulsa, Okla., get a state-of-the-art education in science, technology, engineering and math. CreditAndrea Morales for The New York Times

TULSA, Okla. — The class assignment: Design an iPad video game. For the player to win, a cow must cross a two-lane highway, dodging constant traffic. If she makes it, the sound of clapping is heard; if she’s hit by a car, the game says, “Aw.” “Let me show you my notebook where I wrote the algorithm. An algorithm is like a recipe,” Leila, one of the students in the class, explained to the school official who described the scene to me. You might assume these were gifted students at an elite school. Instead they were 7-year-olds, second graders in the Union Public Schools district in the eastern part of Tulsa, Okla., where more than a third of the students are Latino, many of them English language learners, and 70 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch. From kindergarten through high school, they get a state-of-the-art education in science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM subjects. When they’re in high school, these students will design web pages and mobile apps, as well as tackle cybersecurity and artificial intelligence projects. And STEM-for-all is only one of the eye-opening opportunities in this district of around 16,000 students. Betsy DeVos, book your plane ticket now. Ms. DeVos, the new secretary of education, dismisses public schools as too slow-moving and difficult to reform. She’s calling for the expansion of supposedly nimbler charters and vouchers that enable parents to send their children to private or parochial schools. But Union shows what can be achieved when a public school system takes the time to invest in a culture of high expectations, recruit top-flight professionals and develop ties between schools and the community.Continue reading the main story Union has accomplished all this despite operating on a miserly budget. Oklahoma has the dubious distinction of being first in the nation in cutting funds for education, three years running, and Union spends just $7,605 a year in state and local funds on each student. That’s about a third less than the national average; New York State spends three times more. Although contributions from the community modestly augment the budget, a Union teacher with two decades’ experience and a doctorate earns less than $50,000. Her counterpart in Scarsdale, N.Y., earns more than $120,000. “Our motto is: ‘We are here for all the kids,’ ” Cathy Burden, who retired in 2013 after 19 years as superintendent, told me. That’s not just a feel-good slogan. “About a decade ago I called a special principals’ meeting — the schools were closed that day because of an ice storm — and ran down the list of student dropouts, name by name,” she said. “No one knew the story of any kid on that list. It was humiliating — we hadn’t done our job.” It was also a wake-up call. “Since then,” she adds, “we tell the students, ‘We’re going to be the parent who shows you how you can go to college.’ ” Last summer, Kirt Hartzler, the current superintendent, tracked down 64 seniors who had been on track to graduate but dropped out. He persuaded almost all of them to complete their coursework. “Too many educators give up on kids,” he told me. “They think that if an 18-year-old doesn’t have a diploma, he’s got to figure things out for himself. I hate that mind-set.” This individual attention has paid off, as Union has defied the demographic odds. In 2016, the district had a high school graduation rate of 89 percent — 15 percentage points more than in 2007, when the community was wealthier, and 7 percentage points higher than the national average. The school district also realized, as Ms. Burden put it, that “focusing entirely on academics wasn’t enough, especially for poor kids.” Beginning in 2004, Union started revamping its schools into what are generally known as community schools. These schools open early, so parents can drop off their kids on their way to work, and stay open late and during summers. They offer students the cornucopia of activities — art, music, science, sports, tutoring — that middle-class families routinely provide. They operate as neighborhood hubs, providing families with access to a health care clinic in the school or nearby; connecting parents to job-training opportunities; delivering clothing, food, furniture and bikes; and enabling teenage mothers to graduate by offering day care for their infants. Two fifth graders guided me around one of these community schools, Christa McAuliffe Elementary, a sprawling brick building surrounded by acres of athletic fields. It was more than an hour after the school day ended, but the building buzzed, with choir practice, art classes, a soccer club, a student newspaper (the editors interviewed me) and a garden where students were growing corn and radishes. Tony, one of my young guides, performed in a folk dance troupe. The walls were festooned with family photos under a banner that said, “We Are All Family.” This environment reaps big dividends — attendance and test scores have soared in the community schools, while suspensions have plummeted. The district’s investment in science and math has paid off, too. According to Emily Lim, who runs Union’s STEM program, the district felt it was imperative to offer STEM classes to all students, not just those deemed gifted.Photo Students congregate at the start of the Global Gardens after school program at Union Public Schools district’s Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Oklahoma. CreditAndrea Morales for The New York Times In one class, I watched eighth graders create an orthotic brace for a child with cerebral palsy. The specs: The toe must be able to rise but cannot fall. Using software that’s the industry standard, 20 students came up with designs and then plaster of Paris models of the brace. “It’s not unusual for students struggling in other subjects to find themselves in the STEM classes,” Ms. Lim said. “Teachers are seeing kids who don’t regard themselves as good readers back into reading because they care about the topic.” A fourth grader at Rosa Parks Elementary who had trouble reading and writing, for example, felt like a failure and sometimes vented his frustration with his fists. But he’s thriving in the STEM class. When the class designed vehicles to safely transport an egg, he went further than anybody else by giving his car doors that opened upward, turning it into a little Lamborghini. Such small victories have changed the way he behaves in class, his teacher said — he works harder and acts out much less.

Superintendents and school boards often lust after the quick fix. The average urban school chief lasts around three years, and there’s no shortage of shamans promising to “disrupt” the status quo. The truth is that school systems improve not through flash and dazzle but by linking talented teachers, a challenging curriculum and engaged students. This is Union’s not-so-secret sauce: Start out with an academically solid foundation, then look for ways to keep getting better. Union’s model begins with high-quality prekindergarten, which enrolls almost 80 percent of the 4-year-olds in the district. And it ends at the high school, which combines a collegiate atmosphere — lecture halls, student lounges and a cafeteria with nine food stations that dish up meals like fish tacos and pasta puttanesca — with the one-on-one attention that characterizes the district. Counselors work with the same students throughout high school, and because they know their students well, they can guide them through their next steps. For many, going to community college can be a leap into anonymity, and they flounder — the three-year graduation rate at Tulsa Community College, typical of most urban community colleges, is a miserable 14 percent. But Union’s college-in-high-school initiative enables students to start earning community college credits before they graduate, giving them a leg up. The evidence-based pregnancy-prevention program doesn’t lecture adolescents about chastity. Instead, by demonstrating that they have a real shot at success, it enables them to envision a future in which teenage pregnancy has no part. “None of this happened overnight,” Ms. Burden recalled. “We were very intentional — we started with a prototype program, like community schools, tested it out and gradually expanded it. The model was organic — it grew because it was the right thing to do.” Building relationships between students and teachers also takes time. “The curriculum can wait,” Lisa Witcher, the head of secondary education for Union, told the high school’s faculty last fall. “Chemistry and English will come — during the first week your job is to let your students know you care about them.” That message resonated with Ms. Lim, who left a job at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa School of Community Medicine and took a sizable pay cut to work for Union. “I measure how I’m doing by whether a girl who has been kicked out of her house by her mom’s boyfriend trusts me enough to tell me she needs a place to live,” she told me. “Union says, ‘We can step up and help.’ ” Under the radar, from Union City, N.J., and Montgomery County, Md., to Long Beach and Gardena, Calif., school systems with sizable numbers of students from poor families are doing great work. These ordinary districts took the time they needed to lay the groundwork for extraordinary results. Will Ms. DeVos and her education department appreciate the value of investing in high-quality public education and spread the word about school systems like Union? Or will the choice-and-vouchers ideology upstage the evidence?

David L. Kirp is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 2, 2017, on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: What an Ordinary Public School Can Do. Today's Paper

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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Time for a reward....

This is a test to see if I can go from blog post to Drive spreadsheet to Announcement on New Sites using Awesome Table. What could possibly go wrong?

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edintheclouds · 7 years

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Fake news. Real laughs.

Just about the only source of information I trust these days...

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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Phone meets laptop. Chromebooks are about to get really awesome, and this article in Wired explains how.

How Chromebooks Are About to Totally Transform Laptop Design

Google's first Chromebook was the kind of laptop you'd design if you didn't give a damn about laptop design. It was thick, heavy, rubbery, boring, and black. Black keys, black body, black trackpad, black everything. Everything about theCr-48 was designed to communicate that this device was still an experiment. Even the name, a reference to an unstable isotope of the element Chromium, was a hint at the chaos raging inside this black box. "The hardware exists," Sundar Pichai told a crowd of reporters at the Cr-48's launch event in December of 2010, "only to test the software."

Moments later, Eric Schmidt took the stage and preached about how the "network computer" tech-heads had been predicting for decades was finally ready to change the world. "We finally have a product," Schmidt said, "which is strong enough, technical enough, scalable enough, and fast enough that you can build actually powerful products on it." Apparently already sensing the skeptical feedback Chrome OS would get, he gestured toward the audience and told them "it does, in fact, work."

For years, the knock on Chrome OS was that it was "just a browser." A PC, people thought, had to be more than that. But now, almost six years since that first Chromebook, just a browser has turned out to be just enough for a growing group of users. Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the first quarter of this year, and according to Google, US schools buy more Chromebooks than all other devices combined.

The CR-48, Google's first Chromebook.Google

Even now, the Chrome OS revolution is only beginning. In the next few weeks,Chromebooks will suddenly have access to the millions of apps in Google's Play Store, which will work on a Chrome OS device the way they work on Android phones. Also, Google's beginning a big move into the boardroom, trying to convince businesses to use Chromebooks instead of their old Windows XP machines. And a whole new breed of Chromebooks is about to hit shelves. Not only are they high-end, they're going to be completely different from the laptops we've known before.

Getting Online

Way back in 2006, Kan Liu started at Google working on Windows apps. Yep, Google used to make useful and popular Windows apps: a toolbar plugin for Internet Explorer, and a Desktop Search app that indexed your computer to make stuff easier to find. Even Liu thought the projects were weird. "If you thought about what Google was," he tells me, "you'd be like wait, they make a download manager for native apps that you can download on Windows machine?"

These apps were supposed to be fast, simple, and secure. But because Google couldn't control Windows, it really couldn't guarantee any of that. Boot times really drove them crazy. "Computers used to take, like, minutes to boot up," says Caesar Sengupta, one of the original leaders of the Chromebook project. Tired of this unacceptable offense, a few people on the team started hacking around on an old netbook in the office, taking out whatever didn't make sense—like the fact that Windows still checked for a floppy disk every time it turned on. Without even trying that hard, the team hacked together a Linux-based setup that went from off to online in ten seconds flat. Suddenly Google was in the OS business.

The projects that last within Google—the ones that aren't Reader or Buzz or Wave or Currents—are the ones that scale. "If you want to do something at Google," says Felix Lin, the VP in charge of all things Chromebook, "it really only makes sense to do it at Google if what you're building can touch everybody in the world." Lin came to Google with a singular mission: to build the company's browser into an operating system that would make computing and computers accessible to more people. That meant making computers cheap enough so more people could buy them. More important, it meant removing settings, options, icons, buttons, and toolbars in an effort to make computers easy enough that anyone could use them. Particularly the billions of people who hadn't used a computer before.

When the first Chromebooks launched in 2010, anyone who'd ever used a PC decided something felt a little bit…off. "Among the many things you can't do,"Laptop Magazine wrote, "is view the system properties to see exactly what hardware the computer has, so if you need to know how much free space is left on the system's internal storage or what type of CPU you have, you're out of luck. Nor can you control the power settings." Notebook Review concluded its assessment with the phrase that still haunts Chrome OS: "So…it's just a web browser?"

Thinking about those early reviews makes Sengupta laugh. "The first people who bought Chromebooks were people who were computer folks," he says. "They looked at the Chromebook and said, 'This is not a real computer, it doesn't have very many settings!'" They hated that you couldn't find your files, or change the time setting. But why in the world, Sengupta argues, would any rational person want to manually change the time on their computer? It should just know. "The amount of work it took to eliminate all the settings," he says, "so that you didn't have to care and feed for your computer, was the thing that really made it successful."

The Chromebook Pixel, one of the Google-made Chrome OS devices.Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

One place a super-simple, fiddle-free OS took off: schools. They loved that Chromebooks were cheap, easy to administer, and great for multi-user environments. Then it was businesses, which, well, same thing. Next, Chrome OS is out to convert everyone else. The Chrome OS team was a little early to the idea that people could do their work and live their lives inside a tab or six, but history has proven them right.

That's not to say the Chrome OS crew are fortune-tellers, of course. They did miss out on one very important thing: smartphones. You may have heard of them. "Back when we were starting Chrome OS," Lin says, "the web and mobile were in a dead heat. We were betting big on the web, and the Android team was betting big on mobile." He doesn't say the obvious next part, which is that mobile and Android won.

The Chrome OS team was right about a long of things, but it never saw mobile coming.

There are still times when you want a keyboard and trackpad, though, or a screen larger than the palm of your hand. And lucky for the Chrome team, Android's also part of Google. So the two teams started talking about how to integrate. They had lots of concerns about performance, integration, and above all security. A couple of years ago, a Chrome engineer ran an experiment: He took containers, a way of separating parts of a system that's common in data centers, and ran them on a local machine. Android in one, Chrome OS is another. "A few of us saw it," Sengupta says, "and our eyes literally opened up." That was the answer.

Android apps solve a couple of Chrome OS's lingering problems. Most important, they bring all the software people are now accustomed to using, onto a new platform. Remember when people used to complain about Chromebooks not having Word? There are now billions of people who now reasonably expect their laptop to have Snapchat and Uber. Apps also offer offline support in a much more robust way, and they bring the kind of multi-window, desktop-app functionality that feels familiar to the old-school Windows users. Of course, they also require totally different things than traditional computer software. Most apps assume you're using them on small, touch-enabled screens, running on devices with cellular connections and a bunch of sensors that you definitely don't have in your laptop.

So, OK, new question: what does a laptop look like in the age of mobile?

New Puzzle Pieces

Imagine you want to build a Chromebook. Great idea! Before you can do anything, you have to deal with Alberto Martin Perez, a product manager on the Chrome OS team. Perez is the keeper of Google's documentation, the huge set of requirements and standards given to all Chromebook makers. The documentation is an ever-changing organism, concerned with everything from how much RAM and battery life a Chromebook needs, to how hard you have to press the trackpad before it registers as a click. If your Chromebook takes more than ten seconds to boot, or the power button isn't on the top right? Get on the plane back to China and try again. The long, complex document is written in engineer-speak and is remarkably detailed. It's Google's first line of defense against corner-cutting manufacturers.

When Google decided to integrate Android apps with Chrome OS, Perez and his team combed through the documentation. "We wanted to make sure we were ahead," Perez says. "It's really easy to change a web app, it's really hard to change a laptop." Google now strongly recommends—which is a lightly-veiled warning that it'll be mandatory soon—that every Chromebook include GPS, NFC, compass, accelerometer, a fingerprint reader, and a barometer. Those are all smartphone parts that have made little sense in a laptop before. But Android apps are inspiring manufacturers to make devices that move, that adapt, that take on different forms in different contexts.

The Acer Chromebook R13 is one the the first convertible Chromebooks. It won't be the last.Google

Computer industry execs believe Chrome OS has come into its own, that people will now choose it over Windows for reasons other than price. For many new customers, says Stacy Wolff, HP's global head of design, "their first device was a smartphone. And they look for the cleanliness, the simplicity, the stability of what we see in those devices." That's the thinking behind the sharp and business-like HP Chromebook 13, the company's new $500 laptop. Wolf sounds eager to continue down the fancy road, too: When I ask why the Chromebook 13's not as nice as the Windows-powered Spectre 13, which is one of the best-looking and lightest laptops ever made, he pauses to make sure he's not giving too much away. "I can't talk about the future, but there's nothing that stops us from continuing to go and revolutionize that space." The $1,000 Chromebook used to be a silly sideshow, Google's way of overshooting. Soon enough, it'll be a totally viable purchase.

The next few months are shaping up to be the PC market's most experimental phase in a long time. The addition of Android apps "begs for higher performance hardware and new form factors to support these new use cases," says Gary Ridling, Samsung's senior vice president of product marketing. Batteries are more important than ever, as are touch-friendly displays. Windows manufacturers have been experimenting with convertible and detachable devices for the last few years, but the combination of Android and Chrome will actually make them work.

The results are already starting to trickle out. Acer announced the Chromebook R13, which has a 1080p, 13-inch touchscreen that flips 360 degrees, along with 12 hours of battery, 4 gigs of RAM, and up to 64 gigs of storage. It'll only get crazier from here: you'll see laptops that are maybe more like tablets, a few that are maybe even a little bit like smartphones, and every imaginable combination of keyboard, trackpad, and touchscreen. Google and its partners all see this as the moment Chromebook goes from niche—for school, or travel, or your Luddite dad—to mainstream. "The ability to run their favorite apps from phones and tablets," Ridling says, "without compromising speed, simplicity, or security, will dramatically expand value of Chromebooks to consumers."

When the legendary Walt Mossberg started his personal technology column at the Wall Street Journal in 1991, he opened with a now-classic line: "Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn't your fault." 25 long years later, that story's finally changing. Chromebooks are exactly the computer the world needs now: simple, secure, usable. They just work. And starting this fall, they'll work they work the way people do in 2016: online everywhere, all the time, in a thousand different ways. "Personal computing" left desks and monitors behind a long time ago, and personal computers are finally catching up.

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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How apposite post-Brexit! Great post from @cspenn on two major scourges of modern life: innumeracy and incuriosity.

Combatting the Post-Factual Era

We live in a world that is sometimes described as post-factual, a world in which the average person ignores data and facts in favor of a belief. While politics, for example, has always had a questionable relationship with fact, recent times have transformed "spin" into egregious falsehoods. However, politics is not alone in the post-factual era. Many organizations operate in a post-factual nature, actively ignoring data in favor of strongly-held beliefs.

The impact of the post-factual world is dire: actual problems go unnoticed and untreated, while largely fictional problems become media centerpieces. For example, the climate crisis is a very real, quantifiable threat to humanity's way of life on earth. Reading through the actual climate data and processing it shows unmistakeable trends towards planetary warming.

Yet a shocking number of people either ignore the data or disbelieve it.

By contrast, the anti-vaccination movement is based on no verifiable, quantitative data at all and yet has occupied an enormous amount of mindshare. A strongly-held belief, once established, is incredibly resistant to facts.

The consequences of paying attention to the wrong data or ignoring data altogether are literally world-ending, at least for the world as we know it.

Two forces drive the post-factual era: innumeracy and incuriosity.

Innumeracy

Innumeracy is the root cause of disbelief for consumers of information in the post-factual era. Innumeracy, in the context of the post-factual world, is when consumers cannot comprehend data. They are ill-equipped to understand what they are seeing and unable to interpret it or glean meaning from it.

For example, consider this chart, shared by Tom Webster, of an NBC-2 chart showing survey results about Zika virus concerns:

This is clear innumeracy; whoever put together this chart has no understanding of basic mathematics. What's worse is that this chart is more likely to be visually interpreted rather than numerically interpreted; when citizens have a poor foundation in mathematics, the picture means more than the numbers, even though the numbers contradict the picture entirely.

Incuriosity

Incuriosity is the root cause of disbelief for consumers and publishers of information in the post-factual era. In the context of the post-factual world, a publisher is anyone who publishes information intended for consumption, the sender of information.

Incuriosity literally means a lack of curiosity; the post-factual publisher of information cares little for what the numbers mean or where they came from. Instead, the post-factual publisher simply wants to distribute the information and then move onto the next task.

For the post-factual consumer, incuriosity means the consumer never questions the data they receive. A politician makes a bold claim that 82% of people believe X; the politician's claim is unchallenged in the post-factual world by the average consumer, and the "fact" becomes part of a difficult-to-displace narrative.

The causes of incuriosity vary based on sender and receiver of information. Incurious senders typically have no incentive to explore data or dig deeper; in the business world, incuriosity is often driven by strict, arbitrary timetables. Marketers are forced by quarterly stock market reporting requirements to simply throw together whatever numbers they can. Content creators, especially in the news industry, need to be first with the story, even if being first means being incorrect.

Incurious receivers may have incentive but lack skills due to innumeracy and an education system that focuses more on rote and less on critical thinking.

Combatting the Post-Factual Era

What do we do to fight incuriosity and innumeracy? How do we mitigate the negative effects of these traits?

Some answers come from technology. The rise of the citizen analyst and the associated marketing tools and technologies help invigorate curiosity by removing or reducing a few innumeracy roadblocks.

Some answers come from education. The more we, as savvy marketers and marketing technologists, volunteer our time and expertise as generously as we're able, the more we can open eyes and minds.

Finally, some answers come from passion. If we align our passion for curiosity and numeracy to the causes and organizations people believe in, we are more likely to encourage their adoption of our beliefs in facts, data, and objective analysis. Help the political candidate or party of your choice, but do so with facts and data rather than opinion alone. Help the charity that makes the world a better place in your view, but do so guided by the realities of information you have access to.

The post-factual era is temporary; denying data can last only for so long before the impact of the ignored data is unavoidable. Our goal is to end the post-factual era before its impact ends us.

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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Why Do So Many Schools Want to Implement Project-Based Learning, But So Few Actually Do? - useful article from EdSurge.

Why Do So Many Schools Want to Implement Project-Based Learning, But So Few Actually Do?

By Alejo Rivera Aug 1, 2016

In a world where so much knowledge is a two-second search away, many schools are losing interest in models that promote static learning to know. They're looking to embrace dynamic models that promote learning to do and learning to be.

Project-Based Learning (PBL) allows learners to develop skills by solving meaningful, real-world challenges , i.e. organizing a 5k race to raise money for charity or writing and performing a play on the colonization of Mars.

Recently,Finland redesigned its school system to make PBL a core part of national pedagogy. According toSRI International, students in PBL classrooms achieve higher test grades compared to their traditional counterparts. And in the US, schools that do PBL like theNew Tech Network orActon Academy are rapidly expanding.

Schools all over the world are seeing higher engagement with PBL, and every day more and more schools decide to give it a shot. There's just one problem. Many schools that start doing Project-Based Learning do not stick with it. Why? Because it's not easy to get right.

The 3 Challenges

There are three major challenges schools face when implementing Project-Based Learning:

1. Planning a project is a lot of work!

Planning a project requires a different way of thinking than what we're accustomed to when we plan a traditional class.

We need to think about how to immerse learners into a new world when we "launch" the project. This translates to coming up with the working material, planning specific milestones, connecting different topics, and preparing a final exhibition where learners showcase what they've built.

2. It's very messy and chaotic at first

Having 20 people solve the same problem, in different ways, each at a different pace, is a recipe for chaos.

Project mockups, prototypes, lots of papers and binders. There are often many more physical materials than in a regular class.

Learners are going at their own pace, solving the problem in their own way, and each one of them will have questions about their particular solution. It takes time.

3. It's hard to assess performance

Hands-on learning is inherently multidisciplinary. By working on a project, you develop skills of planning, collaboration, and could easily mix disciplines like creative writing and mathematics. There's a lot of teamwork, and it's hard to be sure who played a role in doing what.

The traditional concept of testing if the students know certain content does not apply here. It's more about testing if they can do certain things or if they've developed skills like being better communicators with their team, or persisting when things got tough.

There are solutions, though

So… What can we do about it? How can we make sure our school succeeds in innovating and implementing Project-Based Learning?

Don't reinvent the wheel

When it comes to planning your project, don't start from scratch. There are hundreds of great projects on the web from publications likeEdutopia orThe Buck Institute for Education.

If you know of another teacher who is already doing PBL successfully, reach out to them asking if they can share one of their projects (along with its planning) with you.

Be patient and stand back

When the chaos of having students solve a problem at their own pace comes to our classrooms, we as teachers need to stand back. It might sound counterintuitive at first, but it's important to let the students make mistakes and fail, because that's where real learning takes place. Instead of being the classroom expert, teachers need to play the role of a facilitator.

Use online tools

If your students have access to tech devices in the classroom, be sure to use an online tool that will help you keep track of the progress of each individual student. This will help you make sure that everyone's learning from the project, and will allow you to figure out who needs help at what time.

Online tools will also help you make parents and administrators part of the beautiful and messy process that takes place when learners get creative.

What now?

Don't be afraid to make mistakes at first. Ask for help. Eventually, you'll figure it out and become a Project-Based Learning Rockstar, and your students will love you for it.

Alejo Rivera is co-founder of Learnhub, a collaboration app for innovative schools. Previously, he was head of school at Talent Unbound Galleria in Houston, TX and co-founded Junto Studio, a web development company.

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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Blockchain is internet 2.0: it really could change everything... Thought-provoking article from raconteur.net.

Blockchain is more than the second coming of the internet

Believe it or not there was once a time before the internet. A time before this incredible system of networks transformed the shape of humanity, created, reshaped and destroyed entire industries. And believe it or not a similar revolutionary shift is about to happen again.

Blockchain technology has arrived. For beginners, this is essentially a database, a giant network, known as a distributed ledger, which records ownership and value, and allows anyone with access to view and take part.

A network is updated and verified through consensus of all the parties involved. When something is added it cannot be altered and, if it looks valid to everyone, the update is approved.

See the full infographic here

Ease of use

The best-known example of blockchain technology and currently the largest use case is through bitcoin, a crypto-currency store of value which internet communities have been using as money. Blockchain underpins bitcoin, allowing users to transact.

Given this facilitates almost instant transfers of value anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, bypassing global banking systems and cutting out central authorities, it didn't take long for the world of financial services to catch on.

Here is a technology which can make sending money as easy as sending an e-mail. It's so simple, it should have been thought of before, but astonishingly wasn't.

If we take the idea that through a huge shared network we can transfer and verify data, value, names, labels or documents, there is not an industry in existence that blockchain could not turn upside down.

In the UK, the government is testing blockchain technology to store and transfer NHS records, and track public spending.

The music industry believes blockchain can help copyright claims and better distribute artists' royalties.

Blockchain revolution

For Canadian writers and researchers, Alex and Don Tapscott, authors of the new book Blockchain Revolution, this goes way beyond the second coming of the internet. The pair, like so many others, stumbled across blockchain via the bitcoin association, quickly realising the genie is out of the bottle.

"In fact, the more deeply I immersed myself in it, the more convinced I became that the technology which was likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy had arrived. But it wasn't self-driving cars, solar energy or artificial intelligence, many of the hot 'buzzy' ideas of the time, it was actually the technology behind bitcoin," Alex says.

His father Don has written several bestsellers on the digital age and, with a publisher's blessing, they set about trying to map a path for where this all could lead us.

"We have now spent two years researching this technology and have concluded, unequivocally, that blockchain technology is the second generation of the digital revolution," Alex says.

"The first generation brought us the internet of information. The second generation, powered by blockchain, is bringing us the internet of value, a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better. But like the internet in the late-1980s and early-1990s, this is still early days."

For those of us old enough to remember the dawning of the internet, the "killer app", e-mail, didn't arrive right away.

And for Don Tapscott, we're not quite at that stage with blockchain. "The technology is still being developed, strengthened and scaled," he says. "Many of the killer apps are in development and will be released in the next one to five years, tracking the progress of the internet in the 1990s.

"And venture investment has exploded over the past two years, similar to how it did in 1993 to 1995."

For those who lost interest in the daily goings on of the circus that is high finance after the 2008 financial crash, be warned, there is a new arms race occurring.

The sprint to rebuild Wall Street with blockchain is on, with two giant and heavily funded companies squaring off to be the only game in town.

R3CEV are technology innovators behind a consortium of 42 of the world's largest banks (and counting), working together to create the fabric of blockchain for use in financial services.

The question is can the likes of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, HSBC and BNP Paribas, all of whom are signed up, work together?

Attempts to bring bitter rivals in the banking space to the table have almost always resulted in failure and in the 1970s the inability to agree on common standards was the eventual driver behind the creation of the SWIFT messaging platform.

Is R3CEV too big to succeed? In the other corner is Digital Asset Holdings, the brainchild of former J.P. Morgan executive and current golden girl of blockchain Blythe Masters.

Digital Asset is not consortium led, but does have huge backers, including Goldman again and J.P. Morgan, and is concentrating on settlement and ledger services for the asset systems.

And all this has happened in the blink of an eye. "When I first started researching this in 2013, no bank had made any public overtures about the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionise everything," Alex says.

"And yet by last year, as we were putting together the first drafts of the book, every single big bank in the world effectively had either joined a consortium, formed a group or had announced they had spent a lot of money investigating this technology."

Related Articles: Cross-border payments opening up new trade opportunities How blockchain technology is shaping the future of payments Are we heading towards a cashless future?

A panacea?

Glancing at the big stories in finance and payments, SWIFT is currently investigating an internal cyber hack which may have led to the $80-million heist on Bangladesh Bank.

Regulators all over the world are swarming over banks to tighten anti-money laundering controls and scrutinise transactions for evidence of sanctions abuse.

What entity would not say "yes" to a technology which could make all these problems go away and, according to Santander InnoVentures, save a financial institution $20 billion in back-end costs?

When the alternative is that a bank does not adopt blockchain and goes out of business as quickly tomorrow as it would today without a website, the answer seems obvious.

"There is an opportunity to harness blockchain to address many pressing social issues"

It is too early to tell which of the private enterprises will win, but like the internet, blockchain is unlikely to be caged. It seems certain this technology will not be defined or limited by the sole use of moving money, bitcoin or other.

Research from the in-house team at London's blockchain tracking hub ChainHQ calculated there was more than $1 billion swilling around in global distributed ledger projects by the end of the first quarter of 2016.

From a standing start in 2015, we have entrepreneurs leveraging for use in a multitude of sectors, including real estate, insurance, automobiles, travel, life sciences and energy.

"I think there is an opportunity to harness blockchain to address many pressing social issues," Alex says, pointing to high youth unemployment, stalled median incomes and the standing trillions of dollars of dead money in the dark economy.

"With blockchain technology, a world of possibilities has opened to reverse all these trends," he says.

"We now have a true peer-to-peer platform that enables personal economic empowerment. We can own our identities and our personal data; we can do transactions, creating and exchanging value without powerful intermediaries acting as the arbiters of money and information."

Just as the internet changed the game for society, to anyone watching the evolution of blockchain, it is clear we are beginning a new digital evolutionary step in the way value and opportunity are created and distributed.

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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Useful GMail tips from Dave LeClair

Quick Tips That'll Make You a Gmail Power User

Gmail isn't just a place to send and receive email. Well, I mean technically it is, but if you're truly skilled at using it, you can make it do so much more for you. If you're a Gmail power user, you can do it all.

How do you become a Gmail power user? Just follow the tips on the infographic and you'll be good to go!

Via NeoMam

Click To Enlarge

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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The Process of Change - nice post from Eric Sheninger about the importance - and difficulty - of embedding cultural change in organizations.

The Process of Change

There is always a great deal of discussion about change in education in order to better prepare students for success. The stakes have become higher as changes in a globally connected world are far outpacing those in our schools. The proliferation of technology in the world is making it much more difficult to engage our students. This is not to say that meaningful, impactful changes are not evident in schools across the globe. Through my work I have seen in person, and through social media, some amazing examples of what education can and should be. However, these cases tend to be isolated pockets of excellence as opposed to systemic transformation evident across an entire system, district, or school. It's not just advancements in technology that have to be addressed in our schools. Other elements embedded in school culture cloud our vision as to what is both needed and possible. Issues such as the status quo, traditions, mindset, fear, apathy, funding, infrastructure, and time seem to consistently rear their ugly heads. These real challenges morph into excuses that ultimately inhibit the change process. Every single school on this planet deals with these challenges and many others on a daily basis. The good news in all of this is that they are not insurmountable. If you feel it is important, you will find a way. If not, then human nature will take over and you will make an excuse. The process of change is driven by a desire to focus on solutions rather than excuses.

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Now here's the thing with change. It is not easy. Nor will it happen quickly. Sometimes the best examples of sustainable change have resulted from a more organic approach. The ability to initiate, manage, and sustain change relies on a leader's ability to think of it as a process as opposed to an event. This takes vision, planning, patience, and perseverance. If sustainable change is the goal, it is important to clarify the what, why, and how followed by a determination of success. What This seems like a simple step, but more often than not change never begins because we identify way too many issues that need to be addressed. To simplify the process take a look at data, which can come in many forms. A data review will give you a clear focus that can later be used to articulate the why. Below are some forms of data that can help you try needed change:

Achievement (standardized scores, local measures)

Attendance rates

Graduation/promotion rates

Discipline referrals

Facilities inventory

Tech audit

Perception (find out what kids think needs to change)

Ask better questions to determine what needs to change. Don't ask educators in your school or community how well you are meeting the needs of today's learner. Instead, ask your learners how well you school is meeting their needs.

Why Once you have some data to identify what needs to change the next step is to build broad support. Aligning supporting research is a sound approach to build a compelling reason as to why the change is needed. This, combined with what the data is telling you, will build a foundation to move the process in a positive direction. To streamline the process consider using Google Scholar to quickly and easily find research that supports the need for change. When we tackled our grading culture at my school I first looked at the data (we were failing way too many kids) and then used Google Scholar to find research to guide the direction for a better way. When tackling the why it is also important to consider the following questions to mitigate potential issues while providing a greater focus:

Why does change not work?

Why has it failed in your school?

What are surrounding schools doing?

Are we meeting the needs of our students and preparing them for their future?

How This is where you need to roll up your sleeves and be prepared to get dirty. Change rarely succeeds through mandates, directives, buy-ins, or unilateral decisions. Creating a process that involves honest feedback and consensus are imperative. The best way to approach this is to form a comprehensive committee that includes key naysayers, antagonists, and resisters. You cannot allow them to continue to be a part of the problem. They must be active contributors to a solution. Present the data, supporting research, and together build a shared vision and strategic plan for the identified change. Be prepared though to make some tough decisions. Going back to the grading example, we openly discussed and agreed on a failure floor, no zeros, and a process of retakes/redos. However, I then established seven criteria that had to be supported with evidence before any student could receive a failing quarter grade. You can see the resulting document HERE. Accountability was ensured as I reviewed all quarter failures and asked for the evidence that everything was done to help students succeed. Success In the end, a strategic plan for change should bear positive results. If the results are not what you expect then re-evaluate to improve as opposed to scrapping the idea and giving up. Referring to the grading example one last time, over the course of three years we reduced our student failures by 75% while also increasing graduation and attendance rates as well as standardized test scores.

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This change process recipe can be applied to virtually any initiative from homework to mobile learning (BYOD, 1:1), to changes to the school schedule, and anything else. It all comes down to leadership and the will to improve in order to create a better learning culture for all students.

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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Microsoft's approach to AI and chats looks like it will lead to some fascinating possibilities...

Inside Microsoft's plan to outsmart Google

After losing on mobile, can Microsoft win the next battle?

In January, The Verge described the tech industry's search for the killer bot. In the months that followed, companies big and small have accelerated their development efforts. Facebook opened up a bot development platform of its own, running on its popular Messenger chat app. Google announced a new intelligent assistant running inside Allo, a forthcoming messenger app, andHome, its Amazon Echo competitor. Meanwhile the Echo, whose voice-based inputs have captivated developers, is reportedly in 3 million homes, and has added 1,200 "skills" through its API.

Microsoft is proud of its work on AI, and eager to convey the sense that this time around, it's poised to win. In June, it invited me to its campus to interview some of Nadella's top lieutenants, who are building AI into every corner of the company's business. Over the next two days, Microsoft showed me a wide range of applications for its advancements in natural language processing and machine learning.

The company, as ever, talks a big game. Microsoft's historical instincts about where technology is going have been spot-on. But the company has a record of dropping the ball when it comes to acting on that instinct. It saw the promise in smartphones and tablets, for example, long before its peers. But Apple and Google beat Microsoft anyway. The question looming over the company's efforts around AI is simple:

Why should it it be different this time?

Microsoft has already had more success building bots than perhaps any other US company. But you probably aren't aware of it, because its success started in China.

In January 2016, one of Microsoft's artificial intelligence creations appeared on the Chinese morning news show Dragon TV when the newscaster cut away to its weather forecaster, Xiaoice. Pronounced "SHAO-ICE," it's a bot whose name is Chinese for "little Bing." That's Bing as in Microsoft's perennial also-ran search engine. But this version of Bing is way more talkative.

The camera cut to an animated circle hovering in front of a virtual podium. The face transformed into an image of a microphone, and in a soft female voice, Xiaoice shared her forecast, even answering a question from the anchor.

"We've found a bot that works in a new way that fulfills many of the promises of conversation."

If you want to know why Microsoft has become so bullish on bots, Xiaoice is a big part of the answer. "I'm not going to go so far as to say we've found the killer bot — but we've found a bot that works in a new way that fulfills many of the promises of conversation," says Derrick Connell, head of search engineering at Bing.

Xiaoice, which Microsoft introduced on the Chinese messaging app WeChat in 2014, can answer simple questions, just like Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana. Where Xiaoice excels, though, is in conversation. The bot is programmed to be sensitive to emotions, and to remember your previous chats. Going through a breakup? Xiaoice may check in to ask you how you're doing.

After it was available for three days, Xiaoice had been added to 1.5 million conversations on the Chinese mega-messenger app WeChat. It was later made available on the Chinese micro-blogging service Weibo, where it became one of the most popular celebrity accounts to follow. Today the bot has been used by more than 40 million people, and the average conversation takes an impressive 26 turns between speaker and bot.

For Connell, Xiaoice points the way toward the next generation of search. Web queries traditionally returned a page with 10 blue hyperlinked results; the perfect conversational bot will simply return the correct answer.

Of course, success in China may not translate to the United States. (Microsoft's first English-language bot experiment, Tay, was a fiasco.) Two years after Xiaoice's debut, there's still no English-language equivalent, and none is imminent. But Microsoft executives say the infrastructure behind Xiaoice represents a significant opportunity for the company.

"We want it to be an ecosystem."

"It's the modern era — you don't have to be an expert in speech and language understanding," Connell says. "Just use our tools. Go build your branded bot with our tools and put it on whatever canvas — it might be Slack, it might be Facebook Messenger. We hope it might be Skype or Windows. But you choose."

And with fears mounting among developers that a war could emerge over bot standards, Microsoft has been uncharacteristically diplomatic. It organized a conference in San Francisco in June to promote cooperation among bot-makers. "We're really interested in it being interoperable — we want it to be an ecosystem," says Lili Cheng, a senior engineer at Microsoft who helped organize the two-day event. (It was called Botness.) "It's more like, what are the problems and challenges that we are finding that we can work on together?"

But by taking the lead with events like Botness, Microsoft hopes to position itself at the center of the shift to bots. If the company succeeds, it will have a fresh start in the mobile era. Bots powered by the company's technology could show up inside each of the world's most popular messaging apps, giving Microsoft a lucrative foothold in the new world.

The strategy

Of course, Microsoft isn't alone in trying to build the defining platform for the next generation of computing — if conversation even turns out to be that platform. Every major tech company and a host of startups are building AI divisions, often with impressive results. But here it's worth saying that comparing AI across companies is difficult to the point of being impossible. Much of what companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are working on remains unreleased. And executives are often opaque when asked what distinguishes their AI — Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for example, has taken to simply saying that the company has been working on it "for a very long time."

Benedict Evans, the resident futurist at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said in a recent blog post that the future of AI remains opaque. "This field is moving so fast that it's not easy to say where the strongest leads necessarily are, nor to work out which things will be commodities and which will be strong points of difference," he wrote. "Though most of the primary computer science around these techniques is being published and open-sourced, the implementation is not trivial — these techniques are not necessarily commodities, yet."

Every major tech company is getting ready for this fight

Qi Lu is happy to make the case for Microsoft's competitive advantage. Lu is one of the dozen people on Nadella's senior leadership team, overseeing the company's applications and service groups. He's also a computer science PhD with 20 patents to his name, and is revered among the colleagues of his I speak to. After a few minutes, I start to understand why — he's ferociously intelligent, tapping his feet impatiently as he talks, as if frustrated he can't speak as quickly as he thinks. When we meet he is wearing socks with sandals, cargo shorts, and a T-shirt emblazoned with three words: "Make epic shit."

Lu begins by running down the disadvantages presented by the first wave of the mobile internet. The percentage of web traffic from mobile devices has never exceeded desktop traffic he says, reflecting users' frustration with the experience. "We know web doesn't really work on the phone," Lu says. And outside a handful of major categories, users are resistant to downloading apps. Seattle residents might be asked to download an app just to check the fare of a ferry they take a couple times a year — surely there's a better model. "Our industry hasn't found an experience platform that can unleash the entire value of mobile and the cloud," Lu says. "Apps, fundamentally, are not the right model."

Apps arose as an interface in lieu of the HTML-based web because they were the best we could do at the time. You couldn't just yell what you wanted from the internet into your phone, so developers built sophisticated hidden plumbing and let you interact with it via big graphical buttons. And buttons remain the most efficient path for getting lots of things done. But thanks to advancements in natural language processing, now you actually can just yell what you want from the internet into your phone. Lu says the next-generation "experience platform" is going to start there, with conversation. It fits more naturally with how humans behave anyway. And if you get it right, you can always start layering those big shiny buttons back on later. "We see a full spectrum of using language as the baseline, but using graphical interactions in a thoughtful, meaningful way, to elevate the experience," he says.

Piece it all together and you can see why Microsoft is feeling so optimistic

But to win, Lu says, a company needs five "key assets." The first is a "conversation canvas" — a place where people are doing lots of talking and texting. Microsoft has Office, Outlook, Skype, and Cortana. The second is that AI "brain" — a sophisticated mental model of the world. Microsoft says its own AI efforts date back nearly 20 years. The third is access to a social graph — people's activity on the internet often involves their friends and coworkers. Not coincidentally, a few days after I met Lu, Microsoft announced it would spend $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn, and its 433 million registered users.

The fourth piece is a platform for the artificial intelligence to operate on. Microsoft has Windows and a family of devices, notably the Xbox. The final piece is a network of developers eager to build on your platform, and to pay you for the privilege. Stoking that interest had been the primary goal of the Microsoft Build developer conference in March.

Individually, Microsoft's assets have strong rivals. Facebook arguably has a stronger conversational canvas with its family of messaging apps, for example; certainly it has the largest social graph. Google's "brain" might be smarter, and it has broad access to hundreds of millions of Android devices. But piece it all together and you can see why Microsoft is feeling so optimistic. "Adding all those assets," Lu says, "I believe we have what it takes to lead the future."

The brain

Microsoft's total embrace of AI became apparent two years ago at the inaugural Code Conference. (The conference was acquired the next year by Vox Media, which owns The Verge. ) Nadella, who had become CEO just three months before, appeared on stage to discuss Microsoft's future. At the end of his talk, he demonstrated a new feature inside Skype. Two Microsoft employees spoke on stage — one in English, the other in German — and Skype translated their speech in real time, allowing them to communicate despite the language barrier. It was an impressive demo — and Nadella announced that by the end of the year it would be a working product.

To the Skype team back in Redmond, Nadella's timeline landed like a bombshell. "It was a complete surprise to me," says Peter Lee, a corporate vice president at Microsoft Research. "Satya really put us in jail with this Skype Translator thing." Initially, the team had two major concerns. One was that Microsoft Research historically has not been tasked with bringing products to market, and researchers worried they would suddenly have less freedom to pursue scientific breakthroughs.

"Satya really put us in jail with this Skype Translator thing."

The other concern was that at the time of the demo, Skype Translator wasn't very good. The company's language models had been built using a large body of formal speeches — testimony from the United Nations, for example. But two-way communication of the sort that Skype needs to translate is much different. There are more "disfluencies" — moments when the speaker trips over a word, or backs up to start a sentence over again. There's "code mixing" — when speakers use multiple languages in a single sentence, which is very common outside of English. Then there was the singing — apparently people are constantly singing to each other, and it turns out that computers have a very difficult time parsing it.

"Basically, nothing worked," Lee says. "What we had to do is re-train all our models." But Lee's team rallied, cheered on by Nadella, and released a preview that December. The product became widely (and freely) available the next year. Lee, who approvingly calls Nadella "an activist," says the project was exhilarating — eventually. "Imagine the dips in morale and fear when you realize none of this stuff is gonna work — you have to somehow get people past that," Lee says. "And when you do, you see amazing new things appearing."

This doesn't feel like hyperbole. Microsoft can now translate conversations between eight different languages — 56 different combinations. And the underlying technology has implications that go beyond translation. You want to hear about a bot that's incredibly, even magically useful? Microsoft is beta-testing software that records business meetings and produces transcripts in real time. The same software can also, say, take an audio recording of an interview between two people and produce a transcript that distinguishes between the speakers — perhaps the single most desired piece of technology for any journalist who ever lived.

"I can't tell you how dismaying it was when we found out stuff wasn't working well for Skype Translator when we first embarked on that," Lee says. "But now that we're climbing that mountain, we're in possession of these speech and translation models, especially the speech models — they're shockingly good."

Clippy's revenge

In the meantime, Microsoft is pouring AI resources into some of its biggest franchises: Windows and Office. One of the promises of AI is that it can anticipate your needs — it's the foundational idea of Google Now, which presents you with traffic, weather, and sports scores the moment you unlock your phone.

Microsoft is working to build this kind of AI into the desktop. Marcus Ash, who oversees the development of Cortana, showed me a mocked-up version of Windows that draws heavily on cloud-based inferences about what I might want to know. When Ash accesses the Start menu, Cortana appears with a series of suggested actions: names that are meaningful to you, documents you've used recently, and suggested translations for common French words. (The user here has an upcoming trip.) With your permission, Cortana incorporates data about your contacts, web search history, and app usage into its recommendations.

It isn't as sexy as a general AI that anticipates your every need — but it's here today

And it changes based on the time of day — app developers can signal that they're useful in the morning, or around dinner time, for example. "This idea of using conversation, using contextual information about you, with your permission, to make you speedier and make you feel like you're in control, that's the stuff we get really excited about," Ash says. "A lot of our user experience work is around simplification, removing friction, and really showing the power of intelligence."

One of Ash's favorite examples is called "commitments." With your permission, Outlook can take note of the fact that your boss asked you to send her something by the end of the week — and automatically remind you if you fail to respond. "My life is pretty complicated, and I tend to forget things — especially in emails," Ash says. Recently he forgot to respond to a request from his own boss, he says, but Cortana notified in time for him to address it.

I see more of this kind of thing when I meet with Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of marketing for Office. He shows me a range of ways where intelligence is making Office easier to use. In September 2014 Microsoft introduced Delve, a kind of Fitbit for productivity that is included with Office 365. The app analyzes how much time you spend in email and in meetings, and highlights times on your calendar where you have extended periods of time to do more complicated, meaningful work. It tells you what percentage of people you sent an email to actually read it, and how quickly. It will suggest reaching out to colleagues that you haven't emailed in a while. It even shows you response times for your colleagues, and for yourself.

If your organization lives in Google Apps, as do many big Silicon Valley companies, browsing Delve felt like a revelation. You don't have to be a numbers nerd to find this kind of information useful. If you're a manager, Delve can tell you at a glance how much time you've spent with each of your employees over the past week. This kind of intelligence isn't as sexy as a general AI that anticipates your every need — but it's here today, it works, and it makes Google Apps look like a neglected backwater by comparison.

After six months of searching for a killer bot, I'm still bullish on the concept generally. The interactions they enable are vastly richer than the 1-800 numbers and forgotten small-business websites they will eventually replace. But I've been disappointed by much of what we've seen on platforms like Facebook Messenger and Telegram: at times they have felt like the slowest way to use the internet. Most seem barely more functional than SmarterChild-era bots on AOL Instant Messenger, and all the typing they require sends me screaming back to button-based graphical interfaces. For now the discussion around bots and AI remains driven by the industry's desire for a profitable new platform, rather than consumer demand for the services they provide.

When bots do their work in the background, they can feel a little bit like magic

Companies' response to that problem so far has been, essentially, that they're working on it. "Like many of these advanced technologies, people assume it's all here today," said Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer at Facebook, when I asked him about it in May. "And there's a lot more technology and work to be developed. I think this will improve month over month, year over year."

And yet visiting Microsoft made me wonder if I hadn't been thinking about the subject in the wrong way. Chat-based interfaces are generally tedious. But the machine learning that powers them, applied to tools you're already using, is really quite powerful. If Microsoft can infuse Delve-like intelligence into a wider range of services, it can reasonably say that it offers the most powerful productivity suite in the world. There will be tremendous value in that even if its vision of a massive platform for powering chatbots never materializes. And it may not — at this early stage, bots in the foreground too often feel frustratingly dumb. But when they do their work in the background, they can feel a little bit like magic.

Illustrations by Pete Ryan. Edited by Dieter Bohn.

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edintheclouds · 8 years

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Fwd: Interesting view of IoT analytics possibilities from @ScottZoldi

The Intelligence of Things: Streaming analytics comes to IoT

Posted on July 6, 2016

There's no doubt about it––the Internet of Things (IoT) is shaping up to be the mother of all technology trends in 2016. There are endless statistics on how many devices are or will be coming online; just within the home, everything from doorbells to refrigerators to light bulbs has become internet-enabled.

As IoT devices infiltrate many product ecosystems, they're becoming more a part of our lives. But while these devices gather lots of data, they're not very intelligent or self-aware in their own right. That can be a problem. We need the right intelligence and security onboard, in the devices, in order for them to become aware when they might be manipulated or failing.

I call it the "Intelligence of Things," and that's when things will get really interesting for IoT.

The power of self-learning analytics

Self-learning streaming models based on continuous inputs are a mainstay of the financial world––in fighting payment card fraud, for example––and, increasingly, cybersecurity. As applied to IoT devices, self-learning models monitor their environment and gather data, and thus can make a determination if the behavior of a user or an environment they're embedded in is normal or abnormal.

Scott Zoldi, Chief Analytics Officer of FICO

With self-learning models on board, IoT devices can warn of an unsafe situation or an impending failure. Stoked by streaming analytics, the device will infer that something about its environment or itself is failing, and issue an appropriate warning.Interestingly, IoT devices within the home can communicate with one another; in this way, the web of devices can build a larger consciousness of the house based on their collective inputs.

IoT spotlight: air conditioners

Here's an example. In recent years, commercial air conditioning units have become targets for vandals, looking to strip the $80-$100 of copper contained therein. Some companies have taken to elaborate measures to protect their A/C units, ranging from lighting and security cameras to special alarms, to putting a GPS tracker on the unit.

Outfitting the air conditioner with an IoT sensor would allow it to collect a constant stream information on many operational functions. Should a component begin to malfunction, the IoT device could trigger an alarm, notifying the facilities manager that maintenance is required. In this way, should the device be intruded upon by vandals, the IoT sensor would detect abnormal activity and trigger an appropriate alarm.

Here's another, even more, dramatic air conditioner example. In 2015, Formula 1 race car driven by Jenson Button and his wife were robbed in their villa in the south of France, reportedly after burglars pumped an anesthetic gas through the house's air conditioning system. (Shockingly, this kind of attack does not seem to be uncommon in the region.)

Again, an IoT sensor could have detected tampering with the unit, or air pressure changes as the anesthetic gas were introduced into the system, triggering an alarm. The alarm from the air conditioning unit, coupled to inputs from the villa's IoT home monitoring system, could have alerted the owners (or a private security monitoring company) of suspicious activity.

On a more pedestrian level, even the lowly IoT doorbell could benefit from self-learning. Earlier this year hackers figured out how to compromise the Ring IoT doorbell, to extract the home WiFi network's password. Putting more intelligence on-board in the device could have triggered an alert that the doorbell was being tampered with. This information could've been crossed-checked with the motion-triggered alerts that Ring already supplies.

Drilling down on self-learning

Moving from vanilla IoT to the "Intelligence of Things" requires a change in the mindset of these devices. Instead of just collecting data for apps, comparison to rules thresholds, or binary commands, they need to self-monitor their state in the environment. They must measure their own "self" which, for an IoT device, requires streaming behavioral analytics.

"Behavioral analytics" has mixed meanings today. To most technical people the term typically refers to heuristics such as, "If X, Y, Z happen in that order, then action A will be taken." These event chains, over time, have their place, but device self-awareness requires a unique understanding of individual environments; no two IoT devices are placed in exactly the same environment. In this sense, they are as unique as their owners' and users' behaviors.

Real-time behavioral awareness is a fixture in certain domains such as payment card fraud detection. Here, a small (1,000-2,000 byte) entity profile of recursively updated feature detectors for fraud is maintained. These entity profiles have a small memory footprint, which allows two important things:

Real-time updates in milliseconds

Highly predictive analytic variables, monitoring normalcy vs. abnormality, can be applied in the stream of data.

This same approach is well suited for IoT devices for which:

It's not feasible to store all sensor data onboard

Having an onboard entity profile that is updated with each and every sensor read is definitely feasible, and allows the device to perform sophisticated self-inspection.

Determining outliers and appropriate actions

Each feature in this entity profile has a normal range of variation and can get very detailed, specifically, understanding which sensor data is interesting or relatively uninteresting. "Interesting" data would occur when a house's inhabitants are away at school or work––or when they are in the home, depending on the IoT device and its application.

Distributions of these "interesting" and "uninteresting" features, computed in real-time, allow for a determination of which ones would be in an outlier state, and how extreme. The outlier features then can be combined to produce a score that can be operationalized as to actions the device has authority to perform.

Collectively, these techniques are well proven and have been utilized on smart devices for more than a decade to monitor components, detect utility network failures and signal infrastructure changes at a national level.

Achieving the "Intelligence of Things"

By leveraging the predictive power of self-learning analytics, IoT can facilitate exciting positive outcomes. "The Jetsons," the 1960s cartoon TV show, has also been mentioned as a benchmark for the connected home. With the "Intelligence of Things" extending data-collecting IoT devices into an analytic fabric, we're closer to a Jetsons future than ever.

The author is Chief Analytics Officer of FICO, a leading analytics software company, helping businesses to make better decisions. Follow him on Twitter @ScottZoldi

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