Teachers and researchers (miniconference?)

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

Part of the allure of constructivism is that it supposedly reduces the role
of the teacher and the bureaucrat, allowing a country where teaching jobs
have been political handouts to the incompetent, to improve its education
system "from the bottom up". There are many good arguments for
constructivism; this is not one of them. You do not build an educational
system by expecting Ramanujan.

Good teachers inspire, decent teachers help guide, and bad teachers get in
the way. The effects of this are (after the "cultural capital" of the
parents and the nutrition of the students) one of the biggest sources of
variance in learning success. If the XO, as a tool, can take some of the
load off of teachers, that will help keep good teachers from burning out and
moving to other professions, it will help decent teachers do a better job,
and it will even turn some of the bad teachers into decent teachers. Many of
the things teachers need - communication with students, ways to facilitate
inter-student communication, resources of information, resources for student
experimentation and experience-building - are already big focuses of OLPC
development. But I would argue that helping teachers *keep track of student
progress* better, with less hassle, and then using that information to
inform your lesson-plans going forward, is a huge part of the job of
teaching. This needs to be "designed in" to many activities just as much as
sharing does, or just as much as the journal metaphor.

The educational researcher also plays an important role. I hated the focus
on standardized tests when I was a student (even though the system is very
explicitly designed to benefit highly-advantaged, successful students like
me - a question that I would get wrong and a less-successful student would
get right is guaranteed to be eliminated from the test - sorry, the
"instrument" - as a drag on "reliability".) And as a classroom teacher, I
hate the even-more-absurd levels to which standardized tests have been
elevated recently in the US (OK, most of my teaching experience is in
Guatemala, but I subbed for a year in  the post-No-Child-Left-Behind US).

But the truth remains that here in Latin America and much of the third
world, the education system is in really, really bad shape, and that it is
literally impossible to improve things without having some perspective on
them. There are also plenty of people with supposed panacea solutions; you
can spend forever if you just chase the latest trendy fashion, so you need
some perspective to see what helps and what doesn't. Educational research is
the only way to get that perspective. If, out of the 2 weeks of filling in
bubbles that the average student in the US spends per year, they could
export one day to each Latin American subregion, we'd all be better off.

Enough blah-blah. This is an list for engineers, do I have an engineering
proposal? Not really, but I have some ideas.

-All activities should keep anonymized usage statistics, and these
statistics should be copied to the central server on backup. Activities
should be encouraged to keep numeric information that can be anonymized and
statistically agregated - including scores, total active usage time in
different "parts" of the activity, etc. - in file metadata, rather than
inside files.

-Keeping statistics on every use of an activity is useful for proving that
the laptops are serving some purposes. However, if use by the child "owner"
is mixed in with even 5-10% of use by parents, siblings, or friends, these
statistics become nearly worthless in tracking individual progress. Also,
automated statistics should not violate privacy. Therefore, there should be
a separate mechanism for "turning in" student activity instances, which
would include information like time spent on the activity, as well as
additional usage information which would make it possible to catch simple
forgeries. There should be a teacher-focused activity which enables the
teacher to organize information that they have about a student. The
"classroom toolkit" is absolutely central here too - if a teacher poses
problems in-class over the mesh, they need to be able to slice the response
data later by student OR by problem, they need to be able to publish
rubrics/expectations with the problems, they need to be able to score
against those rubrics, they need to be able to see score averages AND score
totals (Diego is absent half the time but scores 100, Francisco is here all
the time but scores 50).

I don't pretend to have all the answers for how to balance student privacy
with this. Certainly it is a real concern; a constant feeling of eyes over
your shoulder, especially eyes that are only out to grade you on some scale
of good to bad, is bad for creativity among other things. I am sure that
other people on this list will argue eloquently for privacy. What I am
saying here is that, without compromising on privacy, we can have explicit,
opt-in mechanisms for tracking student progress, and that these should be
architected in.

(also, let me state the obvious: School is often overfocused on grades, but
making it harder for teachers to give meaningful grades is NOT the solution
to that problem. Helping the teacher get a richer view of student
acheivement is important for better teaching, and any teacher who abuses
that power to use it as a grading bludgeon would probably bludgeoning
students just as badly even if they only had made-up/arbitrary grades.)

-The data which is turned-in-for-student-progress is a goldmine for
researchers. Moreover, since researchers are evaluating the program and not
individual students, privacy concerns are much less (though of course we
still need to be careful, because there may still be some data that could be
traced back to the student). However, as long as the data can be anonymized,
it should be available for research - EVEN data which we decide to hide from
the teacher's non-anonymized view. Keeping anonymized and non-anonymized
copies of the same data, and peer-to-peer solutions for anonymizing, is an
engineering problem.

I realize that this random set of thoughts is a long way from what it would
take to make a talk at the miniconference. But I want to put it out there,
to get the discussion going, because I think that it is important. Unless
some support for this is architected into Sugar, it will continue to be
neglected.

Jameson
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