Holt Think: Ed, Creativity, Tech, Administration

CES 2013: McGraw-Hill to Debut Adaptive E-Book "SmartBook" for Students - Digits - WSJ

Anyone see issues with this? 

From the article:

“The company pulls from an “enormous database” of student behavior models that drive the software to chart the most efficient path to learning a subject area, Mr. Christensen said. “Everything that you do is being tracked and it assesses you throughout” the questions and answers in each chapter, he said.

That could raise privacy concerns for some students. McGraw-Hill says it sometimes even shares their learning behavior data with instructors so they can further personalize courses. A McGraw-Hill spokeswoman said that “we take the protection of this data very seriously, and at all times we stay within our stringent privacy policy and make data security our first priority.”

McGraw-Hill’s Mr. Kibby predicted that in 36 months, “what we will see is that we won’t be offering print textbooks” but “dynamic, adaptive, personalized learning environments” instead. The company plans to make the SmartBook product available for about 90 different course areas in the late spring.

The K-12 e-learning market in the U.S. is roughly $5.4 billion currently, a tiny portion of the money spent on traditional educational materials like textbooks. While the market is growing, a number of companies including News Corp NWSA -1.13%., which owns The Wall Street Journal,Pearson PLC PSON.LN 0.00%and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. are vying for a piece of the pie. Meanwhile, states have been cutting back on spending on textbooks.”

From the Website:

SmartBook is the first and only adaptive reading experience available for the higher education market. Powered by an intelligent diagnostic and adaptive engine, SmartBook facilitates the reading process by identifying what content a student knows and doesn’t know through adaptive assessments. As the student reads, the reading material constantly adapts to ensure the student is focused on the content he or she needs the most to close any knowledge gaps.

Video: On website

Texas Public Schools Explorer | The Texas Tribune

Do other states have something like this?—TBH

The Texas Tribune Schools Explorer is our most comprehensive public education tool to date and the only one of its kind in the state. This database combines key academic, enrollment and financial records on all of Texas’ 1,300 districts and 8,500 public schools, including hundreds of charter schools and alternative campuses. It makes school statistics easy to navigate.

View Statewide Data

Take a bird’s eye view of public education in Texas with these statewide statistics before drilling down into individual school districts and campuses.

Driving Miss Daisy and Her Data | edtechdigest.com

From the article:

For many in education, ‘data dashboards’ are something new—but just think about a car for a minute. Driving along, you glance down. Just the right amount of data is always within easy view. While driving you can take a quick glimpse to find out how fast you’re going, how much gas is in the tank, what the engine temperature is at, if the lights are on, is the air low in your tires, and if any doors are still open. Sure, there’s much to know about how the car and the engine works, but we aren’t told everything—just what we need to get us safely from point A to point B. The dashboard doesn’t assume we’re a mechanic, it simply alerts us—in just a couple seconds—to what might stop us or slow us down.

Is Data-Driven Instruction Dehumanizing? Link and My Response (Below)

My response to this nonsense because they probably won’t post what I put down. Click on the title to go to the article.—TBH

                                                 Lori Fey 

Lori,
If you were’t working for the an organization that is pushing a product that is a data-based decision making solution, I might have sided a bit more with you. However when I got to the end of the article and saw who you were and worked for, your objectivity came into question.

Let me push back another story about “data driven decisions,” and see who you think about it:
In many districts, the standardized test rule the day. So, the “data” in Data Driven Decision/Instruction Making (DDDM) is all about looking at the data to see how test scores can be raised and nothing much more. You may have a few anecdotes about a teacher here and there using data for something else, but the vast of majority of data decisions are driven by testing. If you think otherwise, you have not been in a public school lately, or at least in a tested grade level.

Consider the following:
There are districts in the US that spend gobs of money to hire data consultants that can come in, run a few tests through SPSS , print out fancy colorful regression analysis, and see exactly where each child has been, where each child is at, and with some degree of accuracy, where each child is going. They can tell you what child will pass the test with little intervention, which will never pass the test no matter what you do, and which ones are sitting on the fence and could go either way. They can even tell you which fence sitting kids will probably pass which portions of the tests, down to the question and the standard…It gets that granular. For the most part, they are fairly accurate. 

So what is a district to do that is facing sanctions, AYP, has limited finacial resources, and other threats because of the tests? They throw all of their weight of instructional interventions towards the kids on the fence. Because the Data Analysis told them to. So the kids that will pass the test are ignored, and more troubling to me, the kids that the data knows will never pass are forgotten, because, hey, whats the use any way? That kid isn’t gonna pass the test. 

Try explaining that to a kid’s mom. “Well, the data told us…”

So throughout this country, there are perfectly normal kids being ignored academically because they have shown little or now growth on a standardized test over a period of years. Ignored. And they are being ignored BECAUSE of your Data Driven Decision Making.

So, you tell me, in those instances, is Data Driven Decision Making inhuman? I say in many cases, it is.

On a side note, what is the true purpose of the Ed-Fi program which you work for? On the page “About” your product, the term “Student” shows up 4 times. The term “Vendor” shows up twice as many times. 

There is some data for you.

The Learning Registry Now Online.

Thank you Bonny Sutton for sharing this info:

The Learning Registry is a new approach to capturing, sharing, and analyzing learning resource data to broaden the usefulness of digital content to benefit educators and learners. 

Not a website or repository… not a search engine… and not a replacement for the excellent sources of online learning content that already exist… 

…the Learning Registry is an open source technical systemdesigned to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web.

Use & Share

Use the Learning Registry to share…
-  metadata that describe learning resources
-  ratings, reviews, comments, and other annotation data
-  alignments to educational standards
-  usage information such as favoriting, foldering, remixing,    embedding, and other social metadata / paradata
-  resource updates, relationships between resources, and      other assertions

Get Started…
Technical specifications and implementation guides are available to help connect you to Learning Registry.