Blurts

Homework seems to be a popular topic among educators posting online. I get it – students would rather not do homework and educators would rather not spend the time to grade and provide feedback. Fact is, learning requires an investment of time expended on a variety of cognitive tasks and this time simply might not be available during school hours. Conclusion – homework plays a useful role in learning.

I would refer educators interested in the logic and research on homework consider the Schwartz, et al chapter on deliberative practice. This is a different kind of book providing what some instructional designers would describe as a job aid. The ABC thing is an organizational feature I find kind of artificial, but the idea is to identify specific learning challenges and what is known about specific tactics that can be applied.

The authors consider homework within the context of deliberative practice. This concept implies a specific type of learning activity and homework may or may not be understood to serve this need.

Deliberate practice involves focusing on what is beyond one’s current skill set rather than just executing what one is already able to do.

I recognize that homework may also be about repetition to develop automaticity. When deliberative practice is the goal, Schwartz and colleagues contend:

Deliberate practice, if done well, requires a degree of concentration that people cannot sustain

Schwartz, Daniel L.; Tsang, Jessica M.; Blair, Kristen P.. The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them (Kindle Location 842). W. W. Norton & Company.

Without getting into the work done in support of this position (you can read the original using the reference I provide above), the authors suggest that short, but intense engagement is what educators should be assigning to meet the requirements for effective deliberative practice.

Wannabe edupreneurs would do well to read Bharat Anand’s The Content Trap. The book addresses the naivete of creators assumption that success will come from simply creating great content. Using a great number of what are likely to be familiar examples the book identifies factors that determine what gets noticed and what has influence. Success comes mostly from content and connections – creating and enabling connections among people, connections among components of content, and connections between content and larger systems.

Apple and Google have very different revenue models and these differences in their stance of embedded, online ads. Just to be clear the issues associated with ads can be argued on different levels (do producers deserve compensation, what information should consumers have to reveal, etc.). As one might expect, the positions taken may be argued on the level of consumer or production rights, but the positions taken also tend to align with the revenue models of the companies arguing for the services they provide.

So Apple makes it money on equipment and offers other services at very level cost to support the value of the equipment. Apple’s browser, Safari, might be considered one of the added services. Apple has modified Safari to offer information consumers protection against unwanted ads.

Google makes money off ads. Google tries to use an approach to ads and revenue generation for producers by the use of ads that are minimally obtrusive (at least the link ads are small and do not limit consumer attention to content. Google also argues that its ads are smart and offer opportunities that may be of interest to consumers. To offer smart ads, Google has to collect information about users. How and what information is sold to third parties is an important issue and one that is not perfectly clear to me.

Google is seeking a middle ground by attempting to address the problem of “third party” cookies. A third party cookie collects user information – information collected across sites. In a way, this is what Google does, but in a way I think is different. Google collections info from services such as your search history to inform the ads it displays when Google ads are used. Other services use cookies that reside within your browser and send back information to services other than the service/host that you happen to be using. As I understand the Google model, the idea is to delete third-party cookies after short periods of time. This supposedly allows immediate benefits to consumers, but not the long-term accumulation of information. Of course, this fits with Google’s general approach. If you are searching for new car dealers today, you might be interested when ads for local car dealerships show up when you view other web pages. There is little need to keep track of this information on you for 6 months.

I ran across this listing of the top online edutechnology master’s programs. The methodology for the ranking is not provided. It seems to me that the top programs are long standing and long visible. When those who work in such fields are asked to suggest outstanding programs (aside from their own), they tend to list such programs. These programs also have larger and more diversified programs that may offer opportunities to those in the online programs and contribute to visibility.

I am not a Betsy DeVos fan, but I think public schools put themselves in a vulnerable position by limiting the ways in which they are willing to be innovative. The base position for public schools seems to be assuming a traditional staff of teachers and administrators. This finance focused blog post argues that the staffing costs of schools on average make up 81% of the budget and within a minimal resource environment this limits what changes can be made.

Private schools do not necessarily start from the same assumption (from the finance article):

For example, the often touted Rocketship model (a chain of charter schools), makes extensive use of learning lab time in which groups of 50 to 70 (or more) students work on laptops while supervised by uncertified “instructional lab specialists.”

I cannot claim that this is wise and I am sure many would argue this is horrible, BUT such options do allow significant innovations to be tested. Just for sake of argument, it might be suggested that such an approach offers some similarities to a “flipped model”. If presentation-oriented tasks can be completed in a more efficient manner, interactive experiences with experienced teachers might occur at a higher rate.

The NYTimes article on companies supporting teachers to use their products has generated quite a response in the community of ed bloggers I follow. The new thing appears to be statements of personal policy when it comes to accepting resources. A follow-up opinion piece to the original article continues the conversation.

The follow-up describes the plight as being in an interesting bind and likens it to educators who spend some of their time writing grants or launching online fund-me drives to provide resources for their own professional needs and for students. All of these efforts raise questions of best use of teacher time and equity when it comes to the students who learn in classrooms of teachers unwilling or unable to be fund raisers.

[my original post in reaction to the Times article]