Author: Robin

This is finally happening: new elementary schools in the Netherlands, set to open in the fall, are rethinking the educational model by giving each child an iPad and letting them learn at their own pace (with teachers acting as coaches and guides).

If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about. […]

“At home, Daphne learns naturally, according to her own pace, interactively and using multimedia tools,” says de Hond. […] The classic chalk-and-blackboard teachers, he adds angrily, “are preparing children for a world that no longer exists.”

Actually, the idea of self-directed education is at least a hundred years old, as one of the core principles of Montessori schools. In fact, I attended a Montessori school, which perhaps helps to explain why a decade ago I was already thinking about using technology to extend self-directed learning. In high school, I designed an educational website about electricity and described it this way:

This site was specifically designed with the idea that there is no one correct path leading through it. Instead, you are encouraged to start at whichever category interests you most and then meander at leisure through whichever pages “spark” your interest.

[…]

Everyone is interested in different things, so it doesn’t make much sense to make every visitor use the same route, as they would in a traditional research paper. The nature of the web allowed me to set up the site so that people can very easily “choose their own adventure” according to what looks interesting. The hope is that people will have a better learning experience and stay at the site longer knowing they have the power to read about the things they want.

I also pointed out that the connections between topics are crucial:

Energy politics depend on the technologies in use, and development of the technologies depends on the politics. Electrical appliances depend on generators and power lines; all of these things are based on physical principles related to electricity. Because of this there is no inherently “correct” way to teach the subject — so why make one up and say it’s correct? Instead, I hope that visitors will be fascinated by the connections that exist between topics, and willingly learn about areas they might not have wanted to learn about if it was presented in an isolated, linear fashion.

The article about the new Dutch schools casually mentions, almost as a side note:

If a math app is neither enjoyable nor successful, the teacher simply orders another one. The supply of educational programs never runs dry in Apple’s online app store.

I wonder to what extent that is true. Are there high quality educational apps for every K-5 topic, available in all major languages? Do all of these apps let teachers and parents monitor the child’s progress? And further, do these apps make the connections between topics apparent, so that students can follow links to other apps to learn about related concepts?

The principal of one of these schools was quoted as saying “what we are doing will seem pretty normal in 2020.” I don’t doubt that; the low-tech version already seemed pretty normal when I was a kid. In the meantime, I wonder what I should do to help make the high-tech version a success.

“Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books.”

-Dan Lovallo (as quoted in Decisive)

“In software engineering, internships and self-directed projects have become far more valuable to the students… than any university class. And they have become more valuable to employers… than any formal credential, class taken, or grade point average.

“[Students] will be motivated to formally learn about linear algebra when working on a computer graphics apprenticeship at Pixar or Electronic Arts. They will want to learn accounting when working under the CFO of a publicly traded company. […] One of the primary roles of the college itself would be to ensure the internships are challenging and intellectual; that they truly do support a student’s development.”

-Salman Khan, What College Could Be Like

“User Centered Design (UCD) is not about answering requirements alone, but also includes defining requirements. When we practice UCD end-to-end, we pretend we know little… because assumptions close us off to new possibilities. We prefer to allow some design research to create a viewpoint and then form a hypothesis as to what we might build. In this regard, we cross into the realm of product managers, producers, program managers, business analysts and the like, trampling toes with gay abandon and meeting resistance all around. Facing confinement to defining the boring old business need (distinct from the user or customer need), these folks would prefer we constrain our UCD work to usability testing on designs meeting the requirements they set out.”

– Anthony Colfelt

When Bill Gates demoed the Tablet PC in 2001, he predicted it would become the most popular form of PC within five years. But by the end of 2006, Tablet PCs still accounted for less than 2% of all laptops shipped, with about 1 million devices sold that year. Tablets seemed destined to remain stuck in niche markets.

Then came the iPad in 2010. During its first year on the market, 15 million iPads were sold. After two and a half years, over 100 million had been purchased. Worldwide shipments of tablet computers shot up from being 3% of the computer market in 2010 to 25% of the market in 2012. In Apple’s stores, iPads now outsell Macs by more than 5x, despite the product being less than three years old.

Gates’ prediction had finally come true, but something was amiss. “It’s just a big iPod Touch!” Analysts didn’t think it fit the definition of a PC. It appeared to be, at best, just a media consumption device – not a personal productivity tool. Most technology pundits believed that the iPad would fail. (Some still do.)

“Why is the iPad a disappointment? Because it doesn’t allow us to do anything we couldn’t do before. Sure, it is a neat form factor, but it comes with significant trade-offs, too.” -David Coursey, PC World, 28 January 2010

The iPad was indeed disappointing to technologists. Compared to a PC, it could hardly do anything. All of the apps were stripped down to the bare minimum features. The web browser didn’t support plugins such as Flash. You could only run one app at a time. It was hard to get data from one app to another. The on-screen keyboard felt awkward. The list went on. In sum:

“It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” –Bill Gates, February 2010

The surprise was that non-technologists saw things very differently. They walked into an Apple Store and found to their delight that the iPad was a computer they could actually understand. It was far simpler and easier to use than a traditional PC (tablet, laptop, or otherwise). Want to do email? Tap the email app. Photos? Tap the photos app. Press the home button at any time and you’re back to a familiar place. No need to worry about window management, battery life, files or folder hierarchies.

In other words, many of the shortcomings that remain infuriating to technologists are precisely what makes the iPad delightful to consumers. Apple’s engineers and designers did many things right, but the most important reason for the product’s widespread appeal is its radically simpler user interface.

The iPad is a classic disruptive technology. It competes on new dimensions of quality and does not appeal to the best customers of traditional PCs. Instead of processor speed, flexibility, and power, it prioritizes simplicity, size, and convenience. But as tablet computers improve, they will incorporate more and more of the features that currently require a PC. For example, new versions of the iPad have already added video chat, limited multitasking, tabbed browsing, basic Microsoft Office integration, and many other improvements. Eventually, traditional PCs will be overkill for most people, most of the time.

“PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.” –Steve Jobs, June 2010

Almost all of the companies in the Fortune 500 are already testing or deploying iPad, despite their historical risk aversion when it comes to adopting new technology. Why? Because it’s also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient for many business tasks, such as accessing and creating information at the point of need in a meeting, hospital, field site, or during a commute.

Plenty of iPad apps for doing these tasks are just as complex as their PC brethren. But the most successful apps are those that maintain the iPad’s radically simple interface standards. If it isn’t easy to get the job done on the spot, users might as well wait until they’re back at their desk computer – or give up entirely because they have other work to do.

Shawn Otto makes several interesting historical observations in the November 2012 Scientific American article, “America’s Science Problem“. First:

The steady flow of federal funding [for science after WWII] had an unanticipated side effect. Scientists no longer needed to reach out to the public or participate in the civic conversation to raise money for research. […] University tenure systems… provided strong disincentives to public outreach, and scientists came to view civics and political involvement as a professional liability.

Second: While scientists were disappearing from public view, their growing knowledge of technological problems (such as DDT poisoning) increasingly “led to new health and environmental regulatory science. The growing restrictions drove the older industries… to protect their business interests by opposing new regulations.”

It turned out that a powerful way to undermine environmental regulations was to deny the legitimacy of environmental science. This stance aligned industrialists with “religious fundamentalists who opposed the teaching of evolution” and were skeptical of science more broadly. Together, “industrial money and religious foot soldiers” not only proved effective in blocking regulations, but also “gave fundamentalism renewed power in the public debate.”

This antiregulatory-antiscience alliance largely defines the political parties today and helps to explain why, according to a 2009 survey, 9 out of 10 scientists who identified with a major political party said they were Democrats.

“Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of pain that was entrusted to you.”

-Pir Vilayat Khan (via Megan Carroll)

“Creativity is not a process… It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. They keep thinking about something until they find the best way to do it. It’s caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn’t been thought of before. […] So just to be clear, I wouldn’t call that a process. Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out.”

– Tim Cook (interview)

“To try and make something great — the only way you can do that is to care to an extraordinary level.”

-Jony Ive (interview)

“[Innovative people] act in unusual ways, as it’s the only way they know how…. They are honest, cheeky, questioning, amusing, disruptive, intelligent, and restless.”

– Richard Branson